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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

>Seems strange to pretend that there is no barrier to entry to contributing a page to an encyclopedia.

No, there actually is no barrier to entry. You can go to any page right now, click "edit", and are greeted with a WYSIWYG editor. No programming or markup knowledge required. No registration needed either.

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As discussed further up the thread (and as per the point of the article) the barriers to entry aren't technical but social.

An example not mentioned in the article (it's kind of tangential wrt the problems of wikipedias community) but worth noting; women are still disproportionally more likely undertake caring responsibilities outside of work and so may not have as much time as men to create and edit wikipedia pages.

The barrier to entry is the effort required to create a good and truthfull page.

Because people with two x chromosomes aren't capable of that?

There are many more biographies of males than of females on Wikipedia. Whatever the reason for that might be is up to debate.

Is this good or bad? Maybe because (assumption here) there are more "relevant" males throughout history?

It is not good or bad, it is what it is. Unless biographies of females are actively being suppressed, it is simply irrelevant: they are not being created because nobody cares, literally.

It's actually not that high. In the anecdote, the little page I created had two sources with citation formatting messed up and two paragraphs of text. A week later, bots had cleaned up the citation, another bot had added an infobox, and someone had added all the "Retrieved at" dates to the citations. I did so little.

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