From the NYT:
In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.
I would imagine that if less than 15% of the contributors are women, then much less than 15% of the work is done by women.
Considering that almost nobody gets paid for Wikipedia, the most obvious thing that can be said about its existence from a gender point of view is that the human race owes a debt of gratitude to the male sex.
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; ...
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. ...
Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?
I note that the Mexican Simpson's character Bumblebee Man only gets a subarticle on Wikipedia, and I'm much more interested in Bumblebee Man than in Mexican feminist writers, so, guys, get back to work!
The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising.
Unless you stop and think about it.
After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world; Wikipedia is not a software project, but more a writing experiment — an “exquisite corpse,” or game where each player adds to a larger work.
But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.”
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”
To the extent that not having more articles about Mexican feminist writers is a problem, it's a problem caused not by evil misogynists, but by women (in particular, by Mexican women), who are less likely than men (especially non-Mexican men) to see the point (assuming there is one) in working for free to expand access to information for people they don't know. But blaming any problem, even one as exiguous as women not contributing much unpaid labor to Wikipedia, on women is a no-no, so the fault must lie with "misogynists."
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105 comments:
Hey, who wants to vandalize the Pat Barker article with me??
Liberals are stupid.
That's all that comes to my mind after reading stuff like that article.
liberals are absurd, aren't they?
and, INANE, too.
Years ago I largely abandoned TV for the Web. The only people who end up discussing politics here are the ones who're actually interested in it, so naturally most discussions are dominated by men. On the rare occasions when I watch TV nowadays, I am shocked by the proliferation of women pretending to pontificate on male subjects there. Not just politics - sports, and even technology. Gadgets, for God's sakes! Years ago I was so used to this phoniness that it seemed natural, but it doesn't anymore. You'd see a 5-member panel discussing the Tea Party on CNN and 3 of the pundits would be women. It cracks me up.
"...fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women."
Ha ha ha ha ha!
My only experience with editing Wikipedia was when a course I was taking referenced several published works by an Indian author. I went to Wikipedia to find out more about him, but there was no page about him, so I created one. It got quickly deleted for not being notable.
an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women
LOL. This is becoming pretty comical, isn't it? "An obstacle"...
If they really need to identify problems, how about this: "the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s". One would think that a goal to raise an average age of the contributor is a worthy one. A bit more maturity and a bit less bias would only benefit Wikipedia.
How long until the EEOC imposes proportionality rules on volunteer groups?
Good thing they weren't around when the Titanic was sinking, or the casualties would have been even higher.
I'll bet Wiki has far more Jewish contributors than Mexicans and blacks combined.
surprised you have commented on this very stupid NYT article: Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above
Whether or not it subsequently cedes its editorial operations to a crack writing squad that "looks like America," The NY Times should think seriously about renaming itself WikiSelfParody. Unbelievable...except that it's not.
Ugh.
So, someone points out that there is a sex imbalance on Wikipedia. The natural, and correct, reaction is "So what?" You then go on, though, to defend Wikipedia.
Wikipedia sucks.
This is a Hitler-Stalin situation. Retarded feminists attacking Wikipedia do not make Wikipedia good. Wikipedia is, in fact, as you've already seen, a sanitized PC mess with little relation to reality.
Oh my...whatever will Margo McGowan of theWoodhead..err..Woodhull Institute say?
Maybe the female authors write under pseudonyms on wikipedia so they wont be easy targets for the "difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists" that hang out on wikipedia. After all, on the Internet no one knows you're a dog.
But the simpler explanation is that men simply prefer to contribute to an organization not run by a committee of rabid feminists, reverse-racists, and marxists.
How many Mexican feminists are there, six, seven? Mexicans aren't a vanguard race, the ones in the US even less so. Not to mention, The Simpsons is much more than nine times as important as Mexican feminists.
Any decent American, indeed any human deserving of the apellation, must be appalled that the anti-Semites in charge of Wikipedia let the Glenn Beck-like anti-Semites writers include a disproportionate number of Jews in the list of feminists.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia because it is a joke. If you do not have the politically correct slant on whatever your contribution is then it is deleted.
I think that there is a much higher number of women contributing but that they are being censored for this very reason.
Thanks for the link Steve, and I think you nailed it here.
I imagine if it was the other way around the Times would be wringing it's hands over the failure of men to keep up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
Hey, maybe we should expand on this.
Let the good times roll. ROTFL.
A very serious problem with Wikipedia is that it's a mirror of radically-PC values, and it is clogging the Internet with...itself. It links to itself so much (and via its numerous mirror sites), that it is on the first page of results for almost any general search now.
And so the lazy flock to it. Hence PC values are reinforced, and even legitimated. (In popular consciousness, Wikipedia seems highly-trusted, for some reason).
Another of the many Wikiproblems: It rewards megalomania and control-freak-ism. Given two editors with different ideas, the one who "wins" is inevitably the "bitter-ender" who furiously re-edits and reverts what others have written, and is willing to fight until the bitter-end to get his way. It does not matter who is correct. A more aloof personality who edits once and doesn't come back to jealously guard his work, will always lose on Wikipedia. Now, in the event that two "bitter-enders" lock horns, the dispute gets arbitrated and the PC hammer comes down. Either way, reality loses (often enough).
It is a curious irony, then, that Wikipedia's ostensible goal of "Infinitely increasing human knowledge" ends up doing the opposite: dumbing us down into PC-dom (PC-dumb?) even more.
