Do you include Sue Gardner in this? Because it was Gardner, as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, who was most active and vocal about the gender gap. I don't think there is a person on the Wikimedia Foundation board, male or female, who is happy with the current gender stats. This is not something brought to Wikipedia from the outside.

> Imagine demanding a quotum on Pinterest: no more women allowed until the balance is 50-50.

It's perfectly fine and natural to have male and female-dominated sites online. This is not about social justice; the question with respect to Wikipedia is, rather, whether the world is getting the best possible encyclopedia if it is written and edited by a community that is 90% male. The answer to that question is, surely, "No".

The Wikimedia Foundation and numerous commentators in the press disagree. See for example this recent Guardian editorial, or recall last year's controversy about the categorisation of women novelists in Wikipedia. It does affect how information is presented, and what information is presented.

That is the reason why the Wikimedia Foundation has been making such a song and dance about Wikipedia's gender gap.

Wikipedia's male demographics are extremely skewed, too, with a far higher proportion of men on the autism spectrum than in the general population.

Anonymity is a two-edged sword. If you look at the academic text quoted in the article, it appears that women (compared to men) value anonymity more to the extent that it prevents harassment, and dislike it more (compared to men) because their online choices indicate that they prefer to have meaningful relationships, which anonymity makes more difficult. In a hierarchy of needs, the first is merely a matter of self-preservation, whereas the second is an actual motivator that drives choices of engagement.

I think it's true that women enjoy working as part of a team, where there is a feedback loop. One area where women do disproportionately well in Wikipedia, I think, relative to their numbers, is the Featured Articles process which brings articles up to Wikipedia's highest quality standard (there are a few thousand such articles, identified by a gold star). This is usually constructive team work, and women do enjoy it. You also get teams of two or three women collaborating to bring an article up to FA standard, and the results of such collaborations can be outstanding. This is probably the sort of thing Wikipedia needs to encourage more.

I don't agree that women's thought process is "me me me" vs. men's "this this this". If you look at Pinterest for example, it's all "this this this". What is true is that women do enjoy a real social component to the work, rather than just an imagined one.

Not quite. It was the Wikimedia Foundation that created and implemented Superprotect, to prevent changes from volunteers admins of the German-language Wikipedia.

It's partly the fault of people who shout from the rooftops that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica. Some even crow it's more accurate than Britannica. It simply isn't. Certainly the English Wikipedia isn't.

There is no way Britannica would have had the name of some Californian student as the founder of the Independent, or told a million readers for a year that the average winter temperature in Greenland and Antarctica is between –2 and +4 C ... or had a racist slur ("sand monkeys") as the purported name of an Arab football team.

Yes, errors have always existed. Britannica has errors. But Wikipedia has errors (and probably rather more of those than Britannica, given contributors' qualifications) AND hoaxes AND propaganda from fringe groups on top of that. Yet there are millions of people who buy the hype that it's as good as Britannica, a hype that is aided even by journalists of supposedly responsible newspapers.

It is a tempest in a teapot in one way: but if you have about 90% of volunteer Wikipedia admins on a collision course with the Wikimedia Foundation, it's more than that, given how many people rely on Wikipedia to some extent. Wikipedia is a top-ten website. If administrators leave or go on strike, content curation will degrade even further.

Indeed. The one thing that Wikimedia needs is a competitor. The present de-facto monopoly is a very unhealthy situation, especially given that Google aims to rely more and more on Wikipedia and Wikidata, pulling some of that information onto their own pages (to populate the Knowledge Graph, the information panel in the top right of search results pages). Of course, by doing so, Google is also cannibalising Wikipedia to some extent, as anyone who just wants to check a birth year e.g. now doesn't have to go to Wikipedia at all. Google will already display that information, pulled out of Wikipedia, on the search results page. And of course, Google has ads ... much is always made of the fact that Wikipedia doesn't have ads, but in practice, you will see more and more re-users of Wikipedia making money from it. The Wikipedia licence has always allowed commercial re-use. The losers in this really are the volunteers: their work is used to line other people's pockets.

Perhaps there will be a move at some point towards crowdsourcing sites like http://newslines.org/ which pay their contributors. Newslines is still in its infancy, and it's hard to tell to what extent it might take off, but interestingly, the site has no gender gap, and is not dominated by young white males: their two most prolific contributors to date are two black women. There is a large overlap between what they want to do, and what Wikipedia is doing, given that a lot of Wikipedia content these days is news-based.

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

The title of the petition is: Petitioning Lila Tretikov. Remove new "superprotect" status; and permit Wikipedia communities to enact (current) software decisions uninhibited.

Alternatively, people who have a Wikipedia or Wikimedia account can sign here on Meta. (Only sign in one of these places.)

A change.org petition has been started, asking the Wikimedia Foundation to remove superprotection. Sign here: http://www.change.org/p/lila-t...