Yes. I've been working on researching the gender gap on a different site,
with a similar imbalance but is also considered an information knowledge
site. In researching that, this stood out for me in Wikipedia research:
The issue of knowledge creation as it relates to perception of Internet
self-efficacy can be seen when it comes to gender differences in Wikipedia
contributions low-skilled Internet users. Here, Wikipedia’s well known and
documented gender gap largely disappears (Hargittaia & Shaw, 2015) Another
piece that has stood out: Efforts at trying to reduce English Wikipedia’s
gender gap have largely been unsuccessful (Lannon, 2014; Lam, et al., 2011).
Hargittaia, E., & Shaw, A. (2015). Mind the skills gap: the role of
Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to
Wikipedia. *Information,
Communication & Society, 18*(4), 424-442. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.957711
Lam, S. K., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., & Terveen, L.
(2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance. *WikiSym
2011.* Mountain View, CA: ACM.
Lannon, E. J. (2014). *Same gap, different experience: An Exploration of
the Similarities and Differences Between the Gender Gap in the Indian
Wikipedia Editor Community and the Gap in the General Editor Community.*
University of Toronto at Scarborough, International Development Studies.
Scarborough: University of Toronto at Scarborough.
>From my own research: Men and women are equally likely to include links to
sources in their answers. One key difference in citing sources in answers
is that men are much more likely to link to Wikipedia than women. Men link
to Wikipedia around 20% of the time when they provide a link. This
contrasts with women who link to Wikipedia only around 9.8% of the time. This
stands in contrast to Wikipedia usage as readers, with Alexa data
suggesting women read Wikipedia more than men. Women may read it, but they
aren’t sourcing it on Quora. Instead, they tend to chose links that
Wikipedia would classify as primary source.
There is also a whole potentially interesting discussion on the role of
technological determinism and its impact on WMF solutions. I wrote the
following for a paper but I've scrapped it as it didn't fit with the
direction I am now going:
One of the major touchstones of the past five years online on
the issue of unequal treatment of women and content about them has been
English Wikipedia, and its gender gap with regards to participation and
content of women. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs
Wikipedia, led by Sue Gardner made a major push to address this issue
largely through attempts to simplify the editing experience. They
perceived the major hurdle to female participation, and subsequent women
writing about women, as technological and invested money in trying to
improve this through simplifying the interface and creating spaces to teach
women about the technology to remove the technological barrier. Their
narrative to address the issue of women’s involvement on English Wikipedia
fit into one of the earlier liberal feminist critiques of the Internet in
that technology was inherently biased against women because of
technological determinism. Their technology solutions found little
success. As Sue Gardner transitioned out of her role as the Executive
Director and new Executive Director Lila Tretikov came in, the Wikimedia
Foundation moved away from an technological determinist approach to fixing
the gender gap, minimized the importance of addressing the gender gap
across projects, and diverted the few resources institutionally allocated
for this towards community based cultural and technological approaches.
For English Wikipedia, addressing the gender gap through technological
determinism appeared to be a failed cause in that solutions to address this
did not fundamentally work.
One of the largest collaborative knowledge sharing sites outside
of Wikipedia is Quora, which has a gender gap that has been discussed by
several technology news sites and internally on the project. One of the
major differences between Quora and Wikipedia is that the issue of
technological determinism, which is technology serving as an impediment to
female participation, does not exist because of the simplicity of its
interface.
Rather than accepting a narrative of technological determinism
that views technology as intrinsically masculine and catering to male
behaviours, technologies and social media should be critically examined
“for how they reward or discourage patterns of behavior that adhere to
predominant notions of gender.” (Marwick, 2013) This is “Because
contemporary social media is embedded within daily life,” and “it draws
from the same dynamics present in day-to-day interaction.” (Marwick,
2013) Still, technology remains “gender inauthentic” for women because of
these cultural norms as women are asked to give up their personal
definitions of feminine in order to participate (Faulkner, 2000b; Wajcman
J. , TechnoFeminism, 2004; Turkle, 1988; Kitzinger, Haran, Chimba, & &
Boyce, 2008).
On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 7:37 AM, Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]> wrote:
> Outside the widely popular percentage of female editors on Wikipedia/WMF
> projects in general, and the percentage of Wikipedia biographical articles
> about females, is there anything else that has been used in literature /
> existing studies that you'd consider worth mentioning?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Piotr Konieczny, PhD
> http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
>
>
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