How many men contribute to Ravelry? Sheesh.
Richard Fuerle in "Erectus Walks Amongst Us" makes a point about Wikipedia-editing I found interesting (link):
_____________________________________
Today, Caucasian altruism is not directed just towards nearby Caucasians, but towards anyone anywhere, i.e., “promiscuous altruism.” ...Wikipedia is an example of promiscuous altruism, since the hundreds of hours editors spend without pay probably lowers their [evolutionary] fitness...
_____________________________________
Wikipedia used to have a good article on Race and Intelligence. Unfortunately, a female author deleted all the non-PC thought crimes. Does wikipedia actually need more people like that?
Chief Seattle wrote:
men simply prefer to contribute to an organization not run by a committee of rabid feminists, reverse-racists, and marxists.
Wait a minute, Wikipedia is run by "a committee of rabid feminists, reverse-racists, and marxists", not to mention megalomaniacs, pornographers, pedophiles, shock-artists, ethnic-activists, and sundry PC zombies. All masquerade as Bearers of Absolute Truth, and the hoi-polloi tends to believe it.
Consider if Steve Sailer had chosen to devote all his energy to Wikipedia editing over the past ten-plus years. Wiki-Steve's net-impact on the world would be Zero. Everything he'd have written would have been deleted or edited into oblivion by PC-enforcers or zealous "bitter-enders".
I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of the contributors to 'Mexican Feminist Writers" are actually men. I'd be absolutely shocked if the majority of contributors were *not* white men and women of the sort that major in English at Williams.
Isn't this just another problem begging for the old ballpeen hammer approach?
Seriously though, situations like these are ripe with high-comedy. On the one side you have publicly brazen but privately demure post-modern womanhood. On the other, socially retarded yet politically correct geekdoom. Postmodern womanhood encounters something it finds distasteful (like the abrasive, testosterone-poisoned culture of Wikipedia editorship) and asks for special accommodations. Socially-retarded geekdom, which has been spouting all the right feminist slogans yet still hasn't gotten a date in 15 years, rightly sees this as a betrayal of the principle of sexual equality and calls post-modern womanhood on it. Post-modern womanhood, unable to logically counter, claims to detect a whiff of misogynism. Socially retarded geekdom, having less than a 50% chance of ever having even kissed a girl, let alone learned through the experience of several long-term relationships that women rarely want what it is they say they want, becomes even more acrimonious at the false charge and smugly thinks to himself he is the better feminist. At which point discussion degenerates into name-calling and in-group directed posturing before collapsing of its own weight.
Off topic but in the same general category, the LA Times film guy, Patrick Goldstein, just did a column on the 'lack of diversity' in Hollywood ("No black or Latino heads of studies!"). He of course left out some very salient facts.
The cat-fight between pro-Obama liberals and pro-Hillary liberals is a hilarious case-in-point. Liberal men, not exactly Randy "Macho Man" specimens to begin with, still have enough trace amounts of testosterone to go into full he-man attack mode once they've acquired a target. Now, given that few liberal men have any stake in providing the bra-burners with one last glorious ride into the sunset, it was natural they'd swing toward Obama heavily as he is the eminently "cooler" (comes from a more protected victim group) and "fresher" (does not have all that sleazy Clinton baggage) candidate. And so to ensure the arrival of their Federal Messiah, they vigorously attack any obstacles in his path, which- during the Democratic primaries- just happened to be Hillary.
Now, pro-Hillary liberal women, not being able to deal with the fact that their PC-whipped male counterparts are still sporting a pair, or that the two-fisted, hairy-chested exuberance of said counterparts' support for Obama is (at least in its style) about as politically-significant as Playstation fanboy-dom, claim that Hillary is the victim of sexism. And what evidence do they have for this claim? Well, a woman just knows these things!:
Jessica Valenti, the founder of Web site Feministing, has spent recent weeks touring colleges, including Georgetown, University of Mary Washington, University of Akron and University of Missouri. She said that before her travels, she'd been "expecting a lot more Obama craziness" on campuses. To her surprise, at almost every school she visited, young women told her, "My friends or boyfriend or father are progressive guys, but when they talk about Hillary, I feel like they're being sexist. But I can't put my finger on what it is."
"When the election started, I felt very postfeminist," said Wiegand. "I felt like, I'm a woman and I'd love to have a woman president, but I also have many other issues I care about and the Iraq war is a big one, and I'm not going to make my decision just because I'm a woman." But over the course of the campaign, Wiegand said, "there has been a lot of anger toward Hillary that's felt really intense and misogynistic. The gloating after Iowa was something to behold. And it's made me realize we are still dealing with the gender issue."
The epitome of liberal logic. Sexim? Bad! Hillary losing primary? Bad! Why Hillary lose primary? Because of sexism (from all those "this is what a feminist looks like" male progressive wimps).
Semi-related question: Anyone know what percentage of contributors to The Onion have been female? I bet it's tiny. Where's the outrage?
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”
That's not true at all. There's no requirement that "open-minded" people be open to people holding to opinions that have been declared beyond the pale. One can be as bigoted and huffy as one wishes when exposed to "sexists," "racists" etc.
In reality, an actual problem that the modern-day open-minded face is their tendency to shift into empty-mindedness; which is a tendency exacerbated by the sniffing of Reagle beagle types. ("Don't think too much, okay? You might accidentally think the wrong thing. Surely the world will end right there and then.")
but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world
Having the freedom to contribute as many articles as women wish is obviously a tremendous barrier. I don't know how that can ever be overcome.
and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. ...
