In the media

"Wikipedia's hostility to women"

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In an article in The Atlantic titled "Wikipedia's hostility to women", Emma Paling reports (October 21) on Wikipedia's gender bias, a recurring topic in media discussions of Wikipedia.

Leading with a detailed account of the gender-based and sexual harassment Lightbreather experienced prior to being site-banned in an arbitration case (see previous Signpost coverage), Paling goes on to say,

“

Wales said when he created the site it would be based on a "culture of thoughtful, diplomatic honesty" and a "neutral point of view" – but over time, that point of view came to be dominated by whoever joined Wikipedia first and wrote the most. As a result, Wikipedia has become a kind of Internet oligarchy, where those who have been around the longest have the most control.

"Most people look at Wikipedia, and see the text, and assume that it's unproblematically produced by volunteers and always on a trajectory to improvement," said Julia Adams, a sociologist at Yale University who's studying how academic knowledge is portrayed on Wikipedia. "But that is simply not the case."

ArbCom is a prime example. Because ArbCom members are mostly male, biases appear in the committee's decision-making, said Molly White, an editor who goes by GorillaWarfare on Wikipedia and is one of ArbCom's two female members. ArbCom members also tend to be white, formally educated, and from the global north, she added. "I don't think anyone on the Arbitration Committee is intentionally trying to keep women and other minorities out of Wikipedia, but I do think that the decisions sometimes have that effect," White said.

”

Paling notes, correctly, that the Wikimedia Foundation has come nowhere near realising its 2011 goal to increase female participation to 25 percent; even in the Foundation's Inspire campaign, specifically designed to look for proposals to address Wikipedia's gender gap, only 34 per cent of those who submitted ideas identified as female, according to Paling. The imbalance affects content as well as the editing climate, Paling says, quoting again Julia Adams:

“

When institutions like Wikipedia "involve systematic distortion, then we get farther and farther away from accurate understandings of the world," said Adams. "And that presents all kinds of problems – some of them trivial, some of them quite big."

”

Paling cites "Categorygate" (see previous Signpost coverage) as one example of this, and describes efforts led by editors like Emily Temple-Wood to address gender-related gaps in Wikipedia's coverage.

However, challenging the status quo on Wikipedia is no easy task, Paling notes.

“

All the Wikipedia contributors interviewed said that if a woman wants to last as an editor on the site, there are certain fights she just doesn't pick.

"When you put 'feminism' in anything on Wikipedia, all hell breaks loose," said [Sarah] Stierch. "I've been called a Feminazi more times than I can count."

"The lunatics are running the asylum," she added. "And the non-profit that operates it can't even control them. What do you do when you don't have a principal to tell all the kids to behave?"

”

Paling's article sparked voluminous discussions on the Gender Gap mailing list, on Jimmy Wales' talk page and in the "Wikipedia Weekly" group on Facebook. These discussions among Wikipedians identified a number of errors of fact that were subsequently corrected in the article.

In brief

Joanna Newsom: "Wikipedia is amazing."

Joanna Newsom's high dive: Joanna Newsom talks about her enjoyment of Wikipedia in a Newsweek article (October 21). A journey down one particular Wikipedia "rabbit hole", focused on Washington Square Park, provided inspiration for the song "Sapokanikan" on Newsom's recently released album Divers.
The future according to Wikipedia: The Long + Short magazine looks at some predictions of the future contained on Wikipedia's pages (October 20).
2010s in fashion: Slate describes the Wikipedia page 2010s in fashion as "the most haunting document of our time" (October 20).
Wikipedia article found in juror notebook: MLive.com reports (October 15) that a Wikipedia article found in a juror's notebook may have improperly affected a jury's decision in a Michigan murder case. (During a jury trial, jurors are not allowed to take recourse to any source of information other than those supplied or approved by the court.)
Koavf profiled: Prolific Wikipedia editor Koavf is profiled on Priceonomics.com (October 14) and newser.com (October 18).
Johnny Au profiled: User:Johnny Au is profiled (October 12) in the Toronto Star for his long-term attention to the Toronto Blue Jays article.
The chaotic wisdom of Wikipedia paragraphs: Paul Ford, writing for The New Republic, presents an engaging discussion (October 7) of Wikipedia's markup language.

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Paul Ford's article is both informative and frustratingly misdirecting. He calls the Wikimedia Commons just "Wikimedia" (if anything, it's simply "the Commons", so as not to be confused with the Wikimedia Foundation), and mentions wiki.dbpedia.org but not Wikidata, which is more than two years old. Those are relatively trivial errors; the frustration is ignoring how problematical the markup is for newcomers. Yes, he says "Peek under the hood, and it’s pretty horrifying", but he's not horrified at all - he's impressed. At least a brief mention of VisualEditor would have been appropriate. No, VE doesn't enable the kind of complexity that Ford admires, and which has done so much for Wikipedia's readability and value, but it does shield novice editors from being overwhelmed by that complexity. And that's critical if Wikipedia is going to succeed in turning around the trend, since 2007, that has seen a substantial loss of editors and of edits each year. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:51, 25 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I was also disappointed in the lack of mention of the VisualEditor, but that might just be a result of the backlash against it by the English Wikipedia. It's more likely that Ford never heard of it since it isn't on by default and I think recent tests only gave returning users the option to use it. As much as we'd like to think otherwise. WYSIWYG is the way most people edit these days, markup languages require people to learn strange syntax that they won't see the result of right away. It's true that in their quest to hide complexity from users these kind of editors also introduce bugs, especially for a system as complex as Wikipedia's, but the average editor is probably only going to rely on the bare minimum of its functions like text editing and footnote addition. Wikipedia is already hard enough to get into, we should strive to make editing for new users as easy as possible. It'd be interesting if the other language Wikipedia's have statistics to report after enabling the editor by default. Opencooper (talk) 01:40, 26 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@John Broughton - It is simply not correct to contend that there have been a "substantial loss of editors" each year. The all-important count of Very Active Editors (100+ edits/month) on En-WP has been up consistently over previous-year numbers for a number of months running — and this essentially without Visual Editor. The FIGURES FOR SEPTEMBER show 3338 Very Active Editors at En-WP. This is more than September 2014, September 2013, September 2012, and September 2011. So please dispense with the gloom and doom, the contention that editing figures are in a death spiral is not accurate. Carrite (talk) 09:44, 27 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Carrite: I'm aware of the recent upturn in editor/edit counts - for example, I'm the one who has been updating this page for the past year. I don't consider a discussion of the longer-term trend, the trend during the past eight years, to be equivalent to saying that Wikipedia is in a "death spiral"; please don't put words in my mouth. Nor do I consider myself of the "doom and gloom" type - otherwise I wouldn't have spent so much time on helping to improve VisualEditor, and helping with major revisions of its user manual. My main point, to reiterate, is that using the classic wikitext editor has become significantly problematical for new editors, and that admiration for the complexity of what underlies Wikipedia articles should be tempered by the realization that such complexity has a significant downside. And that's true regardless of whether the 8+ year trend of declining editors and editing has (finally) been turned around, or whether what we're seeing is a temporary lull before the long-term trend resumes. [I very much hope the long-term trend has been reversed, of course]. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:17, 27 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The title is yet another example of using hyperbole and over-generalization to push an agenda. I suspect the large majority of the editors are merely indifferent rather than being specifically hostile to female editors. Praemonitus (talk) 17:59, 30 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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