If 85% of Wikipedians were women I don't think there'd be quite as much porn on there. ;-) I think there is also an age bias among Wikipedia contributors (according to the research) and I think this does bias tone of the site along with gender. However I'm more about getting women editing Wikipedia than pondering the sociological questions (despite my degree in sociology!).
I guess it was the sociologist in me that asked the question about what the resource would look like if the gender stats were reversed but there may well also be differences if the average age of contributors were different.
regards
Rosie Williams
http://collectiveaction.com.au
@collectiveact
From: gendergap-request@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Gendergap Digest, Vol 1, Issue 96 To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:20:21 +0000
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Message: 1 Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:13:54 +0000 From: Oliver Keyes scire.facias@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Women4Wikipedia To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: AANLkTinHPkkRVhivV0qx1-tVBKJWOstOBryYFrE-wqpY@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
It depends. I don't think you can generalise and say that gender is the distinction here; rather, it's a distinction of interests and norms. I recommend http://www.mindspillage.org/wiki/Women_on_Wikipedia as a good read. " the culture is not biased against women, but rather biased toward certain traits and against others--and that generally men are more likely to be in the group whose characteristics are more accepted"; in other words, we could have an identical culture if 85 percent of the editors were female, they'd just be a very specific subset of women.
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Collective Action < collective_action@hotmail.com> wrote:
It has occurred to me to wonder what Wikipedia would look like if 85% of its editors were female?
regards Rosie Williams http://women4wikipedia @collectiveact
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