Wow, facts make women uncomfortable? Or is it just the obsession with them? In which case we're to suppose that women are generally okay with facts provided one isn't positively obsessed with them -- as in, say, pointing the factual errors might occasionally creep into a woman's work; you'd have to be totally obsessed to do anything like that.
"There you go again you damned bigot! So what I said wasn't factually correct. Big deal! Can't you get over it, you fact-obsessed goon? Look, stuff this; I'm outta here!"
Another of the many Wikiproblems: It rewards megalomania and control-freak-ism. Given two editors with different ideas, the one who "wins" is inevitably the "bitter-ender" who furiously re-edits and reverts what others have written, and is willing to fight until the bitter-end to get his way. It does not matter who is correct. A more aloof personality who edits once and doesn't come back to jealously guard his work, will always lose on Wikipedia. Now, in the event that two "bitter-enders" lock horns, the dispute gets arbitrated and the PC hammer comes down. Either way, reality loses (often enough).
The answer is encouraging "Multiple Points of View" and "Teach the Controversy." Even this much is a struggle because so many wikipedia diehards are dyed-in-the-wool leftists and/or fanatical Jews.
Maybe it should be renamed Gynepedia or Wikifeelia to encourage participation from the distaff side.
FWIW, no, I don't. It's too PC.
Off-topic, but red meat for iSteve readers: "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?"
"Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one...
...Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations."
As every testosterone fuelled ex-youngman will tell you, women never give away anything for free, never have and never will.
Last time I checked there were more articles in Slovak (about 7 mil speakers) than in Arab (about 280 mil speakers)....
Wikipedia - The Memory Hole (deletion of pages about white murder victims)
"The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally — trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change.”
To me, this sentence encapsulates not only this story but a whole host of similar stories. To what extent are people comfortable with self-selection, that is, with people deciding on their own what they will or won't pursue, what they will or won't invest their time, energy, and interest in? Obviously, some of us are more comfortable than others.
This woman is pretty much acknowledging that, left to their own devices, women wouldn't participate in something like Wikipedia at nearly the same rate as men. But that's not acceptable, so they need to be made to participate more, and the situation needs to be policed in such a way that they will participate more, even if they don't particularly want to, and will never really want to.
Be interesting to compare to published encyclopedias like the Britannica, then we could get a feel for the actual difference. That's kind of the bare minimum I'd expect from an article like that.
Not sure why the article has such a focus on women being serious people who enjoy serious writers (though no doubt many women are), when women are the ones who consume all the turgid and childish romantic novels, female oriented fantasy novels, soaps, soap-in-serious-drama-drag TV dramas and reality TV shows and presumably have a proportionate degree of responsiblity for any Wikipedia content about them (which I'm guessing would, yes, also be many times more voluminous than content about Pat Barker or Mexican feminist writers).
I'd assume this is a dog whistle for "men = techy geeks into geeky "low" pop culture; women = elevated humanities types" therefore this is why there aren't articles in areas of interest to the aforementioned "women". Not because women aren't interested in compiling and spreading knowledge and actually aren't particularly interested, in particularly high rates, in literature or feminism (probably more so than men, but that's not saying much).
Of course, women also likely have less free time than men, but this is not likely to explain the whole of the variation.
Assuming men are writing about objective physical stuff (supposedly they're "objectifiers" and "systematizers", right?), perhaps that's easier to write about, to an encyclopedic standard, than subjective subjects and concepts (like brands and art).
fanatical Jews
It is odd when you read an article and as often as not, there is a disproportionately large segment on a writer or famous figure's "anti-semitism", relative to the importance in that figure's life, career or whatever grab bag of prejudice's he or she likely carried around with them.
It's a funny thing. I read this post and it reminded me to start a new Wikipedia article that I've been meaning to work on for a while. And I wrote it. I've contributed my handful of articles over the years.
It's reassuring when your original articles are largely left alone (a vote of confidence?) or improved and strengthened over time. It's discouraging when they are taken down a different path by later editors.
There is no glory in it, so why do we do it? Are we rising above our self-centered selves for the good of humanity, or is this all just an expression of our adolescent/ pedantic male desire to tell people how it is?
To the extent that not having more articles about Mexican feminist writers is a problem, it's a problem caused not by evil misogynists, but by women (in particular, by Mexican women), who are less likely than men (especially non-Mexican men) to see the point (assuming there is one) in working for free to expand access to information for people they don't know. But blaming any problem, even one as exiguous as women not contributing much unpaid labor to Wikipedia, on women is a no-no, so the fault must lie with "misogynists."
Somewhere in this paragraph, I got left with the unmistakable impression that the Steve-ster was leaving in his wake a not-so-subtle whiff of the H-word.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia because it is a joke. If you do not have the politically correct slant on whatever your contribution is then it is deleted.
I think that there is a much higher number of women contributing but that they are being censored for this very reason.
Isnt that more likely to mean that the number of women represented is actually inflated? ie 15% is an over representation.
Wikipedia is great. While PC affects Wiki articles about hot-button topics, most articles are not influenced by such concerns. History, science, and math articles are often great. Moreover, Wikipedia's content policies mean that there are articles even about such topics as racial differences in intelligence, and the views of Jensen, Rushton et al. are not censored.
"There you go again you damned bigot! So what I said wasn't factually correct. Big deal! Can't you get over it, you fact-obsessed goon? Look, stuff this; I'm outta here!"
