I read Marie Earley's message about the Inspire campaign, and specifically about the Pinterest-related proposal. I was interested in the Pinterest proposal too! I use Pinterest for fun. As far as I know, I was the only one to endorse it (I am FeralOink on WP, Ellie Kesselman IRL).
Marie said this in her message on the GenderGap mailing list:
"
If the pitch to women were "learn code by editing Wikipedia" then I think there would be a greater take up..."
Yes, I agree that there would be a lot of interest from women if that were true. However, editing Wikipedia and learning to code have nothing to do with each other. Learning Wiki syntax for editing is something that can take bona fide programmers a (brief) while to learn, as it is markup with many additional Mediawiki-specific features. More to the point, Wiki syntax isn't a programming language, nor does it closely resemble HTML or CSS, which are not programming languages either. The only people who code on Wikipedia are the Wikidata folks and those who build utilities (many in Python, I think) for whatever the toolserver is called now. Most Wikipedia editors are not going to have any interaction with these few folks, nor any means to learn the skills they have.
I'm sorry for sounding negative, but I don't want to mislead women into thinking they will learn a job skill like programming (coding) by editing Wikipedia. There are many other things one may learn by editing Wikipedia, but they aren't so easy to articulate and vary by individual.
--Ellie Kesselman (FeralOink)