It’s well known that Wikipedia has a contributor ‘Gender Gap’. A survey in 2010 said that the site had only 6% female contributors, others say up to 15%, depending on what you read. This is despite a huge amount of discussion about the Gender Gap on Wikipedia and on external sites, such as the New York Times: Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List.

The Gap has led to a host of initiatives trying to get more women to contribute to the encyclopedia. In the NYT article, Gardner set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25% by 2015. She failed miserably.

Symptom or Cause

Much has been said about why the Gender Gap exists. In a 2011 blog post, Gardner (Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia) gives nine reasons why Wikipedia is unappealing to women. I have rearranged the order slightly.

Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because:

the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly

they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence

they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture

the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted

they find its overall atmosphere misogynist

they find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting

social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites

women whose primary language has grammatical gender, find being addressed by Wikipedia as male, is off-putting

they are too busy

At first glance this list seems plausible, but it’s important to note that the first eight reasons are symptoms, not causes. I will talk more about the reasons these symptoms occur later in the post.

Given the magnitude of the problem, and the seeming willingness to try to understand and fix it, one would think that Gardner and Wales would have prepared better answers for 60 Minutes.





Safer: Rank and file Wikipedians today are still mainly men, reflecting the tech world at large. Gardner: Women are less likely to kinda geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours. I mean, there’s a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right? Like, that’s hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos. — Safer: The gender imbalance was at the heart of a significant internal dispute at Wikipedia. Wales: When William and Kate got married – the royal wedding – someone created an entry about Kate Middleton’s dress. And somebody nominated it for deletion. And some of the arguments were, you know, effectively, “This is stupid. It’s just a dress. How can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress?” Safer (voiceover): Wales intervened, pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs. Wales: And we don’t think anything about that, “cause we’re a bunch of computer geeks”. So we decided to keep it. But there was an interesting moment in that debate, where people were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this, therefore it’s not important.” And that is bias. And that is something we have to be careful about.

Deconstruction

Let’s break that down:

Gardner: Women are less likely (than men) to kinda geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours.

Gardner sets up a false equivalence by comparing all women to some men. She implies that Wikipedia contributors need to be “geeks” who must have a huge amount of spare time to contribute.

In fact, neither of these is true. You can spend as much or as little time editing Wikipedia as you like, and you don’t need to be a geek of any kind to contribute.

Gardner: I mean, there’s a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right?

Next she doubles down on the geek image, saying that Wikipedia is created by hackers, despite most people’s image of hackers as men who know a lot about computers, and that they illegally break into computers. In Gardner’s mind, the stereotypical Wikipedia contributor is filthy, unhealthy, male hacker eating Doritos – for 10-40 hours at a time.

Is this really the image she wants to project of the people who make up one of the world’s leading sources of knowledge? This is a smear on the people who actually contribute, who at least according to the 60 Minutes footage, look fairly clean.

Usually, you would expect that a person making this kind of argument would then say, “But no! We are different from that!” Something like: “People think that Wikipedia is made only by dirty computer geeks, but there are actually lots of women, who contribute to all kinds of pages.”

Instead, Gardner makes things worse.

Gardner: Like, that’s hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos.

She confirms that the contributors are, in fact, filthy Dorito-eating male hackers, but they are not the problem. The problem is that women don’t have “permission” to be as dirty as them!

According to Gardner, the reason there’s a Gender Gap is because women can’t get permission to wear Dorito-stained T-shirts. In Gardner’s world, its ok for men to wear dirty, filthy clothes, but women don’t have permission to be dirty. And because they can’t be dirty, they can’t contribute.

In other words, women can only edit Wikipedia if they take on the same dirty behavior as men. But who is giving this permission to dress down? Men? Society? Why does she think women need any kind of permission to edit Wikipedia at all? It’s completely nuts.

Jimmy Doubles Down

So let’s see how enlightened Jimmy Wales is. Remember, this interview was broadcast in April 2015, not in the 1960s, and in real life, not an episode of Mad Men.

Safer: The gender imbalance was at the heart of a significant internal dispute at Wikipedia. Wales: When William and Kate got married – the royal wedding – someone created an entry about Kate Middleton’s dress. And somebody nominated it for deletion,

Four years after the wedding, with all that outreach, and all Wales can cite is an article about a wedding dress? The implication here is that women are only interested in women’s stuff: dresses, and perhaps make-up, and shoes.

No mention of the various programs to add more women scientists, more women poets, more women in general. No mention of women trying to edit articles about science and history. A dress. That’s Wales’ go-to example.

Wales:…and some of the arguments were, you know, effectively, “This is stupid. It’s just a dress. How can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress?”

The question here is how did Wales build a site that had a significant part of the users that would think that way?

Safer: Wales intervened, pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs.

Again the false focus on technology. I have very rarely used Wikipedia to check up on computers or software programs — that’s what review sites are for. Like most people, I use it to find information about people and things. Y’know, like a normal encyclopedia.

