Intro to Understanding Wikipedia’s Gender Gap: 11/13/17 Week 13

Intro to Understanding Wikipedia’s Gender Gap

By: Jacob Chan
Image: Wikimedia Commons


For this week’s iteration, the beginning of the week covered an interesting topic: the wikipedia gender gap. At first I  had no knowledge of what or where this was going but after further research and reading I learned more about it. Long story short, it refers to is the lack of female editors in Wikipedia, however the bigger picture is something to take note of. Wikipedia in itself is a method in which a large encyclopedia can be edited by anyone and is not controlled by one sole entity. It can be described as a playground of sorts where anyone can lay check and balance on information placed on the popular search website. This in theory is an ideal means of keeping up to date information on the website which keeps its relevance and fills the demand for current information on nearly anything. Where the theory comes to a grinding halt is that the public check and balance system does not account for gender. In fact the reading material pointed out that less than 10% of Wikipedia editors identified as women and 1% identified as transgender, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. This is important when considering that there are many ideological biases that are due to gender.There have been many movements to fill in the gender gap including: Art+Feminism Project and Wikipedia “Edit-a-thons”. Not many people understand the importance of this type of study especially because it is a relatively new one and covers new concepts in public digital spaces and culture.

Class Reading/Source:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 17, 2017 at 9:37 PM

    Often times I question the reliability of Wikipedia but you did mention an excellent point that due to Wikipedia’s many contributors, it is constantly reviewed and edited to ensure that the material provided is accurate and reliable. Anyone has the ability to fix the information provided, so if it is incorrect it is easier to ensure that the information is fixed by allowing multiple parties to constantly update it. After reading your post, I was able to think of Wikipedia from a different viewpoint and I will keep this in mind when I question the reliability of Wikipedia in the future.

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