On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yes, but as I wrote in that Signpost article, that data relied on the
gender editors state in their user preferences and "this information is
optional and the majority of accounts do not state it". There a good
reasons to assume that the differing incentives distort that data even more
than the anonymous responses to banner-advertised surveys. For example, the
user has to be comfortable with stating their gender in public, and in several
languages
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender>
female
users have to set that user preference if they want the word "user" next to
their nick show up in female instead of male grammatical gender form (e.g.
"Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer" in German) - male users do not have that
incentive.
One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men as
well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender preferences.
-Frances