Slate on Wikipedia and the gendergap - Gendergap

22 Jun 2015

Hello,

Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about
Wikipedia:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_…

The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out: 

"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, 
composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, 
handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the 
site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force,
 the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from
 its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The 
dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly 
longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the 
only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore,
 was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments
 toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the 
Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief 
antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was 
the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia” Corbett, who has a milelong
track record of incivility, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to
alienate every male editor,” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse,” among less
printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language.
The other editor was Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an
anti-male agenda” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia biography of her;
 he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee 
opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior 
being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a 
setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After
 the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest.)
 Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it 
attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."

Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.

What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of
topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only
know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women
behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak
that way. 

This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden
opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions. 

So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on
English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other
Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language
versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?

And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really
influence the gendergap?

Best wishes,

Lennart Guldbrandsson

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