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October 11, 2004
The gender profile of Wikipedia
Joi Ito has been spending time with those heavily involved in the Wikipedia community. He has noticed that the bulk of active community members are women. He's curious if this is common of other wikis.
I'm curious if there are stats on Wikipedia's membership. Liz has pointed out that the bulk of librarians are women. I'm curious if there's a connection there.
Posted by zephoria at 01:48 AM in Software | Permalink
Comments
Were I about to embark on researching this I would begin by testing the hypothesis that women are more willing than men to perform uncompensated work.
Supporting evidence example: consistently lower pay & fewer professional benefits (e.g. travel to conferences) in professions which tend to have more women than men.
Potential contradictory evidence example: the open source software movement, which is free work given usually, I believe, by men.
Posted by: Dinah at Oct 11, 2004 11:38:35 AM
My impression is that open source software work, while not paid, does give the volunteer some prestige, at least within the open source software community. I don't know whether the kinds of unpaid work that women tend to perform confer any similar prestige.
Posted by: katie at Dec 4, 2004 7:17:38 AM
Has anyone seriously examined gender participation on Wikipedia, or are we operating on a WOM related to one observation? I'm skeptical that female participation is that strong.
Posted by: kgs at Aug 22, 2006 12:16:56 PM
