Tag Archives: gender

Women of the Internet, start your editing engines. If it’s one thing we’ve learned recently from go-to Web info source Wikipedia, it’s that what the user-edited encyclopedia could use more of is you.

Researcher Santiago Oritz has developed Wikipedia Gender, “an interactive visualization that shows which articles have more male or female editors”. The graph matrix runs the spectrum of user ratio against female-to-male, with scrollover dots and a color key that help identify specific subjects. Two things immediately become clear: First, that the number of male editors far outweighs female editors (as reported by the New York Times earlier this year, women make up just 13% of total contributors). Two, that, apparently, the only subjects where the ratio almost levels out are on drastically female-body-oriented subjects like menstruation, or, for reasons that could perhaps merit their own article, gender identity. In fact, of the 3,000 articles analyzed by Ortiz, the only article that has a female majority is the one for the Cloth Menstrual Pad. Understandable, but….yikes. Read more …