On 16 February 2011 17:38, Oliver Keyes scire.facias@gmail.com wrote:
Reading some of the links (I'd only seen the NYT article and a few other pages - thanks for providing all of it) I do see your point, but it does seem like trying to resolve it internally would have been a better first step (unless there was some attempt to do so that went completely over my head. I have a habit of missing things like that and then putting my foot in it).
Don't worry, you haven't put your foot in it :-)
But the fact of the gender gap's been known internally for more than a year, right, since the results of the UNU-Merit study were published. It's been thoroughly discussed on e.g., the strategy wiki.
I think lots of individual community members have been working to help fix the problem (for example, there are lots of wiki-projects, some of them listed on our meta pages). My general view is that more action, more awareness, more people helping, is good not bad :-)
We've got a lot of suggestions here, some of them very good, but the problem is that we don't have any hard data on what it is specifically that attracts men rather than women. I did suggest something to get that data, but it seems to have sunk into the archives like a stone. It seems like the priority should be working out what the disease is rather than frantically scrambling to treat the symptoms.
I'm actually, in spare moments here and there, pulling together a blog post that attempts to summarize what research exists, and what we can learn from it. But I don't think your suggestion has gone unnoticed. For example, I know that quite a few Wikimedia Foundation staff lurk here, and some of them work in research. They also talk with other researchers, inside the projects and outside. And Joseph Reagle is here, and my understanding is that gender is the focus of his research on Wikipedia, right now. I expect that the questions that have been raised here are very likely to turn up in surveys and studies over the next few months :-)