Reminds me of an ex-gf of mine: "Even if I'm wrong, I'm right!"
"Assuming men are writing about objective physical stuff (supposedly they're "objectifiers" and "systematizers", right?), perhaps that's easier to write about, to an encyclopedic standard, than subjective subjects and concepts (like brands and art)."
Actually, Wikipedia's probably the best source for looking up pop stars and such. Even female pastimes preferred by relatively nerdy women like crochet gets quite a bit of press. It's only super-female stuff preferred by the 'popular girls' such as fashion that gets ignored.
I'm a woman and I've written my share of articles for Wikipedia in my arcane areas of expertise. Every line I write is referenced and footnoted so people know where to look it up, just as it is supposed to be under Wikipedia guidelines. But I am Queen of the Nerds. The other contributors appear to be kings and queens of the nerds in their respective subjects too. And there is just as much conflict over comma placement or word choice as you might expect in any other human endeavor. Nerds just fight over things that make the rest of the world point and laugh. On the other hand, everyone seems to look up stuff at Wikipedia if they want to find out something fast.
Speaking of The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/army-program-pairs-female-soldiers-with-male-chape,18978/
Army Program Pairs Female Soldiers with Male Chaperones.
I find wikipedia quite reliable when it comes to objective subjects like science, maths, computers, etc. The worst affected topics, in my opinion, are those on history. While some show a distinct bias, many others show sloppy research.
I have contributed to Wikipedia in the past. There is nothing there asking for your gender that I remember. It seems very anonymous so even if somebody didn't like your article, because a woman wrote it, you would never hear about it.
It is probably mostly guys who comment here as well!
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. ...
Sue Gardner should be kissing guy ass for giving her a job, but instead she sees them as a problem. Typical.
I love how they always say the environment is hostile to wymmnz, or whatever. YES, apparently, knowledge for its own sake and nerdy info-wrangling is hostile to wymmnz.
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”
Cart, meet horse. NO, the guy talk doesn't keep the women away. The lack of women encourages the guy talk. Guys start grabbing their crotches and spitting when they know the womenfolk are gone, or more particularly, repelled by the environment (grease, sweat, numbers, etc.).
Wikipedia has its problems, to be sure, but it has its strong points as well. You just have to know how to use it, esp. keeping in mind its open source nature. Take any politically contentious topic with a grain of salt. Make sure to verify any piece of information that is important to your purposes.
I think of Wikipedia as a people's encyclopedia, primarily aimed towards popular culture and entertainment and modern biography. Think about it; what other encyclopedia can give you the history of the Transformers?
Reagle says, "I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world."
In other words, freedom, openness, and egalitarian ideas have nothing to do with "the real world," which ought to be taken in hand by authoritarianism, close-mindedness, and elitist ideas.
The "problems," of course, is that their pet fantasies are BS and aren't working out - in the real world.
Women are just interested in relationship type babble, food and fashion. Everyone knows it, why not just come out and say it?
History, science, and math articles are often great.
disagree here, its got a bad richard dawkinsesque globalist worldview liberal slant on everything (and i am not talking about creationism, but rather- anti-religion, anti-western bias.
Wikipedia has a horrible liberal slant on just about everything. The only topics that escape that bias are the ones not noticed.
This is just dumb. The author seems to think there's a limited amount of space on Wikipedia, as if the nerd boys are filling it all up so the girls can't find space for their articles on Mexican feminists. That's print publishing thinking -- every column inch or page has to be fought over.
While, as some have said, there seem to be PC squads browsing Wikipedia and deleting anything that offends them, that would hardly stop articles on Mexican feminists.
The truth is, men are more likely to build "stuff" online (software, documentation, fan sites, etc.) for the same reasons they're more likely to build stuff in real life. In the unlimited space available online, they're able to pursue that drive to their heart's content. The guy building furniture in his garage has to stop when he runs out of storage space or cash to afford lumber. The guy writing Wiki articles on all the characters in his favorite computer game from 1985 doesn't hit any such limit.
Wikipedia also claims to have a broad worldview but that's only when that means anti-western. For example, in an article on reparative therapy for homosexuals, someone point that Indian psychology still treats it as a disorder and there are far more indian psychologists than western ones, so that ought to be reflected in the article, right? wrong. try posting their view and see how long it lasts.
and the views of Jensen, Rushton et al. are not censored.
what wikipedia are you looking at??
"The epitome of liberal logic. Sexim? Bad! Hillary losing "primary? Bad! Why Hillary lose primary? Because of sexism (from all those "this is what a feminist looks like" male progressive wimps)."
Pols and pundits? I don't care if they are hermaphrodites from Uranus. They are among the lowest of humanity. No glory there.
But you seem to say sexism doesn't exist? I mean in the U.S.? Except of the anti-male variety of course? Well if it doesn't that's good to know--the former statement not the latter.
And here I was letting my lying eyes deceive me.
On to more important stuff.
I've tried to contribute to Wiki. But why waste my time--it's only slightly less controlled than MSM.
Yeah, it's sill for women to blame anybody but women for not being more active, but really...If it were mostly women contributing you'd blame "feminists' for Wiki. It's mostly men contributing and you still blame "feminists." Same old same old.
There are fantastic web-sites (quite a few run by women) with free info on all matter of science, nature, medicine, lit, etc. Wiki is the web as the NYT and WaPo are to real news.
Semi-related question: Anyone know what percentage of contributors to The Onion have been female? I bet it's tiny. Where's the outrage?
