Wikipedia: It's not for girls
Time-rich computer scientists in America say they have conclusive proof that online encyclopedia/graffiti archive Wikipedia is biased against women. Hardly any of the site's legions of volunteer editors are female, and the few who are get picked on by the male majority: as a result Wikipedia fails to provide quality in-depth …
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Maybe...
It's because any person who has spent enough time watching Sex in the City to be able to write a wikipedia article on it would either be confined to a small comfortable room without access to electricity, let alone the internet, or would already have taken their own life?
In my (perhaps limited) experience, women aren't particulalrly underrepresented on the internet, but they seem to spend most of their time alternating between facebook and ebay.
The fact that few technical articles on wikipedia have much female input is perhaps more a reflection of the general lack of women working in technical fields. For example, in my career as a software developer, which has stretched over more than a decade, I have met exactly two female programmers, one of whom was technically very adept, and one who wasn't. I'd be very surprised if the percentage of women in this field reaches double figures. This is not due to lack of ability, rather than lack of interest. This is a pattern that is reflected in many technical areas, and if you want to change it, you first have to change popular attitudes (including those amongst women specifically) towards what is considered appropriate work for women. Good luck with that.
It is also worth noting that gender bias works both ways, and there are very few males working in areas such as nursery nursing. This is in part due to the attitude society takes towards men working in such roles, viewing them with suspicion.
Hmm
The mayor of Washington, DC, is a confessed "Sex and the City" fan. This did not seem to hurt him in the primary, I suppose because a majority regarded his opponent, the incumbent, as a jerk. I could post a query to the mayor's office asking what they will do about it, but he didn't run that well in our ward and may regard this as more yuppie snottiness.
Mayor of D.C.
Getting elected to Mayor of Washington, D.C. doesn't count for too much. remember that this is a city that *re*-elected a convicted crackhead who's defence primarily consisted of "Bitch set me up!"
See, if I were a lass...
...I would find the implication that I was only interested in "friendship bracelets and Sex and the City" to be a wee bit patronising. Perhaps the colour pink also, and My Little Pony?
and friends!!!
My Little Pony AND FRIENDS!
/huff/rant/hair-flip/period
i mean full stop
20% cooler in 10 seconds flat
I can see your point - they are magical, after all.
Oh God, what's wrong with me??
or maybe...
there's no "kitchen" or "sandwich" in "wikipedia"... of course they're gonna get made fun of... welcome to the real world, where everyone gets made fun of. Someone should make fun of me for ending that last sentence fragment with a preposition. I think the world needs a good dose of sense of humor.
Beer
I doubt you care, but
...by one analysis, the "of" in "get made fun of" isn't a preposition, but a part of the the phrasal verb 'to make fun of'. By this analysis, grammatical English sentences really don't end with prepositions. But cue the inevitable old joke:
Harvard freshman: Hey buddy, can you tell me where the library's at?
Senior student: Real Harvard students never end a sentence with a preposition.
Freshman: I'm sorry. Can you tell me where the library's at, asshole?
My Little Pony?
At least with the new version that seems to be mostly male geeks as well, I'm afraid.
"mostly male geeks as well"
Damn right! Fluttershy is adorable!
...Wait, did I just say that out loud?
The inimitable NMA TV on the "Brony" phenomenon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcjhG4PQpaE
What about shemales?
I bet they are under represented too...
Wikipedia should get rid of all it's editors
... you can't edit anything on there for love nor money... whatever you write will removed and classed as vandalism even if its is nothing of the sort. The editors just have different opinion about the subject and use the editor rights to revert changes.
Also if the dude in the red chinese shirt (why is he always pictured like that, it makes him look like a twat) want anyone other than nerds and geeks to write wikipedia articles he should make the thing understandable to normal people... does anyone understand what they see when they try and undo something?
I gave up trying
to contribute to Wikipedia years ago. I once spent days on there going through correcting spelling and grammatical errors, not even adding or altering the factual content. Nor did I "correct" American spelling - I was merely correcting genuinely misspelled words and grammatical errors.
After discovering that the vast majority of my edits were being reverted to the erroneous versions by snot-faced little elitist pricks with an editorial superiority complex, I told them to go fuck themselves, got banned for my pains, and haven't been back since.
The only thing I use Wikipedia for now is to get the source websites listed at the ends of the articles for information. I wouldn't take anything from Wikipedia itself as gospel.
Or Maybe....
Women just have better things to do with their time.......??
Well done Chris Jasper for finally mentioning that
The involvement of people in anything that doesn't result in personal gain is a type of sickness. What will they say when they die? "I spent 1/10 of my waking life working on some open-source project that is now totally obsolete, wow I feel really good about that". In return I got a few 'virtual' thanks, didn't make any friends (at least not the type that I could have a beer with), and totally f**ked up my eyes, neck and back in the process, when I really should have been making the most of my free time to play sport, spend time with the kids (perhaps even... *have* some kids). You get the idea? Women, quite simply, don't suffer from the sickness. They're self, self, self, unless it's some community-based thing, in which case their contribution is highly visible, resulting in more friends, more people to share gossip with and so on. I'm sure I'll get shot down for my stereotypical view, but we have plenty of women at work (programmers), but they do it as a job. They don't take it home. They have better things to do, so really there is no reason for them or anyone else to complain about a lack of representation.
I have long suspected..
..that's why women are under-represented in computer programming. They aren't as easily fooled by computers as us men. I think we get some kind of 'social interaction' kick from them. Women being more accomplished social animals means that they don't get that same kind of kick. To them a computer is just a bloody complicated machine and only an idiot would bother to spend all day 'communicating' with one.
