Puppy wrote:
Gender bias is not my soapbox; this thread was not
started by me, I have
merely provided some anecdotal and statistical information. I believe we
are currently in the examining and discussing phase rather than the
solutions segment. I see as a more fundamental issue that women are less
well represented in the editing pool, and wonder why that might be. If
the editing pool were less unbalanced, perhaps our article coverage
would be also.
If you're not sure that WP has systemic bias wrt gender, why
would you
believe that more women editors will make a difference? I'm not being
flip here - so far we've had the general attitude that credentials are
secondary, that a college student can follow the same rules and get the
same treatment as a Nobel laureate. Now I'm in the camp that wants more
subject-matter experts in WP, but I have a very pragmatic reason - my
observation is that experts usually write much better and faster on
their subject than amateurs, and so it's just a more efficient way to
grow the encyclopedia; an expert can put together a feature-quality
article in a couple sittings, while the mass of amateurs takes months to
get to the same place (of course there are plenty of exceptions). The
hazard of asserting that women editors have something similarly
distinctive to bring to WP, by virtue of gender alone, is that one is
playing right into the stereotype of "women's topics" or "female
viewpoints", and risks creating a sort of "pink collar" ghetto in WP
that new female editors would be subtly (or not-so-subtly) steered towards.
Then again, perhaps the women who are interested in
editing Wikipedia are less interested in "women's topics" than in other
subjects.
That's certainly been my experience. Often I'm surprised to
discover
that the gender of an editor is the opposite of what I had surmised
based on choice of topics and editing style (so much for stereotypes!).
Of course, short of a medical exam, results to be mailed to the
Foundation, I'm not sure how one proves gender of an editor anyway... :-)
I do note that [[Can opener]] is a stub, but look at
[[P-38
can opener]], the military can opener. Not a great article but longer
than the parent article. Of course, any Pokemon character article would
blow both of these away.
The ironic thing is that female editors (often teen-aged) are huge
contributors to Pokemon articles. Would they become interested in [[can
opener]] all of a sudden? Seems implausible to me - people are
interested in what they're interested in.
Stan