[WikiEN-l] An observation

Thu Nov 9 17:07:12 UTC 2006

On 11/9/06, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> --- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > geni wrote:
> >
> > > Since when did we care about gender on wikipedia?
> >
> > Since we started using personal pronouns, whenever that was. I wasn't
> > around then, but I suspect it was fairly early on.
>
> Granted, we are sometimes -- but only sometimes -- aware of another editor's
> gender on Wikipedia, but does it make a big difference? Do I know (say)
> [[User:SpLoT]]'s gender? Should I care? If I did, would it make much difference
> to how I would interact with that person? For me, the answer is "no".
> Admittedly I don't edit articles like [[feminism]], but my experience is that
> Wikipedia is a place where gender is relatively unimportant. Maybe your
> experience is different.

It *is* relatively unimportant, I think; certainly it doesn't come up
on a regular basis in arbcom or elsewhere. But it's just an
interesting observation. Certainly, to echo Charles' point a bit, all
other things being equal I'd rather see sane, reasonable people from
many different perspectives than from all the same one, and gender is
one of the most obvious differences (when the user chooses to tell!).

Perhaps most women are simply smart enough to avoid putting themselves
up for a crappy job. ;-)

-Kat
whose college quiz bowl nickname, as president, was "token chick"

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