[WikiEN-l] An observation

Sun Nov 12 19:21:41 UTC 2006

On 11/8/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/8/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > We have, so far, twenty announced candidates for next month's
> > Arbitration Committee election. To the best of my knowledge, none of
> > them is female.
> >
> > In previous elections, we also had very few female candidates, yet one
> > of them finished either first or second in each of the last two
> > elections. I'm sure we have some female contributors who would be
> > well-qualified and bring a valuable perspective to the arbitration
> > process, and I would encourage them to consider running.
> >
> > --Michael Snow
>
> Since when did we care about gender on wikipedia?

Since when is gender equality a bad thing on wikipedia? Or for that
matter, having many different perspectives?

If there is an overwhelming amount of males over females it usually
signifies something bad (with a few exceptions, like say professional
wrestling). We have a host of brilliant female editors but apparently
not many of them are running for arbcom. This is a very, very bad
thing. We should encourage gender equality whenever we can, just
saying "We are wikipedia, here gender doesn't matter" is naive. There
is obviously a problem here and we should work to fix it. We don't
want to be a boys-club.

--Oskar