Poetlister wrote:Is there any evidence that having a higher proportion of female editors would lead to more articles about women? Or is that just a sexist assumption by the WiR?
If you don't know, why are you even asking? Other than to fire up the hordes?
The answer is yes, of course. Research has shown the gap affects not just the number of articles in general, but also the topics covered and even the language used in them and how they are interlinked.
Lam, Shyong K.; Uduwage, Anuradha; Dong, Zhenhua; Sen, Shilad; Musicant, David R.; Terveen, Loren; Riedl, John. “
WP: clubhouse? an exploration of Wikipedia’s gender imbalance.” Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. New York: ACM, 2011. 1-10.
Note the date.
2011.
Wagner, Claudia & Garcia, David & Jadidi, Mohsen & Strohmaier, Markus. (2015).
It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Notably, the Wikipedia Gender Gap Task Force set up to address all these issues, wasn't created until May 2013, and of course by the end of 2014 it had been destroyed after the relentless attacks of the troglodytes who were absolutely insistent that either the editor gender gap was just a myth being spread by SJWs, presumably because there are millions of editors unwilling to identify as female even in anonymised surveys, or that it exists but it has no impact on the quality of Wikipedia, because of course, men are not sexist, especially those screaming in women's faces about how they have lots of women friends, even on Wikipedia. It was obvious horseshit, but the male dominated ArbCom of course decided to ignore the trollery, banning trogs and the feminists they had provoked in equal measure.
Oh sure, they put the whole topic of gender disparity among Wikipedians and Wikipedia articles under Discretionary Sanctions, but this was pointless then and it has continued to be useless now, as trog after trog has said the most inflammatory things in the wake of FRAMBAN, and unsurprisingly the Wikipedia Administration sees no problem, because the number of actual bona fide feminists in their ranks is trivially small. As the research would predict would be the case in such an hostile environment where feminist issues are dismissed as mythological and Administrators are elected by the community.
You can draw a direct line between the flame wars that surrounded the GGTF, and the ones that have surrounded FRAMBAN. The harassment of anyone who dares suggest Wikipedia, or rather the Wikipedians, has a sexism problem. Indeed, some of the exact same Wikipedians are involved this time around. Others with different names but playing the same tunes are undoubtedly merely returning sock-puppets of some of the men banned in 2014.
About the best that research has to say about Wikipedia is that by the time of that 2015 study, the ratio of male to female biographies broadly reflected the inherent bias of Wikipedia's notability standard, since obviously for every historically notable women, there are a ton of men. Predictably, efforts to change that standard in a systemic way have been resisted by the trogs, hence the switch in strategy of WiR to achieve it through fait accompli. You can't blame them.
Anyway, given their historical position, and their enthusiasm for the chase in FRAMBAN, it is hardly surprising to see Wikipediocracy is still skeptical about the entire sexist or indeed misogynistic foundation of this ongoing culture war on the wiki, still happy to see it as a SJW plot, with people like Fram seen as the real victims. Never has been a place where feminists felt safe and included. Troglodyte women like The Adversary (and perhaps Eagle?) are of course perfectly at home.
Isn't that right Jake? Go on now, say some shit about how I'm a sexist...... I'm listening.