Hi all, I'm Sage. I've been a Wikipedian since 2005, and I've been
thinking and talking with other Wikimedians about the gender gap since
around early 2009, when the first results from that survey came out.
Right now, I work for the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the team
working on the Wikipedia Ambassador Program, a project that makes
connections between the Wikipedia community and academic experts and
their students. One thing that's nice about this project is that when
you're working with classes full of students who have been assigned to
contribute to Wikipedia, the gender ratio is a lot closer to even.
We're also finding, I think, that the people drawn to the Wikipedia
Ambassador roles end up having less of a gender gap than Wikipedia
contributors overall, and a lot of our Campus Ambassadors are people
who totally new to the community.
Building off of Kat's ideas about Wikipedia attracting people with
specific traits and not others, I think there's a lot of potential for
attracting talented and enthusiastic people with different sets of
traits if we do more to define specific roles they can step into.
There's a ton of specialization within the community, but the gateway
is pretty narrow: you have to like the part that comes right after you
click [edit] on an article or a talk page enough to stick around.
Once you've learned the ropes, you may find some other important part
of the project (besides editing articles or commenting on them) is
what keeps you interested, but if you don't like that first step
enough, you'll never discover the other roles you could take on. So
creating and drawing attention to other entry points into the
community is an area where I see a lot of potential.
-Sage