The Gender Gap in Wikipedia

Image by: LaMèreVeille (CC BY-SA 4.0)
When it comes to Wikipedia there is a noticeable gap between the gender that is mostly contributing to the post that are made and how there is a big disparity between the amount of information for a particular post will have. In the article "Critical Digital Praxis in Wikipedia: The Art + Feminism Edit-A-Thon" it states that studies have shown that about 83% of the people to contribute to the encyclopedia are male, while the other 13% are female. That alone can give an idea of how Wikipedia must look when it comes to the amount of contribution that is being contributed by the different genders,. Another state that was discussed is how you can see the disparity between topics such as if the topic revolved around teenagers. If you were to look up a topic about friendship bracelets you may only get a few lines or maybe paragraphs about it, while if you looked up something about baseball you would get very detailed information about it as well as maybe a timeline as well as historical information. This can show just how much Wikipedia is influenced by mostly male contributors or females, which in my opinion needs to change.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 17, 2017 at 8:35 PM

    With the number that you provided, it is easy to see that there is a giant difference in the amount of females Wikipedia editors there are when compared to their male counterparts. Which will also lead to there being more information on pages that are geared towards men. I would say that this is mainly because editors will contribute to pages that they have experience with or care about. So if it is mainly male viewers then it will mainly be topics that males care about. So it is important to have female Wikipedia because that is a point of view that we are missing for the most part.

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