Wikipedia is Male-Centric!


I use Wikipedia a lot, but I never felt that the topics (I mean the topics, not the content) were mostly male-centric. Then again, I am a guy, so I wouldn’t notice such a thing even if it hit me with a sledgehammer. Anyways, it came as a surprise to find this article say that Wikipedia had topic bias!

It all started off with a question to the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, as to how even esoteric topics that only men care about, like the over 100 Linux variants, get covered whereas some “some fluffy girl topic” (like make-up) or Kate Middleton’s wedding gown get voted off the site as being irrelevant.

Wales responded that he personally believed that they should keep the article on Kate’s gown because of the dress’ presumable long-term effect on fashion. Well ok, such examples trivialize the issue (as one comment said, “I really see this idea that keeping this article does something to remedy the gender imbalance here to be facile at best and insulting at worst.”).

But look at things more seriously, and it turns out the root of such bias, if you believe it exists, is that only 9% of Wiki editors are women (as of 2011). Which, by the way, is a significant improvement over the 3% it used to be a decade back.

If you thought that getting more women to start editing Wikipedia would correct this bias, think again. Turns out that female editors make fewer changes to articles than male editors.

So for the time being at least, it looks like Wikipedia will remain a male bastion!

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