Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List

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.

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; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

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Posted in * Culture-Watch, Blogging & the Internet, Media, Men, Science & Technology, Women

One comment on “Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List

  1. A Senior Priest says:

    The fact that males contribute FAR more to Wikipedia is all about biology, and nothing about anything else.