Apparently only 13 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are women, according to a just-released survey of users. What does that mean? Well, that dudes like disseminating possibly erroneous information while looking super authoritative. The November survey of 175,000 “valid” users, conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation, also found that said users are mostly in their 20s, they like “sharing knowledge,” and they tend toward scientific and technical entries. (Of course, it must be noted in surveys like this that the folks most likely to respond aren’t necessarily representative of the whole, but hey, we’ll go with it for discussion purposes.)
So do you mess with — ahem, contribute to Wikipedia entries, PopWatchers? What makes you decide to “share knowledge” with the Internets?
I mostly just correct glaringly bad grammar and spelling. Once I took out a sentence from an article that was just flat-out wrong, and explained why on the edit page for the article. Oh, and I’m female.
What’s wrong with Wikipedia? It’s a useful guide and tool, just don’t use it as your only source if you’re writing a term paper, cause then you’ll look like a moron. And even though a lot of readers may be female, you’re discounting them as not being authoritative, you’re discounting the females that do edit wikipedia for going anywhere near the site, and you’re discounting males in general as being petty and arrogent and contributing to a useful resource. So congrats on pissing all over your audience. Stay classy EW.
Agreed. Why didn’t JEnnifer Armstrong simply remark on the fact that there’s a big discrepancy between the numbers of men to women who contribute to Wikipedia instead of making it sound so judgmental? It’s a interesting question without the pettiness.
And I also agree than the vast majority of times, Wikipedia is actually very useful.
Wow, I really appreciate the title of this topic. “Blame” it on men? If you had found out that only 13% of the contributors were male, how many sentences in do you think that it would have taken you to write “Why do men contribute so little? Is it because they’re stupid?”
I know MY favorite pass time is making stuff up and passing it along as fact. But it’s merely for entertainment purposes… Maybe Wikipedia could do the same thing. Instead of “All The News That’s Fit To Make Up” their Tagline should read: “For Entertainment Purposes Only”
I think that this motto is already taken by MSNSBC and the New York Times.
MSNBC…sorry!
While survey respondents from specific sites may not always represent the whole, it is extremely interesting that this survey found that it’s young males who are contributing since they are the LEAST likely to respond to surveys. You could potentially argue that the % of women is inflated in this article because women are much more likely to take surveys.
what a coincidence that an article is written about contributing to wikipedia the same day that i made my first edit! i was writing my own blog regarding rihanna earning another top ten hit on billboard’s hot r&b/hip-hop songs chart, so i wanted to count how many she had. i noticed that someone claimed rihanna’s “umbrella” went to #1 on this very chart but i was 100% sure it did not, so i just did some research and was right! the song peaked at #4 (on the hot 100, it went to #1), so i edited it! i have a weird memory about chart facts so i was excited to contribute. check out my site!
http://www.downstairsthreads.com
Wikipedia is a toy for people who want to play ‘encyclopedia editor.’ If you look on the talk pages for the bigger articles you can see how the contributors act like overgrown babies.