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Why women have no time for Wikipedia

Thoughts on the online encyclopedia’s gender imbalance

By Andreas Kolbe, with contributions from Nathalie Collida

Wikipedia is notorious for having a sizeable gender imbalance. As Guardian feature writer Anne Perkins put it – somewhat cattily – in a recent article, the site is dominated by “young white western males with a slight personality defect”. Most of them are single and childless. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, many are still children themselves.

Wikipedia demographics

The 2010 United Nations University survey was the largest survey examining Wikipedia demographics to date. It had a total of 176,192 respondents, of which almost 60,000 identified as current (or former) Wikipedia contributors; the remaining respondents were Wikipedia readers. The survey reported that –

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Overall, the average age of the Wikipedians that participated in the survey is 25.22 years. Half of the respondents are younger than 22 years. The most frequent age that can be observed within the respondents is 18 years. Splitting the respondents in four equally large age groups shows that 25% are younger than 18 years old, 25% are between 18 and 22, a further 25% are between 22 and 30 (e.g. half of the respondents are between 18 and 30 years) and the remaining 25% are between 30 and 85 years old. There is a slight age difference between readers and contributors – readers are, on average, 24.79 years old while contributors show an average age of 26.14 years. Finally, female respondents are younger (23.79 years) than male ones (25.69 years). […]

Contributors show a substantially larger share of males than readers. Among respondents only 12.64% of contributors are female.

This gender imbalance has long vexed the Wikimedia Foundation. In January 2011, in response to a New York Times article by

…continue reading Why women have no time for Wikipedia

The Battle for Wikipedia: How Your Donations May Be Destroying the Crowd-sourced Encyclopedia

By The Masked Maggot

Just as the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) was wrapping up its annual show of “wiki-love” and idealism at London’s Wikimania 2014, the latest round of tensions between the foundation and the volunteer community reared its ugly head. The trigger this time was the forced introduction of the Media Viewer to the German Wikipedia, after the community of editors that work on that version voted to disable it. While a slight change to the presentation of images might seem like a minor issue, it points to a deeper and widening rift between the offices in San Francisco and the global community which they serve.

The WMF’s gradual grab, or How the Wikimedia Foundation is harming Wikipedia

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While there are all sorts of issues worth complaining about, Wikipedia really is an amazing thing. For 13 years, a vast collection of unpaid and unsung volunteers have written, organized, and advocated for an online encyclopedia-like website that pretty much everyone uses, naively or reluctantly. It’s been a long run where volunteer “editors” have not only created the content, but have also been enfranchised to have a say in how the site is run. Wikipedia’s “consensus” model, for all its problems, has been the real driving force behind getting the product to market, and the “Stone Soup” way that everyone brought something to the table (from content to structure to presentation) worked a bit better in practice than it should have in theory.

Those happy days seem to be coming to an end, and while the seeds for that end were planted at the beginning, the fruit is only becoming apparent now. The Wikimedia Foundation, which accepts all the donations and was (so the Wikipedians thought) dedicated to supporting the volunteers who write

…continue reading The Battle for Wikipedia: How Your Donations May Be Destroying the Crowd-sourced Encyclopedia

Wikimania 2014

By Andreas Kolbe

With contributions from Jake S, Nathalie Collida and Triptych

 

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The Wikimedia movement’s 10th Wikimania conference at the London Barbican (6–10 August 2014) concluded on Sunday. Two years ago, when discussing the London bid for the event, Jimmy Wales had confidently stated,

I spend a lot of time in London, and believe I can help significantly with ensuring a well-funded conference at a great venue, with VIP speakers (academics, politicians, media, entertainment). I have extensive and good relationships with the UK press and believe I can help land great press coverage for the conference. I’m a big fan of this bid.–Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:36, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately for Jimbo, those extensive and good relationships weren’t quite enough to overcome the healthy skepticism of the UK press towards his almost blatant contempt for the EU’s recent “Right to be Forgotten” ruling. This culminated in a frankly embarrassing Newsnight interview with James O’Brien, in which Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling, at a time when the economies of half the EU’s member-states are already close to the brink, and with energy prices set to rise precipitously during the coming winter.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the Wikimedia Foundation actually upped the ante by publishing a list of take-down notices received from Google, thus eliminating any

…continue reading Wikimania 2014