Ryan wrote again:
It may not be statistically meaningful, but the results are certainly
valuable to discussion. The idea that "women have better things to do", i.e.
don't think contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, is a new one for me. Since I
consider editing Wikipedia to be one of the most valuable ways I can possibly
spend my time (more so than raising children or curing cancer), this idea had
never occurred to me. Is it possible that men are more indoctrinated to value
knowledge, information, epistemology, etc. and thus see Wikipedia as inherently
more important than women do? I'm not saying this is the case—indeed, it seems
like too easy a scapegoat—I'm just wondering if it's a valid hypothesis.
Perhaps someone should conduct a survey asking "How valuable do you consider
Wikipedia?" and correlate this with the respondent's gender. This also seems to
relate to empathizing–systemizing theory,[1] which controversially suggests
that men (whether due to social or biological factors) prefer systemizing over
empathizing, while women tend towards the opposite. It may also relate to the
fact that men are much more likely than women to be diagnosed with autism and
Asperger syndrome, although no one is sure why. These are just hypotheses,
however, and we shouldn't jump to any conclusions. I do think, however, that we
should incorporate this idea into future research and see if there are any
significant results.
I comment:
I do recall someone (a woman, don't remember who) observing in the halcyon
days of blogging that while most women blogged about their personal lives, men
blogged about anything but (again in line with frequent clinical and
non-clinical observations about gender differences in preferred topics of
conversation*).
I suspect that has an effect on an Internet user's desire to edit Wikipedia
... adding information about baseball statistics, medieval Turkish sultans or
reporting and blocking vandals falls far more readily under "anything but".
Daniel Case
*I really ought to post those excerpts from You Just Don't Understand that
I've been meaning to.
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