How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki | Hacker News Reader

How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki

lola-pr.blogspot.com

25 pointscoenhyde18 comments

Leaving aside the sexist subtext that women appreciate beauty more than men...

While Wikifashion is pretty and, that beauty certainly (I'm sure) helps contribute to it's success: Don't you think your high female contributor ratio has more to do with your subject matter being more interesting to women?

She does mention it, and it's probably the most relevant reason, but I think the form factor of the page is also a hughe one.

I wasn't intending for my article to come across as sexist. I merely wanted to point out that certain elements of our design may appeal more to women than wikipedia's.

Ah, re-reading your article, I think I misunderstood your use of "pretty". Where I was reading it to mean "well designed and aesthetically pleasing", retrospectively it seems like you're using it as a catch-all term for "a-look-of-some-kind-that-appeals-to-women"? In which case, I apologize for crying sexist-wolf.

Incidentally; Wikifashion is genius. I'm totally going to score points by showing it to my fashion-obsessed-and-wikipedia-contributing girlfriend tonight.

Apology accepted :) Glad your girlfriend will like it.

Maybe, but there are lots of men in the fashion industry. For example, take a look at the sidebar on this site and see how many of the top fashion designers they list are men.

http://www.top-fashion-designers.info/

So it seems reasonable to assume that her site could pull in more than a few guys, making the mere 7% a bit surprising. I have no explanation to offer for that though, not even a guess.

This is fallacious. There are many reasons why the ratio of men to women in the upper echelons of the fashion industry might not be reflected at the lower levels (men going into the fashion industry need to have more drive, men tend to cluster at the top and bottom of any field while women trend towards the middle, etc.), and in fact it's pretty well known that that is in fact the case.

Absolutely. Though the blog post really wasn't trying to attribute Wikifashion's high female contributor ratio solely to its good looks. It was more about showing that females and wiki's do mix, despite recent debate otherwise.

http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/women-wikipedia/

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-th...

"Leaving aside the sexist subtext that women appreciate beauty more than men..."

It's not about appreciating beauty, it is about having good taste.

Also, to contrast with wikipedia, certain kinds of anti-social behaviour, arguing and power-seeking are not just encouraged, but practically enshrined at wikipedia. Frankly the only surprise is that it isn't even more of a sausage-fest.

Harry Potter fandom is roughly 99% female. Out of several hundred people I knew in the fandom, I can think of 5 (including myself) that were male.

It is not hard to get a heavily biased female contributor ratio...you simply need to talk about things that are of interest to females. Computers and startups, unfortunately, do not seem to be among them.

To be fair, most blokes find talk about computers and startups to be dead boring too.

Disclaimer I'm a co-founder of Wikifashion.

Wikipedia Signpost also had a bit to say about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...

coenhyde of brisbanephp fame?

The one and only :)

Why would you ever want such a skewed and biased ratio? It's not something to be proud of, it's a failure.

Indeed, it's still skewed, but the other way around. The ratios should be around 52%/48% to be representative of.the world population (AFAIK).

I would estimate that the contributors to the Vintage Sewing Pattern wiki Wikia are >95% female, and many of them are older, too.

http://vintagepatterns.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

When it first started, the pages were bare-bones and the UI was not "pretty" in any way, so I don't think it was UI driven; I think it was content-driven. Now there are >35,000 pattern images, with plentiful metadata, including category tagging, and links to reviews and vendors.

aha best line... "ergo Wikipedia you're that really smart nerd in high school that all the cool girls secretly wanted to date but wouldn't dare."

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