I don't know about the Onion, but how could you miss this:
http://reelaroundthefountain.tumblr.com/post/1696432166/cracked-com-is-sexist
which on top of being filled with factual errors that could have been fixed by looking at, uh, wikipedia, led to this thing of beauty:
http://www.othieves.com/fakecracked/cracked.html
Serious request - will the posters who say that wikipedia is overly PC link to some examples?
I use wikipedia mainly for a quick brief on technical subjects - chemistry, math, medicine. Also some history, and once and a while a pop culture reference. And I haven't noticed a bias. Do you have to hang around the Rachael Corrie page to see it?
"I'm a woman and I've written my share of articles for Wikipedia in my arcane areas of expertise. Every line I write is referenced and footnoted so people know where to look it up, just as it is supposed to be under Wikipedia guidelines. But I am Queen of the Nerds."
I infer from this that you submit articles about sufficiently arcane and/or nerdish topics that the PC police don't come along and eff with them. Good for you.
I may be even more queenly--or more nerdy--than you are. I put in links to support my points when discussing issues with my friend by email. There I am, in private, non-scholarly correspondence, doing research and including links.
Maybe my crown is too tight.
"A more aloof personality who edits once and doesn't come back to jealously guard his work, will always lose on Wikipedia."
this is why i don't contribute to wikipedia anymore.
a few times in the past, i have gone to pages, and noted a few places where information was missing or wrong, so i changed it. or rewrote ONE sentence so it was easier to read. i come back in a few hours and see that the page has been changed back to it's original, less useful state.
what i realized is that there are people literally guarding their favorite wikipedia page, immediately deleting edits and reverting the page back to the way they want it. there have to be thousands and thousands of people out there meticulously guarding pages. it's retarded and DOES hurt wikipedia. wikipedia is awesome, there's no doubt about that, but the guardian issue is a big one.
also, some people have their pages deleted. i'm talking about public personalities who don't like having a wikipedia page about them written by strangers. that hurts too. "Hey, I don't like people being able to know stuff about me, please delete that page."
...but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women.
When I read a sentence like that I start to wonder if the writer (or, I suppose, editor) is 100% behind the approved NYT line.
Wait a minute here. There are plenty of women bloggers who blog for free. Women do lots of stuff for free -- lots of women I know volunteer. And haven't you ever had a woman try to unload the excess of summer squash from her garder on you?
But the trick is that the issues usually has to be personal and something that really interests them. A lot of female bloggers are "mommybloggers" who blog about their kids. A lot of women who volunteer do it at animal shelters, or if they're political at abortion clinics and the like. I suspect the combination of intense conflict around Wikipedia editing and the way it's an encyclopedia which ostensibly presents only facts on tightly categorized abstract subjects (not friendly to discussing personal experience) is what turns women off.
I do know some women who have true geek levels of obsession with abstract subjects that aren't directly career related, but they're much more rare than male geeks.
"" "A more aloof personality who edits once and doesn't come back to jealously guard his work, will always lose on Wikipedia."
this is why i don't contribute to wikipedia anymore. ""
Same here. I used to contribute a fair amount but now it feels like pissing against the wind. Though I do get in the mood to contribute in the circumstance of a very tiny article, where I feel very interesting sourced information can be added, though that hasn't happened in a while. (usually when I'm reading a book and come across something interesting, so I look it up on wikipedia and add what I read)
Wikipedia is a fantastic weapon of "the enemy." The bulk of the Wikipedia content, and insane amount of "white-man-hours" that goes into creating the content is done by what I imagine are mostly non-PC white men. So these guys create the content that makes Wikipedia the go-to site for the general public and gives it its influence. Once that Herculean task is done, the "enemy" descends on the content and modifies it to create the spin they like, the spin that is so deadly to the very white males who created that content to begin with. And so the enemy basically gets us to construct our own gallows. lol.
Chief Seattle, wikipedia is awesome for that stuff. technical information which is not too controversial. it's the best thing ever. gives you some basic facts on topics outside your area of expertise. it's no substitute for an authoritative resource on a particular technical topic but it gets you the gist of things quickly.
it's also the ultimate argument ender, the ultimate BS session destroyer. how many times before the internet have a couple of guys gotten into some argument over the fastest car or the most powerful gun or how many interceptions john elway threw? those arguments are over now in 5 seconds. no more "Well I swear I read in some magazine that..." or "I heard this guy one time say that..."
before good internet information collections, those arguments would go on and on. what was the dallas cowboys record in 1987? how much horsepower did a 1968 ferrari have? who was the fastest track sprinter in 1975? without reference materials, two guys who were experts could argue for hours, recalling things they read in some specialist magazine or textbook or journal, each guy calling the other guy's claims BS.
we no longer have to listen to guys talking out of their asses if we don't want to. thank you wikipedia. it's one reason i realized michael jordan's "the shot" makes no sense as a great sports moment. it was in the first round of the playoffs and the bulls went on to lose in playoffs that year. "the shot" didn't lead the bulls to the title. it was basically irrelevant. now i wonder what the big deal is about it.
Years ago I largely abandoned TV for the Web. The only people who end up discussing politics here are the ones who're actually interested in it, so naturally most discussions are dominated by men. On the rare occasions when I watch TV nowadays, I am shocked by the proliferation of women pretending to pontificate on male subjects there. Not just politics - sports, and even technology. Gadgets, for God's sakes! Years ago I was so used to this phoniness that it seemed natural, but it doesn't anymore. You'd see a 5-member panel discussing the Tea Party on CNN and 3 of the pundits would be women. It cracks me up.
