But wouldn't that create a "wiki" by professionals for professionals? It's hard to get a significant part of a research community to agree on a long, detailed text with loads of footnotes, so trying to write a concise entry on important topics like obesity, climate change, religious violence, etc., could result in similar endless battles of opinion, only this time between academic schools.

An ideal encyclopedia, IMO, can deal with such fights because the editor-in-chief is a bit of a Renaissance man (man in the sense of person, but the fixed expression is like this), with the authority, diplomatic skill, and good sense to make a final decision, and to reopen a "permanent" article when there is a real change. He/she will probably need a bit of equally minded staff to help with that.

As for other languages: many of the longer articles are factual and have the same relevance in all countries, especially when properly reviewed, so a translation would suffice. The rest, well, might not benefit from this approach, since it would cost quite a similar amount of money to support such a process for languages with a much smaller reach than the main, English wikipedia. Bad luck, I guess.

Yes, that is problematic. But I'm also not interested in contributing, even though my (former) field of 20+ years of academic expertise has a woefully sketchy article. I'm just not up for the endless reverts, the nitpicking, the minute changes. I once tried to start a wiki for a particular type of (computer-based) musicians. I added some skeleton, filled in some articles, inserted some relevant pictures. No-one read it, and one person rewrote a perfectly understandable paragraph into something worse, instead of writing in the vast uncovered space. So, Wikipedia seems to have painted itself in a corner. Editing encyclopedias is not for everyone.

> Yet they are the top search hit when someone Googles the name online.

If you think you've had it all, vanity rears its head. Wikipedia is these people's Echo. Perhaps that myth has a grain of truth in it.

I know women that can write very well. I also know women that can't. If they can achieve Wikipedia's goal, why not? Perhaps some typical men's issues would not be found on Wikipedia. But since the number of men and women participating is so incredibly large, it is unlikely the most significant topics get overlooked, regardless of the gender/ethnicity/nationality/etc. ratio.

I do mind that Wikipedia trumps itself on the large number of articles (like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...), while in reality over 90% of Wikipedia's content is garbage. Here is a list of 10 random articles, obtained by hitting "random article" 10 times in a row, no editing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...

Is that a pathetic list or what? Three football players, two geographical units of no interest with the shortest description possible, an article about a local school and a local museum, and an obscure artist. The only interesting items are possibly the glacier (but almost no information), and Oscar Romero. There are hundreds, if not thousands of entries in Wikipedia about characters in Star Trek and Star Wars.

Anyone who can clean up that mess is good for me.

That's fine, but nobody knows what the barrier is. If the barrier is time, how is Wikipedia going to remove that? The data there is, is of very limited value. It's all based on some badly organized, voluntary questionnaire. You can't make good analyses and decisions based on that. The rest of the article is socio-blabla, without as much as a shady questionnaire to back it up. If Wikipedia can't even organize its relations with the current volunteers without every argument ending in a fight, how is it ever going to attract women, who are apparently not deeply committed in the first place?

I don't get the "surely". I don't see how adding female editors (and all the other genders, of course) would improve wikipedia. More editors usually means more bickering. As far as I'm concerned, a much larger problem is that many of the editors have only limited knowledge of the topics, and quite a few have hidden agendas. What's next: the number of homosexual editors? Black editors (I can't write African-American, since Wikipedia is international)? Instead of focusing on PR problems, Wikipedia should focus on objectivity, correctness and completeness.

That example about categorization could also have been done by a woman. I mean, why put them in the category "American novelists", and not in "novelists"? Or "men"? Or "people who happen to write"? There are so many mistakes to make, and this one is, objectively, not even an error. Just a preference.

But that there are Wikipedia cliques is a problem of the people who edit, not of gender bias. I remember a vehement wiki-fight over removing information about female anti-feminists points of view.

While I can see the merit of action in classical gender gap examples, I too agree this goes to far. Imagine demanding a quotum on Pinterest: no more women allowed until the balance is 50-50. That would be insane. Now, I know that Wikipedia has a higher standing and is consulted as authoritative, so it will be deemed more important, but Wikipedia is about providing correct information, which is unrelated to gender distribution.

I don't get it either, unless it's about money, somehow.

You would almost think that there was a relation between Google paying Mozilla large amounts of money and Google's desire to get as much information from users as they possibly can.

Sure, but for one, the abstract of the article is a whopping 3 sentences, of which the second one is dedicated to socialism as the single source of the effect. Another thing is that a study that is set up like this, cannot distinguish between all potentially contributing factors. And the effect itself isn't really big, and present for both West and East Germany. Bad, bad study. Doesn't deserve to publicity.

Spot on.

Researcher ask two groups, that they know to be different beforehand, a question, and then are surprised to get different answers? Really? If it had gone the other way around, they would have had simply reversed the explanation. And this study has so many potential confounds, like poverty, or even geological distribution, that it's hard to describe the level of ignorance of researchers that contribute this effect in their abstract to "exposure to socialism". Last week there was something about children from religious groups vs. children from non-religious groups, and the message that gets picked up is: religious children are more superstitious, and this week it is: socialism makes people dishonest, etc., while in reality no such conclusion can be drawn. Seriously? F* this kind of research.

Yup, you're completely right. Who in the hell is going to look at what individuals do? That only makes sense if you want to paint them black. And the study is, as pointed out above, a very lousy questionnaire and it even shows a (weak) trend that those who might care indeed lower their energy consumption. And then some conservative, who is "Vice Chairman and Senior Independent Non-Executive Director of Tethys Petroleum" (wikipedia), can decry hypocrisy?

When are people going to stop paying attention to these clowns? How are they going to launch in 4 years without having working prototypes right now, nor a lot of money? Or are they going to sell 100M mugs in the coming months?

The article itself is nothing but a few selected quotes from Amazon's press release. You can call that factual, but I bet it hasn't even been fact-checked.

Memories decay, but not on recall.