There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that should be of interest to this list.

Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia: Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."

http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/

One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:

"It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities.

"Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of Wikipedia contributors are mothers.

"That is less than 1 in 50."


Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO