That is interesting! Of course according to the latest stats, chances
are 87% that any Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is male (and we
just found out this month that in the Dutch Wikipedia, 94% are male).
It would be definitely interesting to fund some research on this
specific issue (how people react in AfD discussions to
girlish-named-Wikipedians based on female gender assumptions). This
week similar research was published on the use of the Wikipedia
"Ignore all rules" policy in AfD's:
On 30 March 2013 22:39, Daniel and Elizabeth Case
<dancase(a)frontiernet.net>wrote;wrote:
Thank you for sharing this Jane. It's amazing
that it's still such an
issue but yeah, a great example of how deeply
>rooted our presumptions
are.
This actually happened to me, in a way, with one now long-departed
Wikipedia editor. Despite a female-suffixed username*, I assumed this
editor was a male because she was a flagrant asshole in some AfDs in a
way
that (in my experience) only men ever are. I was actually stunned to find
out she was indeed a she.
Daniel Case
*As most of us know, username-based gender assumptions cut both ways.
Users Hersfold and Nancy (see the explanation on his userpage) are both
men, yet regularly deal with new editors assuming based on their names
that
they’re female. And I know they’re not the only ones.
Hersfold and Nancy aren't the only ones. I've almost come to assume that
if a username "sounds" feminine, it's probably attached to a man. Almost
every editor I know whose username ends in an "a" is male. And many
female editors have "male" sounding usernames.
If Wikipedia has taught me one thing, it is never to assume anything about
the identity of the person on the other side of a username: not age, not
gender, not orientation, not geographical location, or a million other
things that we tend to use to categorize people.
Risker/Anne