That describes me and my reactions to a t as well. At least the Fox gals are young and cute.
Wikipedia is great. While PC affects Wiki articles about hot-button topics, most articles are not influenced by such concerns. History, science, and math articles are often great. Moreover, Wikipedia's content policies mean that there are articles even about such topics as racial differences in intelligence, and the views of Jensen, Rushton et al. are not censored.
I agree, overall Wikipedia is great. You just have to have some Wiki-fu. If there's a @^%# hair's chance of liberal mass-mind bias creeping in, check the discussion page. That's where all the action is.
I think I need to explain my first comment a bit more:
A couple years ago there was a big dust-up when a female Wikpedia contributor was stalked and received a death and/or rape threat (electronically, not in the real world). A big discussion followed over Wikipedia's supposed female unfriendliness and eventually someone broached creating a women's-only mailing list. Since Wikipedia operates under the illusion of community control, and since the mailing lists are the platform from which the community actually controls things (not really, but, people operate under this illusion) it seemed like female Wikipedia contributors would be getting an extra "vote" in how things are run.
This set off accusations of reverse sexism, and then based on the heatedness of those charges, counter-accusations of normal sexism, etc. Just proof of how liberalism and PC warps normal human life.
OF COURSE women have less tolerance for confrontation than men. OF COURSE women, through said confrontation avoidance, often do not express their wishes directly, but use hints, indirection, etc. and so are experts at reading (and over-reading to the n-th degree) even the tiniest social cues.
Now the typical socially awkward Wikipedia geek has been spoon-feed on PC and feminism and takes it all at face value. After all, a girl can grow up to become as good a Navy SEAL as any man, right? (at least according to Hollywood), so why all this drama over a little online jostling? And so they become enraged at this double-standard, and act even more oafish than normal, driving even more female contributors away...
What socially awkward Wikipedia geeks fail to realize is that PC feminism hypocrisy (publicly agree that women are the complete equals of men, then provide special accommodations when they prove they can't cut it, then pretend that this has absolutely no logical implications for the rest of the feminist agenda- what only 20% of firefighters are women?) is a microcosm of any working male-female relationship. As anyone who has been happily married knows, she is always right. Of course this was all a lot cuter before feminism started pissing away 3% of our GDP with its inefficiencies and litigation...
chief seattle:
this guy has problems with evolution but he documents bias pretty well.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia
most recent example "Wikipedia does not mention until after 600 words that Jared Loughner, like many Wikipedia editors, is an atheist, and its entry initially failed to admit that he is also a nihilist, an extreme form of atheism.[1]"
I know the NY Times has got problems, but this article takes the cake. Wikipedia is an open, collaborative project. There is no centralized authority in it. Its not like there is anyone trying to keep women from contributing content to wiki. They are perfectly welcome to contribute content to wiki.
If 85% of the content comes from guys, well guess what? Its guys who are willing to get up off their asses and to contribute content to wiki. There is nothing to keep women from contributing more content to wiki if they so choose.
The guy from Harvard who was quoted in the article is even dumber than the idiot who wrote the article. Of course there is no "rules" or "goals" of the kind he mentioned in wiki because it is an open-source collaborative project based on volunteer work. Its a example of bottom-up spontaneous self-order. The kind of "rules" and "goals" he cites are not applicable to this kind of project.
This is got to be the stupidest article I have ever read in a major newspaper. No wonder the newspapers are all going bankrupt.
Take any politically contentious topic with a grain of salt.
I agree. This is true for all news and information sites. Of course CNN and the NYT have a liberal bias, but where else can you find a single source for comprehensive national and international news? Once you know the bias is there, you control for it, but you don't stop reading because there's no alternative. An avowedly non-PC site will have just as much bias, except in the other direction. The fact that you agree with the bias doesn't make it less biased.
I love Wikipedia because it's a quick source of information on literally any topic in the world. For example, I recently learned the word "juggalo." (Yes, I'm old.) I could have googled it and gone to three or four sites before finding a straightforward discussion of the term. Or I could have gone to urbandictionary.com and gotten a brief, maybe accurate definition, all the while wondering how significant the thumbs-up to thumbs-down ratio was.
Instead, I Wiki'd "juggalo" and got everything I needed to know - which, granted, wasn't much - in a quick minute's read.
On more significant topics, Wikipedia may or may not be the best source, but it is a single place for everything. That's very convenient. If I want to know more about, say, the Chaco War, I don't want to have to go to several sites, which might or might not be more reliable than Wikipedia anyway.
I, too, would like to see evidence of widespread, significant, ongoing PC editing at Wikipedia (not a single article or a single crank editor, which is inevitable in an open-source site). I suspect that at least some of what is being called "PC" editing is actually editing of overtly anti-Semitic and racist commentary.
Anyway, why don't those of you who are unhappy with it create an IHateWikipedia site - a place to post your complaints and grievances about PC editing and the like?
As for the role of women at Wikipedia, or lack thereof ... what a surprise! Wasn't this true of Usenet as well? (I said I was old.) Of course there are more male writers in such settings. Men are:
1. Generally more inclined to obsessive collection of knowledge that is not immediately relevant to their own lives.
2. Much more likely to expound their opinions publicly, while women tend to hide their light under a bushel except among people they know very well.
