This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting attacks against Wikipedia. (Incidentally, they just deleted one from this very community because they got called out for it). This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it. This user doesn’t give a single shit about gender equality; they simply aim to discredit a resource standing in the way of their agenda.
A gender gap is a longstanding and severe issue on the English Wikipedia, but there’s a lot this article leaves out about its monumental and ongoing efforts to increase its coverage of women and to welcome more women into the project. This especially includes WikiProject Women in Red, far and away Wikipedia’s largest collaborative project whose entire purpose is to create new biographies about women. A large part of this biographical underrepresentation stems less from a bias in the editors themselves and more from the way that historical women have often been left out of published, reliable sources, and it’s taking scholars enormous efforts to bring those women to the surface today. It also says: “just 10-15% of its editors are female.” What this fails to acknowledge is that there’s an option simply not to declare your gender at all. To be clear, the ratio is atrocious, but 10–15% is likely an underrepresentation: women may be substantially less likely to self-declare their gender than men. The Wikimedia Foundation has outreach, activism, etc. focused specifically on recruiting women to the project and has for well over a decade now. Wikipedia really is trying, and its experienced editors are constantly aware of this.
The article does put forth three hypotheses for why this gap exists, but I don’t think they put forth compelling evidence that the reason it exists is because of the culture on Wikipedia or in general is Wikipedia’s “fault”.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting attacks against Wikipedia. (Incidentally, they just deleted one from this very community because they got called out for it). This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it. This user doesn’t give a single shit about gender equality; they simply aim to discredit a resource standing in the way of their agenda.
A gender gap is a longstanding and severe issue on the English Wikipedia, but there’s a lot this article leaves out about its monumental and ongoing efforts to increase its coverage of women and to welcome more women into the project. This especially includes WikiProject Women in Red, far and away Wikipedia’s largest collaborative project whose entire purpose is to create new biographies about women. A large part of this biographical underrepresentation stems less from a bias in the editors themselves and more from the way that historical women have often been left out of published, reliable sources, and it’s taking scholars enormous efforts to bring those women to the surface today. It also says: “just 10-15% of its editors are female.” What this fails to acknowledge is that there’s an option simply not to declare your gender at all. To be clear, the ratio is atrocious, but 10–15% is likely an underrepresentation: women may be substantially less likely to self-declare their gender than men. The Wikimedia Foundation has outreach, activism, etc. focused specifically on recruiting women to the project and has for well over a decade now. Wikipedia really is trying, and its experienced editors are constantly aware of this.
The article does put forth three hypotheses for why this gap exists, but I don’t think they put forth compelling evidence that the reason it exists is because of the culture on Wikipedia or in general is Wikipedia’s “fault”.