Yeah, you don't get paid for it. But work is done there, and isn't the fact that you don't get paid for it all the more reason why it should be rewarding? People don't volunteer if the working climate isn't in some way satisfying.

Don't you think any workplace works better if people enjoy working with each other? We're both men, but I think neither of us would enjoy working somewhere where we don't get on with people, and probably would enjoy working somewhere where we feel we're doing good and worthwhile work together with people who appreciate what we're doing, and whose work we in turn respect. Surely, Wikipedia should ultimately be no different if it's to produce the best work it can.

The Wikimedia Foundation has long taken the view that having a volunteer community in which women are so underrepresented leads to content that is less stellar than it could be. A recent Guardian editorial commented,

So there are quite practical considerations underlying this which have little to do with social justice concerns. Greater diversity makes for better content in some areas. Hence the head scratching on the part of the Foundation about what it is that makes women stay away, and how to balance things out more.

That's pretty much it; there are more fun things to do. If Wikipedia is serious about involving more female contributors, it needs more opportunities for constructive, emotionally rewarding collaboration. I've seen it work quite well sometimes in the Featured Articles process, where people work together to get an article to top quality level, and edit-a-thons seem to strike a chord, but at present those are exceptions to the rule.

I think this is true, but then the problem is that Wikipedia offers insufficient opportunities for women to engage in their preferred mode of operation. There are some such opportunities, of course, and women are indeed well represented there: Wikipedia's Featured Article process, for example, was for many years run by a woman (SandyGeorgia), and my impression is that women have been more active in that effort (which produces Wikipedia's "gold star" articles) than elsewhere, partly because the process of reviewing Featured Article candidates and polishing them and bringing them up to scratch is a team effort, with a joint achievement at the end of it.

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.