This post from Romaine on Wikimedia-l caught my eye:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-February/076685.html
Parts of it touched on the gender gap. Those parts are copied below:
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Hi all,
The past weekend was great! Wikimedia was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, organised as the university ULB in Brussels, Belgium! We had there a stand with flyers about Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Belgium, and a lot of goodies.
In the Wikimedia movement we often discuss the Gendergap, as one of the gaps we have. Wikipedia/Wikimedia looks very much likes FOSDEM, but there the Gendergap is even larger. Wikipedia/Wikimedia needs a more social development, we need software which enables users to form groups in an easy way. The female contributors to Wikipedia do like two things: having in person meetings to socialize with other editors, and second they need more social software. The education extension is a primitive form of what is needed. We need an extension where users easily can form groups (namespace Groups: or something, used by an extension), where they easily can see the recent changes of edits of group members only, to be able to actively interact with other group members and having a long term participation in Wikipedia. Having software where users, interest groups or a group of editors from an external organisation can work together.
To translate it for the tech community: Wikipedia needs a kind of *phabricator* with groups, tasks, assignments, and so on, but then for on Wikipedia itself.
Yes, Wikipedia is not a social network, but we need to create an environment in what we enable people to have a collaboration on a more visible way (if people want to).
That is my clear conclusion after this conference where I spoke with a lot of women about editing on Wikipedia, but also based on many project of the past years we organised.
[...]
Romaine
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Romaine's thoughts echo some of my own, as expressed here:
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
Andreas