Women! Wikipedia needs you

Wikipedia needs you

Jimmy Wales has suggested that more women need to get involved with editing the online encyclopedia, but what is putting them off in the first place?

In a revealing glimpse inside the Wikipedia kimono at its annual conference in Haifa at the weekend, co-founder Jimmy Wales described the typical Wikipedia editor as a 26-year-old geeky male with a PhD. Eventually he'll get married, go on to some other project and leave the site, said Wales. And Wikipedia's own research found that 90% of editors are male.

This imbalance has meant that while technology and science are covered comprehensively, other subjects are left wanting. "The main thing is to bring in people of all different backgrounds," Wales told the event, reports the Independent. "If you do that, you increase the knowledge base of the site, which can only be a good thing. At the moment, we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare."

He was careful to say that there isn't exactly a crisis in a lack of Wikipedia editors, and it is obvious that with fewer pages to update – now that Wikipedia covers 3m pages – there is less to edit. Wales described this as "natural attrition", but said it is important Wikipedia is making some changes to try and attract a new swath of contributors. Sue Gardner, head of parent organisation Wikimedia, said there were around 90,000 active contributors as of this March, and the site wants to recruit 5,000 more by next June. Wales would like many more of those to be female.

Part of Wikipedia's attempts to make the editing task seem more attractive (and these are, of course, unpaid contributions) has involved introducing the WikiLove feature, which formalises a spirit of "niceness" that had emerged on the Wikipedia mailing lists over a few years. Contributors are rewarded for helpfulness or good edits with various badges, including kittens, stars and hearts, a bit like those potty training encouragement kits. Perhaps Wikipedia could also try making some pages pink, to see if that helps?

There are many reasons for posting or editing entries on Wikipedia: editing your own entry (the politicians' favourite); the satisfaction of updating an entry to reflect a breaking news event; correcting an error, spelling mistake or badly written sentence. But the inner sanctum of Wikipedia editing is a very serious and deeply competitive affair, with higher profile tasks reserved for long-standing editors of status and a complex, only partly visible code of conduct. Frequent documented editing spats testify to the level of competitiveness; David McCandless has beautifully and comprehensively illustrated the lamest edit wars.

We might speculate that potential female editors had, until now, been deterred by an aggressive, rather protective community with a clear hierarchy and what Wales admitted are "a lot of editorial guidelines that are impenetrable to new users".

For me, that would be less of a deterrent than the enemy of time: much as I don't doubt I'd find contributing quite satisfying, those kind of projects are a very long way down a list that prioritises spending more time with my son and less time looking at screens.

Have you noticed an absence of great famous women on Wikipedia? Is Wales sexist to suggest women are needed to write about childcare? Let us know below.