Published in News

Wikipedia crippled by a lack of women

by on29 August 2014

Edited by boys who know nothing

Wikipedia’s problem is finally being realised, it teams of editors are “young white western males with a slight personality defect” and there are simply not enough women working at the place. Guardian feature writer Anne Perkins said that Wikipedia’s editors are single and childless and most of them are actually small boys who are getting bullied at school.

A recent survey of Wikipedians showed that the average age of them 25.22 years, young enough to know nothing but old enough to think they are gods gift to intellect. Half of the respondents are younger than 22 years. The most frequent age that can be observed within the respondents is 18 years. So that means a quarter of them are younger than 18 years old and another quarter are between 18 and 22, a further 25 quarter are between 22 and 30. Only the last quarter are between the ages of 30 and 85 years old which is the age you actually know anything.

Contributors show a substantially larger share of males than readers. Among respondents only 12.64 per cent of contributors are female. Wikipedia acknowledges that it suffers from a lack of women editors however it has been unable to do anything about it and in 2013 any attempt within Wikipedia was abandoned.

As a result if you compare the coverage of female porn stars, where a page that went up first in 2004 has been edited over 3,000 times by more than a hundred volunteers determined to make it as copiously referenced as possible with that of a page about women writers you see the effect of the gender and age bias.

However it is not an issue about women and technology. Women have come to outnumber men in some social media domains. They use social network sites such as Facebook more often and more actively than men and female users predominate on Twitter, Yelp, and the online pinboard Pinterest.

Men hang out in Reddit, a social news website known for its sometimes-misogynistic content and LinkedIn has attracted almost twice as many males as females. LinkedIn claims that this is because men are better at professional networking than women.  What is more likely is that women do not hang out in places where there are a higher percentage of men being misogynistic socially retarded tossers – which is why they ignore Wikipedia in droves.

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