A Culture of Editing Wars

It’s worth distinguishing between two different kinds of gender imbalance in Wikipedia. One is the relative length of articles and the number of articles that concern “women’s interests” (the Times article cites friendship bracelets and “Sex and the City”) vs. articles that concern “men’s interests” ("The Simpsons" and Grand Theft Auto). The second is the number of women who contribute vs. men who contribute overall.

I believe we might find different reasons for the two different kinds of imbalance. But first we might ask, why should we care at all — do we want women to contribute to Wikipedia because for diversity’s sake alone?

We care because this gender imbalance raises the possibility that “citizen-generated media” are not actually generated by all citizens, and that the democracy that Wikipedia aspires to may in fact ignore the voices of 50 percent of the population. This is indeed something to worry about.

It’s not worrisome because women should spend their time contributing to an online encyclopedia (as one mother told me when I was researching girls’ use of videogames, “what could possibly be wrong with the fact that my daughter is spending her time with real people rather than computer game characters?”). It’s worrisome because Wikipedia is ever more powerful as the canon, the go-to source of “knowledge.” And if women aren’t contributing, then that putatively exhaustive body of knowledge is only reflecting the knowledge of some of our citizens (and I’m guessing that gender is not the only demographic that is imbalanced in Wikipedia).

As for the source of the gender imbalance, I think it may be revealed if we compare what Wikipedia looks like from the outside vs. what it looks like to a contributor. To those of us who don’t spend time contributing, it does indeed look like Wikipedia is a democracy of knowledge — a place where all we know is gathered together and made available to all of us equally. Who wouldn’t want to be involved in such a lofty enterprise?

From the inside, on the other hand, Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased.

Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.

There is, therefore, a certain disparity between the public goals of Wikipedia — to make all knowledge available to all people through a social and collaborative process of knowledge construction -- and the private practices of Wikipedia, where one truth may have to be defended against opposing points of view, and one’s words may need to be protected against others who seek to wipe them out.

This is the backdrop for any discussion of why there might be fewer female contributors on Wikipedia, and what to do about it. I hope that in 2011 I don’t need to defend the fact that women know as much as men do, can express themselves as clearly, and have just as much ability to work collaboratively to construct bodies of knowledge. It is also clear that women can defend their point of view as well as men can. And certainly many women are contentious, fond of debate, and happy to put forward and defend their own points of view.

However, it is still the case in American society that debate, contention, and vigorous defense of one’s position is often still seen as a male stance, and women’s use of these speech styles can call forth negative evaluations. Women may be negatively judged for speaking their mind in clear ways and defending their position. A woman who wishes to collaboratively construct knowledge and share it with others might not choose to do so as part of a forum where engaging in debate and deleting others’ words is key.

A woman who wishes to share what she knows with others may not want bitter altercation and successive edit wars. Even Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikipedia Foundation, seems reticent about defending her perspective on gender in Wikipedia. As she says in the Times article: “Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it. I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”