We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:49 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
The conclusion from the study on which the figure of 12-14 or something women has several metodological flaws in my view. Mainly about the representativity of the sample from the survey
See http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf and http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Age_Gender_30March%202010-FINA...
If you take those numbers as unbiased estimators of sampled population, you come to the conclusion (from page5, 1st doc) that Wikipedia has the mindboggling amount of.. 200 thousand readers.
But I guess it's useful to think of the conclusions there derived as accurate, for sake of discussion.
Then, I don't want to get into problems (as that figure and the gendergap seem to have become sacred topics these days) so I will just not rock the boat, leaving those links for those with actual statistics knowledge to read.
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanchez@gmail.com wrote:
If you take those numbers as unbiased estimators of sampled population, you come to the conclusion (from page5, 1st doc) that Wikipedia has the mindboggling amount of.. 200 thousand readers.
And no, I'm not talking about number of people who answered the survey, I'm talking about percentages being remotely resembling to actual figures.
If proportion of editors/readers were roughly 23/65 %, take numbers from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm and you get the quote
Hoi, There are no benefits to indicate gender for the English language at the moment. There is for Russian and the consequence is obvious. There is no reason to believe that there is any other reason for there being more women in the ru.wp then there being a benefit. Thanks, GerardM
On 21 February 2011 18:49, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 21 February 2011 17:49, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
It's fair to say that any figures we get are rendered pretty dubious by the privacy/nondisclosure issue, and it's certainly true to say that there are going to be observable and predictable biases as a result, but I don't think this effect is going to be strong enough to entirely explain away the figures.
The various calculations and surveys on the demographics of the editing community are probably wildly inaccurate in many details, but with the figure widely quoted of about 10-15% of editors being female ... well, most people seem to have nodded and said "yes, that seems about right". It's not widely dissimilar to earlier estimates, and it fits with a lot of anecdotal observations of (and from!) the community over time.
We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
There was a study, but based on long experience with numerous editors I know that it is real. Men and women act somewhat different online.
Fred
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org