I've known three female programmers during the 25 years I've been doing it and all of them were very good at programming. They seemed to take it more seriously though and were interested in the theory which is part of why I came up with my theory. Most male programmers prefer to leap in and start typing (experience gradually weans you off the habit). None of the three women I knew did that. They always planned things out thought and didn't start work until they had a clear idea of what they wanted.
"The involvement of people in anything that doesn't result in personal gain is a type of sickness"
Go back to bed Ayn Rand
"I spent 1/10 of my waking life working on some open-source project blah blah"
As opposed to "I spent 1/10 of my waking life posting innane drivel on some news-site message board that is now totally forgotten, wow I feel really good about that"
In 1000 years, what will anything YOU have ever done be worth a damn?
In 1 billion when the entire record of human existence on this world has been subducted back into the Earth's mantle?
In 4 billion when the sun goes red and either scalds or totally consumes the earth.
(Or in several years-decades when God does effectively the same thing if you are more into the primitive superstitious stuff).
The reason women are under-represented in computer programming
.. is that women are under-represented in computer programming.
The 'Let's get more women into computing' campaigns completely miss the point and are doomed to failure, not that so-called industry 'experts' seem to have noticed any time during the last 30 years.
Still waiting for the 'Let's get more of a less pathetic type of man into computing, so that women will then follow naturally' campaign.
Sexist reporting?
Sorry to see that The Register took the "Sex And The City" comment out of context, making The Register itself look embarrasingly sexist. I'd suggest that before commenting, people read the actual report itself instead of The Register's mischaracterisation of it.
Ahh, The Internet....
Where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.
Slightly fictional example, then
Article history for "Serbian Nationalism in the 20th century"
Felicity Petticoat: I feel this article should be restructured to more accurately reflect the role of Tito in subjugating the ethnic Serbs and fuellinh resentment among the disenfranchised peasant classes.
J.Random Editor: T*ts or GTFO
Bad example unfortunately
As anything Balkan related is encircled by half a dozen nationalistic editors on each side of the "debate" with a couple of editors trying to be a thin blue line.
Most sane editors of either gender don't hang around there long.
Patriarchal
WP has a patriarchal management style that is fine for how men do things in groups , but less interesting to women. Undoing someone's edit instead of fixing a small thing seems like a very macho approach.
Men (a bit more-so than women) also like to sound authoritative and WP gives them an outlet for that.
WP has no management style at all.
It's just 'last edit wins'.
Restrict the scope of Wikipedia
Wikipedia should be restricted to science, technology, film and music.
All other topics, including anything remotely political or historical should be confined to the dustbin as Wikipedia is a quagmire of insidiously biased diarrhoea on anything outside this spectrum.
I can't believe...
...no-one's gone:
"In general on the internet it's safe to assume that a fair number of people claiming to be female are actually men or teenage boys,"
[Citation required]
Yeah, whatever.
'As anything Balkan related is encircled by half a dozen nationalistic editors on each side of the "debate" '
Instantly splitting into a number of mutually hostile factions? There ought to be a word for that.
Wikistics?
So about 1 in 6 fiddlers is female. Perhaps the other females are actually using their knowledge for more profitable pursuits instead of partaking in a contest where the goal seems to be "my wiki fiddle is bigger than yours".
Of course not
All the women that are actually women on the interwebs are playing WoW, not talking on adult chat sites or wasting valuable raiding time creating grossly inaccurate information for kids to cut and paste into their schoolwork. While it is an extremely amusing past time, it isn't really all that important as far as IT jobs go.
Ladies that are interested in SATC...
are in the main, I would hazard the guess, less likely to be interested in adding to Wikipedia.
(BTW the SATC page is actually quite detailed and structured).
To generalise (ie not to be sexist) most of this section of the female populace would rather be reading "Now!"
Ladies that are into sex and the city...
are in the main, I would hazard the guess, less likely to be interested in adding to Wikipedia.
(BTW the SATC page is actually quite detailed and structured).
To generalise (ie not to be sexist) most of this section of the female populace would rather be reading "Now!"
Faulty reasoning
"In general on the internet it's safe to assume that a fair number of people claiming to be female are actually men or teenage boys, so this would suggest that only a tiny proportion of Wikipedians are genuine ladies."
I'd argue that the opposite probably applies to Wikipedia. There's little to no advantage to be a male pretending to be female on Wikipedia, in fact, the popular perception that females have less input there would even work against it. There are probably a fair number of female masquerading as men there.
Instead of looking at what gender Wikipedia users identify at, it would be much more instructive to isolate ways women and men compose their language (yes, there are differences), and put some algorithms together to see how that runs across Wikipedia articles in general. I suspect the results would be a lot more even.
"isolate ways women and men compose their language"
There is a site that does this:
http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
This site takes a block of text and uses statistical analysis to determine the probability of it being written by a male or a female. In my own tests it has proven to be remarkably accurate - on the order of around 85-90%. While this is still a significant margin of error, it is still far more accurate than determining the author by their stated gender identity. Consider that a lot of women would identify as men in order to avoid being hit on or discriminated against, and a significant number of men would identify as women in order to get free gifts and such. I know from running a female character in WoW that people are much more willing to give gold, gear and help to someone they perceive as female than they are to a male!
So the error factor resulting from false gender self-identification would be considerably greater than the 10-15% error exhibited by that analysis site.
If you've got the time, feed some wiki articles into it and let us know what you find.
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