3. Much more tolerant of disagreement, controversy and rancor.
There will never true gender parity among Wiki contributors, any more than there will ever be true gender parity in sports. Women just aren't built that way.
@ Hail
"since the hundreds of hours editors spend without pay probably lowers their [evolutionary] fitness"
Unfortunately the evolutionary fitness of many in the Wikipedia crowd is probably already really low. Ditto anything like world of warcraft and video games
The key question is did these guys reduce their fitness voluntarily, or did they opt out of the dating market once it was clear they were fighting a losing fight?
One other point:
Why are left wing people called "liberals"? They clearly do not believe in liberty. Indeed, they believe in the restriction of liberty.
Would Wikipedia exist if it weren't for men? Would The Onion? Would the internet?
You know, you don't even have to interact with anyone face to face in order to contribute to wikipedia. Have entries made by women been deleted because they were made by women? I would think we would have heard something by now if this was the case.
People interviewed for the New York Times article seem to suggest that wikipedia is "sexist" just by the fact that more men contribute information than women do even though there is no barriers of entry at all for women. In other words, they are saying that the very concept of openness and freedom is somehow "sexist". This is incredibly warped.
I think the liberal-left has gone off the deep end.
Why are left wing people called "liberals"? They clearly do not believe in liberty. Indeed, they believe in the restriction of liberty.
You're right - to call them liberals is sort of Orwellian. That's why I've taken to calling them leftists. It's the only term that really fits.
"Progressive"? Uh huh. As if everybody has the same idea of how progress happens or ,indeed, what constitutes progress.
Steve,
I urge you to read Wikipedians' own perceptions of gender bias. Great source of material for a future column.
It begins by one female Wikipedian asserting Wikipedia is a place of such crushing gender oppression that a women-only discussion list is needed. A male Wikipedian then springs to the bait, hotly claiming this would introduce gender apartheid and that the liberal thing to do is not run from the problem but confront it (and look who's the real feminist now!)
Another female Wikipedian replies that anyone questioning the existence of sexism just proves how bad it is. A lot of back and forth follows, with not one of the male herb Wikipedians challenging these claims of discrimination, only the idea of "running" from the problem by creating a female-only space that would reinforce stereotypes. The consensus male position becomes such a list would be OK, so long as "Wikichix" is opened to both genders (got that?- female-only, yet open to all).
One female supporter of the "Wikichix" list desperately tries to triangulate:
I hope this new list can be something that is open for anyone to join. I hope the men who would join would take the opportunity to listen in to such a discussion rather than shape it.
Got it? Don't try to phallocentrically "shape" the discussion with your nasty logic and evidence. Just quietly accept your guilt.
Finally, when cornered into providing an example of sexism, the female Wikipedian gives this:
There is such a lack of belief that the problem exists or that it is serious which is shocking to me. If anyone who attended the Board Q & A at Wikimania and can still think it is not a serious problem after witnessing the entire room laugh at dismissive comment which nearly brought me to my feet in outrage; I do not know what to say to them.
And what exactly was this Larry Summers-ish bit of ogreishness that brought her to the point of storming out? When Wikipedia foundation top-dog Florence Devouard (a Frenchwoman) lightly brought up that she was not compensated for the cost of child care when she went away on foundation business, someone made an even lighter riff on that.
Sailer wrote:
"But blaming any problem, even one as exiguous as women not contributing much unpaid labor to Wikipedia, on women is a no-no, so the fault must lie with "misogynists.""
Yes, steve, you are quite correct. And obviously so. And you point out this hypocrisies and incongruities time and time again, as do you compatriots at vdare.
But you never ever even hazard a guess as to WHY this is so. WHY, steve. Why is this present situation so prevalent? You seem curiously incurious about the causes, the forces that led to this politically correct regime. Never even a guess? Very curious.
Why, steve? Why is it so? Things in this deterministic universe happen for a reason. WHat are the forces, the reasons, that caused this present situation? WHY is it that it is a no-no to blame women for this problem, as you so correctly pointed out above?
You and all the other paleos on vdare and all the other paleo, anti-immigration sites seem quite content to merely point out the hypocrisies without ever speculating on the forces that led to their existence.
It is a deterministic universe, mr sailer.
Time for you to take the next step. Why is it that you avoid this area?
Why is it that buchanan and brimelow and the rest of the anti-immigration, anti-PC crowd refuse to ever consider why this regime exists in the first place?
Why, steve?
-cryofan
Wiki is good for basic stuff like: population of cities, Super Bowl winner, films an actor has been in, books by an author.
This may not be true. Many men pretend to be women online. OTOH, as Wikipedia is not very respected, women may pretend to be men in order to hide their identities.
As many posters have alluded, passion is a large reason for the gender gap. As Charles Murray wrote in "Human Accomplishment", men are much more obsessive.
Does Wikipedia show us that the passion exists mainly on the Left?
My anecdote on what's wrong with wikipedia: the pitbull page. I've learned from it that they are simply misunderstood.
If one entertains any notion at all that the lower class has rejected the blank slate, think about the common view amongst that class vis a vis pitbulls and other dangerous dogs and even wild animals. All mammals are fine so long as "you don't abuse them!". *All* of them.
"Why is it that buchanan and brimelow and the rest of the anti-immigration, anti-PC crowd refuse to ever consider why this regime exists in the first place?"
What on Earth are you babbling about son?
"Anonymous said...
Wiki is good for basic stuff like: population of cities, Super Bowl winner, films an actor has been in, books by an author."
