To summarize some of the findings from the paper:

1. The gender gap does have a real and measurable effect on Wikipedia content. As one example, movies which were significantly more popular with women (as rated by 150,000 users of the site MovieLens) end up having significantly shorter articles on Wikipedia.

2. The gender gap has been at about the same level since 2005 and does not show any signs of getting better or worse.

3. Certain content areas are more popular with women than other content areas. For example:
People - 11% women editors
Arts - 10%
...
Science - 5%
Geography - 4%

4. Women have a higher percentage of edits on User pages and User Talk pages than men do, i.e. they are more community-oriented.

5. Female newbies are reverted more often than male newbies.

6. Being reverted as a newbie has roughly the same effect on women as men.

7. Women are more likely to edit contentious articles than men. (This result was unexpected.)

Ryan Kaldari


Hey all,

I wanted to forward along a link to a detailed new study covering the topic of gender on Wikipedia which will be presented at WikiSym soon. The GroupLens research group has done a great deal of work on Wikipedia in the past, and one of their PhD candidates is actually at the Wikimedia Foundation for the summer studying broader editing trends. 

I highly encourage anyone interested in seeing hard data on this issue to read it. There's a PDF in the link below...

Title: WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
Link: http://www.grouplens.org/node/466
Abstract: "Wikipedia has rapidly become an invaluable destination for millions of information-seeking users. However, media reports suggest an important challenge: only a small fraction of Wikipedia’s legion of volunteer editors are female. In the current work, we present a scientific exploration of the gender imbalance in the English Wikipedia’s population of editors. We look at the nature of the imbalance itself, its effects on the quality of the encyclopedia, and several conflict-related factors that may be contributing to the gender gap. Our findings confirm the presence of a large gender gap among editors and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity in the content of Wikipedia’s articles. Further, we find evidence hinting at a culture that may be resistant to female participation."

--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org


_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap