When I was a kid, it used to freak me out to hear “established” media sources talk about technology. They always got it wrong: a modem was a radio, hackers stole phone cards, ankhs were symbols of Satanism.
A day or so ago, a report came out pointing out the absolutely obvious: 85% of the contributions to Wikipedia have come from males. Where are the women? they ask. As usual, the stuffed heads get it all wrong.
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.
…
But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women. – NYT
With an obliviousness verging on mental retardation, the established media are somehow missing the obvious: “he average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s” and it appeals to a computerish, nerdy, and socially awkward crowd.
Who — whether on World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, the local Linux fan group, LARPers, videogamers, or even internet forums — makes up this crowd? Mostly young men. Lots of them. The lack of women on Wikipedia is not about gender, or IQ. It’s about how our society produces alienated and isolated young men who detach from the social process.
Even so, Wikipedia’s contributors are a tiny minority among the male population. The Wikipedia volunteer list will I suspect mirror that for most open-source software: underemployed males in entry-level technical jobs, basement-dwelling graduate school dropouts, and people incapacitated by mental or physical health.
Our established media treats Wikipedia as if it were an outpouring of all of humanity, but in reality, it’s not only the product of a lonely group of nerds, but it’s a business instrument of Google, Inc. Google reached a point where it could not refine its search results further to remove crap; language is intensely context-sensitive, so a typed phrase often creates ambiguous results and is open to forgery. Google wanted to ensure that its top link at least returned basic information and a links list, and it couldn’t do that through automation. Instead, Google funded a free public initiative whose goal was to use legions of alienated people to clone existing encyclopedias.
Most of this was done through plagiarism. On any given Google search, you will get a few pages of links in which 2-3 links give you most of what you need to know about the topic. The Wikipedia drones took these, compiled them and changed the wording, and hit publish. They also cloned information from their textbooks, from government sources and from out of print books. The problem got so bad that Wikipedia demanded a source for every cited fact, and constant “is this source notable?” discussions split the community.
Like the Mozilla Foundation, to whom Google is the biggest giver, Wikipedia serves a purpose for Google that Google cannot undertake directly without running afoul of anti-monopoly laws. And like Mozilla, it’s a “people’s project” that is cloning an established product (in Mozilla’s case, the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers). Its volunteers see it as a kind of revolution against the old media and corporate power structure.
When you need to staff such a project, you want unpaid volunteers who are fanatical. That rules out anyone who is happy with their lives. You want people who crave the self-esteem boost of identifying with a revolutionary mob. In effect, you want people who are defined by their need for an identity and an in-group/out-group conflict.
If you have ever dealt with Wikipedians, you will note that they are many things, but “professional” is not one of them. They bicker. They backstab. They engage in lengthy political battles. They don’t mind wasting the time because they plan to do this forever, since it’s what gives their life meaning, not their jobs or lowly social status. They flare up when their dignity is insulted and go ballistic over simple disagreements.
Normally this behavior would cause us to put them in asylums, but since they’re using computers, we assume the computers are to blame. What makes more sense is that this audience self-selects by their opposition to society at large, and as a result of that find computers as a medium where they feel comfortable. No actual interaction, you see, so no criticism for who they are or how disorganized, chaotic and/or pointless their lives are.
How many Wikipedians have gone on to achieve success in areas other than Wikipedia? Your average Wikipedian is drawn to Wikipedia for the same reason that police academies have rigorous psychological screening: damaged people seek power so they feel better about themselves. Wikipedia gives them a chance to look intelligent to their peers. It makes them feel better about the dingy basement piled with books from their last academic failure, or the tech support job.
Let me hazard a guess as to why relatively few women (about 13 percent of the total) contribute to Wikipedia. They are not interested. Wikipedia writing is impersonal and anonymous. It is a solitary activity and women are less solitary than men. – The Thinking Housewife
I believe this explanation makes the most sense: women adapt where men rage. Part of that raging includes dropping out and giving society the finger, joining one Revolution or another, and wasting a decade on liberal ideas of “progress.” This process in turn creates more of the social instability that creates its members, so it grows like a cancer. Wikipedia is merely a subset of this.
Our media insist on treating the internet like a recently-discovered planet. What do the creatures there do? What is the culture? The answers are in front of their noses: the internet is not a culture, anymore than “telephone lines” are a culture. It’s a gathering place. Most of the people who gather there are the ones that life has failed, or who have failed at life.
Wikipedia’s gender balance is not about gender. It’s about who’s out of options, and the pointless activities they chose to compensate for that sorry state.
