[Gendergap] Why women and wikis do mix...

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
> Subject: [Gendergap] Why women and wikis do mix...
> To: gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Tuesday, 8 March, 2011, 19:09
> On Signpost:
> 
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/In_the_news
> 
> http://lola-pr.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-women-wikis-do-mix.html
> 
> Fred


Thanks Fred, interesting. Here are some sample articles from Wikifashion:

http://wikifashion.com/wiki/Christian_Dior/Resort_2011
http://wikifashion.com/wiki/Yasmin_Sewell

I don't think there is anyone in en:WP who would write these articles. Yet the
article on the Resort 2011 collection is precisely the level of detail that
we would have on something like wrestling or Pokemon, and it's notable, with
coverage in decent sources.

Yasmin Sewell doesn't even have an article on en:WP (look her up in Google
News to see how notable she is ...).

We discussed the design issue that the Wikifashion lady highlights a few weeks 
ago. 

I like the Wikifashion interface design ... having a toggle option to change 
to a design like that would be useful in WP. A real eye-opener. Please let's
add a design like that as an option. 

Following on from what Carol said, and from observing how and why my wife 
writes, I think women do get a kick out of writing an article about someone 
whose work they think is important, be it a biography or an article about that 
work. There clearly are women out there who enjoy writing a wiki article on 
a widely covered fashion collection; they're just not doing it in Wikipedia.

I like that Wikifashion has lots of images: again, this follows entirely the
model of reliable sources writing about fashion. Yet I can't recall ever
seeing such richly illustrated fashion pages in Wikipedia.

Andreas