I do think paid crowdsourcing is the future. All the talk about "sharing" is hypocritical spin, given that Google and other scrapers are using Wikipedia content to make money from ads, while unpaid volunteers do all the work. See Wall Street's internet darlings require an endless supply of idiots – Sharing Economy? Mug Economy, more like.

In terms of social development, the internet currently compares to the darkest age of the industrial revolution. So, more power to you.

Many academics have said the same thing to me. No desire, and not enough time, to argue endlessly with nincompoops. There is currently an initiative underway, focused on medical articles, to get funding for experts to peer-review Wikipedia articles. Once an article is up to scratch, there would then be a permanent link to the peer-reviewed version displayed on the article page. This might be a more promising approach, and it could scale to other topic areas as well. Experts would (1) be paid, (2) have the guarantee that their work will have some permanence, (3) derive a degree of kudos from their having been appointed to do this work. Funding would, in this case, come from charities interested in making reliable medical info available online. Currently, for example, there is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at Cancer Research UK, who is working with CRUK experts on Wikipedia's articles on cancer. The position is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Quite. I think the whole discussion about what turns women off once they're there addresses only the smaller half of the problem. The main question is, why don't women come to begin with.

If you take things on people's say-so, you end up with this. Reliability is bad as it is – looking at an article, you can never be sure, without checking the references, whether it is a bunch of nonsense or a well-researched, accurate article. But if you allow everyone – well-intentioned, knowledgeable people like yourself as well as pranksters and hoaxers – to add stuff without citations, the site would quickly be corrupted altogether. No one can tell if you are sincere or making stuff up out of whole cloth.

Kozierok's First Law: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."

Yup. And of course, you are looking at the English Wikipedia, which is the most-developed language version of Wikipedia. Yet Wikipedia claims to be available in over 280 languages, when in many of them, coverage is really, really rudimentary. See e.g. the "Mind the zombies" slide from a recent Wikimania presentation – basically, only 125 language versions of Wikipedia have more than 5 editors. The others are, to all intents and purposes, dead.

Note also that even English Wikipedia contributor numbers (as opposed to reader numbers, which are immense) are really quite small. (Someone else has pointed this out above.) If you look at this table, you'll see that there are only about 3,000 regular editors in the English Wikipedia, i.e. people who make more than 100 edits a month (i.e. about three a day). That number has shrunk considerably over the past few years, from a March 2007 high of 4785. At the same time, of course, the number of articles continues to increase constantly (now at 4.6 million). There are fewer contributors, and more articles to be watched over.

So Wikipedia has many articles that it does not have the (wo)manpower to curate adequately. In the early days, of course, everyone thought that "eventually" all these articles that someone started would become little masterpieces, but it's becoming clear that this will not happen. Little-watched biographies in particular are a problem, as the only people interested in them are usually the subjects and/or people who hate them for some reason, so they turn either into puff-pieces or hatchet jobs, with no one really noticing (there are well over half a million articles that no one has on their watchlist). Yet they are the top search hit when someone Googles the name online.

This reminds me of Newslines.org, a news-based crowdsourcing project that overlaps to a certain extent with Wikipedia, with the difference that they *do* pay their contributors. They report that their gender split is reversed: they have more women contributors than men, and also have more contributors from ethnic minorities than Wikipedia (in fact, their two leading contributors are black women).

The comparison is relevant in response to the argument that women simply don't have time to spend online and edit Wikipedia. They clearly do have time to spend online, but are spending it elsewhere.

Yes indeed. Well done for pointing it out. While Wikipedia is a top-ten website, the vast majority of people using it never edit it. With men, it's a minuscule proportion, and with women an even more minuscule proportion. Still, the disparity has an effect on the content.

If you don't get the "surely", imagine an encyclopedia where 90% of the writers were women. Do you think it would be as good as an encyclopedia could be?

Incidentally, since you mention it, gays are well represented on Wikipedia, I think. African-Americans on the other hand are poorly represented, and you can tell from some of the content in related topic areas. The hair straightener hoax described here for example probably wouldn't have succeeded if there weren't a dearth of Black editors.

We're not talking about any occupation or hobby, but about the web's primary reference site. No one has a problem if football or knitting forums have an unequal gender balance, but Wikipedia's coverage ends up lopsided if one half of humanity is barely there.

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.