Wales: And we don’t think anything about that, “cause we’re a bunch of computer geeks”.

Wales joins Gardner tripling down on the typical Wikipedia users as “computer geeks”. Not only that, but computer geeks who don’t think about other viewpoints. One has to wonder why Wales is presenting this image of the contributors.

While most people editing Wikipedia do so on a computer – you don’t have to be a “geek”, a computer expert, or a geek in any way, to edit the site. In fact, expertise in a topic is looked down upon in Wikipedia. In most cases, people are simply adding and comparing sources. Much of the work is spell-checking.

And note the present tense — this is what they think now.

Wales: So we decided to keep it.

How generous! Four years ago, Wales and his gang of Dorito-stained hackers decided that an article about a princess’s dress should be kept in. The implications of this are obvious: women’s topics (as defined by men) are going to be vetted by men.

Wales: But there was an interesting moment in that debate, where people were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this, therefore, it’s not important.” And that is bias. And that is something we have to be careful about.

Translation: But there was an interesting moment in that debate (by men), where people (men) were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this (female thing), therefore, it’s not important.” And that is (male) bias. And that is something we (men) have to be careful about.

But there’s nothing that says how Wales fixed the problem. No mention of how procedures were improved to include women. Nothing to say how bias is prevented. No updates about what has happened in the four years since. Because nothing has actually changed.

Wales’ attitude is typical of someone who doesn’t know he is part of the problem. In another segment, Gardner describes Wales as the “Queen Mom in the parade”. It’s an apt comparison: He sits at the top like a distant monarch, waving at the men who cheer as he passes in his gilded carriage, totally unaware of the women they crowd out.

As I like to say, Wikipedia editors talking about the Gender Gap, are like the lions at the watering hole wondering why the zebras aren’t thirsty.

It’s the software, stupid

Here’s the truth: Wikipedia can never be inclusive because the core wiki software is designed to give power to the powerful. In Wikipedia, might is right, and the biggest power group by far is men. There is no way for women or minorities to tilt the playing field in their favor.

But software is a choice. Software is simply a set of commands to do things. If you want software to draw a line on the screen, you program it to do that. If you want software to work for a diverse group of users, then you make it happen, by designing the software for inclusivity.

But Wikipedia was not designed by Wales — it was given to him as an off-the-shelf solution that could possibly work to create an encyclopedia. It was never designed as an inclusive system, and as it grew, it was never updated to give balance to the different types of people who could use it.

Now, due to the huge external success of the site, Wikipedia’s software is seen as perfect by insiders. Instead of understanding that the cause of Wikipedia’s problems is the software, they focus on the symptoms.

Instead of blaming the software’s flaws, they blame the people who use the software. If only we could get rid of the sexists, the harassers, the abusers, the PR people, the vandals, then our perfect system would be pure again. But it’s the software that lets all of these groups flourish.

Gardner’s reasons why women don’t participate, are all symptoms of bad software design. Women don’t contribute to Wikipedia, NOT because they aren’t confident, or are conflict averse, or need a welcoming tone, but because Wikipedia is designed to give and maintain power to its first group of users, who were men. It doesn’t help that Wikipedis is designed to benefit those in that group who are the loudest, most fanatical, and those most likely to abuse power

Women don’t edit Wikipedia, NOT because their edits are more likely to be reverted or because it’s misogynist, or sexist, but because nothing has been done in the software to stop harassment and bullying for both men and women.

Women don’t contribute to Wikipedia, NOT because the interface is bad — but because Gardner, in her seven years as Executive Director, didn’t change the interface to make it easier for all users.

In fact, other than some window dressing, Gardner, who describes herself as a “Feminist Wikipedian” didn’t do anything to improve the software to include more women contributors.

In all the time Jimmy Wales has been involved with the site, from co-founding it, through today, he has done nothing to fix the software to include women. And it shows by the way he talks about the issue. Women are an afterthought.

The question is whether they know what the problem is, and won’t fix it, or whether they are completely ignorant of how their own site works. If it’s the first, then they are hypocrites, talking about diversity while doing nothing. If it’s the latter, then they are incompetents who don’t deserve their positions.

The promise of the Internet is that it can break down power structures. Instead, Wikipedia is a system designed to give and maintain power for early users, almost all of whom are men. And the people at the top don’t seem to know why it happens, and are not prepared to make the hard choices to change it.

How do I know this?

Because this site, Newslines, even though it creates broadly similar crowdsourced content to Wikipedia’s news and biography pages, has had up to 80% women and minority participation. The main differences being a software design that stops entrenched editors taking “ownership” of pages, randomizes the editors who approve posts, and allows for fully anonymized assessments of edits. Combined these measures stop groups of editors ganging up to fight other users and stop harassment of individual users. The other difference is that we pay our writers, and when people are paid they don’t want to waste endless time fighting and instead, concentrate on getting the job done. For more on Wikipedia’s flawed software design read my posts: Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins