Puppy wrote:
Gender bias is not my soapbox; this thread was not started by me, I have merely provided some anecdotal and statistical information. I believe we are currently in the examining and discussing phase rather than the solutions segment. I see as a more fundamental issue that women are less well represented in the editing pool, and wonder why that might be. If the editing pool were less unbalanced, perhaps our article coverage would be also.
If you're not sure that WP has systemic bias wrt gender, why would you believe that more women editors will make a difference? I'm not being flip here - so far we've had the general attitude that credentials are secondary, that a college student can follow the same rules and get the same treatment as a Nobel laureate. Now I'm in the camp that wants more subject-matter experts in WP, but I have a very pragmatic reason - my observation is that experts usually write much better and faster on their subject than amateurs, and so it's just a more efficient way to grow the encyclopedia; an expert can put together a feature-quality article in a couple sittings, while the mass of amateurs takes months to get to the same place (of course there are plenty of exceptions). The hazard of asserting that women editors have something similarly distinctive to bring to WP, by virtue of gender alone, is that one is playing right into the stereotype of "women's topics" or "female viewpoints", and risks creating a sort of "pink collar" ghetto in WP that new female editors would be subtly (or not-so-subtly) steered towards.
Then again, perhaps the women who are interested in editing Wikipedia are less interested in "women's topics" than in other subjects.
That's certainly been my experience. Often I'm surprised to discover that the gender of an editor is the opposite of what I had surmised based on choice of topics and editing style (so much for stereotypes!). Of course, short of a medical exam, results to be mailed to the Foundation, I'm not sure how one proves gender of an editor anyway... :-)
I do note that [[Can opener]] is a stub, but look at [[P-38 can opener]], the military can opener. Not a great article but longer than the parent article. Of course, any Pokemon character article would blow both of these away.
The ironic thing is that female editors (often teen-aged) are huge contributors to Pokemon articles. Would they become interested in [[can opener]] all of a sudden? Seems implausible to me - people are interested in what they're interested in.
Stan