From our Swindon Correspondent:
From the Toronto Star
Sarah Severson, a librarian at the University of Alberta and a member of the board for Wikimedia Foundation, said that the lack of diversity trickles to the content on the site, because it’s volunteer-based, so editors will work on pages that they are interested in.
“You see really long articles on Dungeons and Dragons characters, and you see an independent female artist having a small article,” Severson said.
“You don’t know what’s missing unless you have diversity within the editor forces,” she continued. “When you have an editorial community that’s all North American white men they’re just going to see different things.”
In the absence of sexist men telling the ladies to go back to their kitchens, we have to conclude that in general, men and women are different. And yes, that “general” means that some women want to be giant nerds, and we should welcome and encourage that as much as we do men. But it also means that you aren’t going to get equivalence of outcomes across the sexes.
There’s nothing stopping women from taking STEM classes either. Dr Judith Curry remarks that the hostility she experienced as a female scientist was nothing compared to when she turned climate sceptic.
I wonder how Iverson etc think Wikipedia ought to react to this? The organisation is so non-sexist that it has to ask what sex its editors are.
Actually, it’s always the same with these people, the ‘solution’ is always: ’employ me, or people like me’.
So Wikipedia is getting the articles (and lengths) that reflect what its volunteers are interested in, and not what leaders think they should be interested in!
Leaders are already too influential! Articles on towns all have stats that imply that skin color is crucial and someone is out to get women; those on nations must mention what they are doing about money inequality, and whether it is a safe place to have anal sex.
I’m a long term and frequent editor on Wikipedia (currently in the top 2500 by edit count) and have originated and edited many articles. Editors are all volunteers and we edit the things we are interested in: be it pop culture, Ancient Rome, classical music, football or science or thousands of esoteric subjects.
There have been drives to encourage editing of “women’s” articles, but you can’t force people to voluntarily work on things they are not interested.