My opinion as well. For anything apolitical it's probably okay. For everything else, Caveat Emptor.
Wikipedia: The first place you look - The last place you trust.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia because it is a joke. If you do not have the politically correct slant on whatever your contribution is then it is deleted.
I think that there is a much higher number of women contributing but that they are being censored for this very reason.
Isnt that more likely to mean that the number of women represented is actually inflated? ie 15% is an over representation.
How do you reckon? Are you assuming that female = libtard?
You know what it means when you assume?
Mark Richardson had a blog post recently on how Liberals react to autonomy producing the "wrong" results:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2011/01/clarissa-motherhood-castrates-women.html
If one entertains any notion at all that the lower class has rejected the blank slate, think about the common view amongst that class vis a vis pitbulls and other dangerous dogs and even wild animals. All mammals are fine so long as "you don't abuse them!". *All* of them.
To be fair, APBTs are misunderstood. Scum have taken to breeding out their human-friendliness, though. But prior to that, they were one of the most human-friendly breeds there were. Sorta a requirement when you're breeding a fighting dog.
I grew up with an APBT and it was far more restrained (toward people) than many other dogs. Leaving aside the scum-bred APBTs, you're far more likely to be bitten by a Cocker Spaniel.
Do you have to hang around the Rachael Corrie page to see it?
No, that's where you go to see Jewish bias and liberal bias turn on each other.
Wait a minute here. There are plenty of women bloggers who blog for free. Women do lots of stuff for free -- lots of women I know volunteer. And haven't you ever had a woman try to unload the excess of summer squash from her garder on you?
Good reality check. Yes, women are charitable.
There are few women who write for Wikipedia, because the politically incorrect truth is women are not really interested in ANYTHING. I am speaking from an objective analytical perspective with no malice, but this has been known throughout the centuries, it is only now with our new egalitarianism which translates into no gender differences, particularly where they are unpleasant.
The truth of the matter is women are only interested in things pertaining to love or emotions, what is personal, what is practically needed. They enjoy an activity for the benefit or emotional gain they derive from it, but have no intrinsic interest in the activity itself.
Women enjoy watching movies for example, because of the emotional benefit they derive. But extremely few women will be truly interested in analyzing and criticizing film, or understanding the art of film. Careers, for example, man women succeed, but not due to an intrinsic interest in the material, but rather a practical gain from it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
Hey, maybe we should expand on this.
That particular entry changes size and form a LOT. It's been twice the size it is now in the past.
See also: oh noes!
"There are few women who write for Wikipedia, because the politically incorrect truth is women are not really interested in ANYTHING."
well bust my buttons. All those dozens of books sagging my cheap bookcase, books on everything from archeology to Russian History to comparative religions to exo-planetary biology to the story of PutuMayo scandal in the Amazon, must just be to fulfill my lack of enough ice cream. All those websites I incessantly puruse. All those (well, not a huge number ) of women I talk about things with.
Sometimes this blog is scream.
But sometimes I wonder what these people would look like when if I met them on the street.
oh, and btw, I have never made more than 50,000 a year but even while unemployed for over a year I contributed to animal groups and took in stray animals. I would gave my gift card to a no-kill shelter. These places would be hard pressed to to keep going if it weren't for women, who have been in the forefront of animal welfare movements. But I'm sure somebody will have something derogatory to say about that because, after all, women are into it.
I agree with Dores. I once met a woman who was exceedingly interested in her job as a management defense lawyer. She positively relished the process of extinguishing an employee's quest for workplace fairness. Once, while waiting for a settlement conference to begin, I stood in amazement as she proselytzed a personal injury victim in a full body cast about how the tort system was being abused. Oh, and she's a Democrat.
"I agree with Dores. I once met a woman who was exceedingly interested in her job as a management defense lawyer. She positively relished the process of extinguishing an employee's quest for workplace fairness. Once, while waiting for a settlement conference to begin, I stood in amazement as she proselytzed a personal injury victim in a full body cast about how the tort system was being abused. Oh, and she's a Democrat."
How are you agreeing with me? I'd be pulling for the body-cast.
Dahlia said
>If one entertains any notion at all that the lower class has rejected the blank slate, think about the common view amongst that class vis a vis pitbulls and other dangerous dogs and even wild animals. All mammals are fine so long as "you don't abuse them!". *All* of them.<
The pit-bulls-are-misunderstood craze is a deliberate political tactic, mere "anti-racist" propaganda dressed up as concern for animals - it is the thin wedge of race flat-earthism aimed at the lumpen. Preposterous?
Just Google "pitbulls racism."
I was not aware that dogs were a race.
Somebody is pushing this absurd meme, for obvious purposes indicated by Dahlia.
Here's another for Steve's list of confusers (like whooping crane/whooping cough, or Iran/Iraq): SPCA/SPLC.
(All this - it should go without saying - is beside the point of whether you like dogs or know of good or bad bull terriers. Those interesting discussions are but a smokescreen for the pursuit of the political purpose.)
What socially awkward Wikipedia geeks fail to realize is that PC feminism hypocrisy ... is a microcosm of any working male-female relationship.
Honesty = autism.
It is an obvious fact of life that men create knowledge, not women.
This whole argument is moot because men invented and built the entire internet - of which Wikipedia is just a single website.
Like Steve said, these five Mexican feminists would probably be as important as The Simpsons if they could tell a single joke between them.
Guys, stop being so productive, you're making women look bad and don't you know that's sexist!!!!1!
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