My eyes! That picture is the stuff of nightmares! Agent Smith needs to reach through that guy’s computer and throttle him!
> “… Mozilla, it’s a “people’s project” that is cloning an established product (in Mozilla’s case, the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers) …”
Methinks you’d best fact check that assertion.
Rex is right. If you knew anything about browsers you would know that Mozilla Firefox usually is way ahead of Internet Explorer, and that Microsoft is the one that is doing its best to clone Firefox.
I suspect it may be inaccurate to ascribe computer usage to “life failure.” Some of it may simply be a result of introverted personalities.
Also, you critique ignores the importance of the info wars in controlling dominant popular narratives, and the emerging centrality of Wikipedia in that struggle.
Hey! I don’t remember giving you permission to use that photograph of me!
But take heart, Brett: All internet “forums” operate like this: Ignore the content, and snipe at asides and details. Most readers are interested only in proving you wrong, and themselves right. It makes them look better, you see? Thus, whatever you say, no matter how you say it, and no matter what it is about, you will almost never be able to actually communicate anything.
I repaired a toaster, this morning, designed to fail, and have its main control melt, shortly after its warranty expired. All of this is quite, quite normal.
Most readers are interested only in proving you wrong, and themselves right.
That is very, very true. The disturbing implication is that they are not that interested in truth, or even a good debate. It’s why I tend to avoid the Wikipedias of the world.
“I believe this explanation makes the most sense: women adapt where men rage.”
Well, that’s always been the case. The point of men has always been to bear the brunt of our development as a species. Men are made to shoot for the stars, with most falling short. Those who are found most fit take up the baton of reproduction, enjoy the women, and (ahem) thrust our species forward toward new eugenic heights.
At least that’s what used to happen. Western Civilization’s enfranchisement of the beta male may have slowed evolutionary progress some, but in so doing it harnessed beta energy toward building civilization itself. Good tradeoff, I’d say.
A traditional society subscribes to exactly the above philosophy. But as Evola would say, these days too many “energies have been released”, both male and female. For the women, long held in check desire to breed with the fittest male possible, as often as possible. And for the disenfranchised betas, the unfortunate necessity to sublimate sexual frustration into edits on Wikipedia:)
“She said her group had persuaded women to express themselves by urging them to shift the focus “away from oneself — ‘do I know enough, am I bragging?’ — and turn the focus outward, thinking about the value of your knowledge.””
i think this is interesting. are they telling women to speak up on issues without worrying about how much they know about them? what does the ‘value’ of one’s knowledge mean when seen as detached from how much one knows?
“Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015,”
“Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said in an interview on Thursday. “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.”
“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.””
she says its not diversity for diversity’s sake but then offers no reason why more female contributors would make wikipedia better.
i think there’s a disparity between viewpoints regarding what it means to make the encyclopedia better. to them i guess making it better means everyone has an equal say, which means the emphasis is not on developing a reliable source of facts.
There you have it, Aamir.
For my part, I am furious that spotty people with pot-bellies are under-represented.
It just seems so…so…um…unfair.
Loved this article. I used to be an editor at the English wiktionary, and I wasted many hours there. When I changed my life, started going out, started seeing girls and so on, suddenly I lost all interest in wiktionary. Just naturally, spontaneously died to it. Most girls are more outgoing and social than guys (unless they’re hideous, they can’t walk outside without meeting people). No wonder none of them have a mind to spend thousands of hours debating the spelling of “aluminum” on talk pages!
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In a few years this entire statistical analysis will be thrown in disarray by new synthetic archetypes. Take a little biotech and nano-tech surgery and the whole system goes south. Statisticians will be gnashing their teeth. Here; have an example when these three sexes enter the fray – http://futanariobsession.com/content/Katherine-futanari-daughters_Dmitrys.jpg
will these sway statistics towards male? Female? Or not all, because they will be too busy fucking to have any discernible effect at all? Inquiring minds want to know….
Well, that certainly was a mean-spirited essay.
I don’t contribute to Wikipedia, but I am glad to have the resource. It’s not my personal cup of tea, but haven’t there always been researchers who research and compile information simply for the sake of the furtherance of knowledge? I think you are failing to acknowledge an idealistic aspect of Wikipedians, whether Google intended it or not. Also, how is an ankh an example of technology?
[...] weirdo creeps are living proof of Brett Stevens’ allegations about the average Wikipedian: Who — whether on World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, the local Linux fan group, LARPers, [...]