- Wikipedia, your gender bias is showing – Eesh, not a new topic but a whole new depressing format to view it in.
- Hypermasculinity & dickwolves: The contentious role of women in the new gaming public – Open access journal article on an important topic and with the greatest title ever.
- Mars Curiosity descent in HD – Interpolated from the original 4 frames per second to 30 frames per second. Ooooh, pretty.
- Crowdsourcing science – The research will focus on where amphetamines go within brain cells.
- Cute Animal Friday! Collective Soul cat made me lol, from nowoo. 30 renowned authors inspired by cats. And to round out the cat theme, snow leopard cubs.
So, the results of the wikipedia gender thing are not at all shocking. But still, how exactly do they find out the gender of editors?
I loooove snow leopards.
A little trivia: the latest genetic work is showing they aren’t leopards. They’re more closely related to tigers.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/
This is the Dickwolves comic mentioned in the article for anyone who was interested.
Yea. There should be links in the article to each of the comics mentioned. We were forced to take the actual images out by the publishing house because we didn’t have explicit consent to use copyrighted works…. despite being obvious fair use. *grumbles*
Since there’s literally zero barrier or risk to being an anonymous wikipedia editor, and 99% of wikipedia editors don’t disclose their gender outside of anonymous surveys like this (so it’d be impossible to mistreat them on account of their gender), the problem is primarily self-selection and the snowball effect from having better articles on topics that appeal to men. Whatever else Wikipedia is doing wrong can’t have had much of an impact in that kind of environment.
As to the proposed solution, there’s already a general rule against posting one’s own opinions on controversial articles’ comment sections as opposed to posting in a constructive way towards improving the article, but enforcing it is not practicable.
There is also a rule against personal attacks and it’s pretty well enforced. It’s also hardly relevant to the gender disparity since the vast majority of Wikipedia editors don’t disclose their gender.
It’s more complicated than that. I’ve told this story before (maybe not on here), but I am heavily into gaming, and specifically romance videogames (primarily in Japanese) targeted to women, which has its own genre name. I contributed and added to an article on this niche, and was repeatedly suggested for ‘merging’ into a larger, more generic genre article which, surprise surprise, took away the focus on being targeted to women, and a lot of the info which came along with that. That was pretty much my only major contribution to Wikipedia, as that alienated me. And frankly, it can be a lot of work for no payback or recognition, and as a woman I do enough of that already.
I know I’m not the only one who’s experienced this type of thing. It’s not as simple as you say.
Speaking of cats… Michael Clarke Duncan also loved cats. He had 6 or 7 of them.
Watch him freak out when Craig Ferguson mentions cats:
http://youtu.be/6ISasEcFeAc
lol. <3