WIKIPEDIA - The Perceived Gender Gap

IMHO this is not the fault of the Wikipedia organization, it is women not being interested enough to participate in editing articles which is time consuming.

"‘Wikipedian’ editor took on website’s gender gap" PBS NewsHour 5/18/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Wikipedia has come under scrutiny over a lack of female representation and participation on the website.  To combat this trend, Adrianne Wadewitz was a dedicated "Wikipedian," who wrote and edited content on Wikipedia as one of the nearly 75,000 active volunteer editors.

TRACY WHOLF (NewsHour):  Rebecca Morris is a prominent, contemporary American artist.  With a career spanning the last 20 years, her paintings can be viewed in galleries and museums around the globe including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Goetz collection in Munich, Germany.

And if you google her, immediately images of her work and links to interviews appear.

But prior to March 9 of this year, Rebecca Morris didn’t have a Wikipedia page.  Some say that this omission is a small example of a very large problem; the lack of female representation and participation on one of the world’s most popular websites, Wikipedia.

INTERNET - View of Wikipedia Founder

"Russian Blackouts, Neutrality and Trusting Wikipedia" PBS Newshour 7/10/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Hari interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on today's blackouts in Russia, trusting crowd-sourced information and attracting more women to the Wikipedia community.

INTERNET - Wikipedia is 10yrs Old

NOTE: Do NOT confuse Wikipedia with WikiLeaks. They are NOT related at all. There are many "Wiki" sites, example Risen Wiki (game sight) at Wikia.

"Wikipedia – an unplanned miracle" by Clay Shirky, Guardian UK 1/14/2010

Excerpt

Every day since its birth 10 years ago, Wikipedia has got better. Yet it's amazing it even exists.

Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in the world. That statement is both ordinary and astonishing: it's a simple reflection of its enormous readership; and yet, by any traditional view about how the world works, Wikipedia shouldn't even exist, much less have succeeded so dramatically in the space of a single decade.

The cumulative effort of Wikipedia's millions of contributors means you are a click away from figuring out what a myocardial infarction is, or the cause of the Agacher Strip war, or who Spangles Muldoon was. This is an unplanned miracle, like "the market" deciding how much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free; even the servers and system administrators are funded through donations. That it would become such a miracle was not obvious at its inception and so, on the occasion of its 10th birthday, it's worth retelling the improbable story of its genesis.

Ten years ago today, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were stuck trying to create Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with a seven-step publishing process. Unfortunately, that also meant seven places where things could grind to a halt. However, after nearly a year of work, almost no articles had actually been published.

So, 10 years ago tomorrow, Wales and Sanger decided to try a wiki, as a way of cutting through some of that process. Sanger sent an email to Nupedia collaborators about this new way of working, saying: "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes."

WIKIPEDIA - Just a Reminder

An embarrassed Fox News hits Wikipedia



I love Wikipedia, but we all need to be reminded of the down-side of having an "encyclopedia" that can be edited by anyone. Then add the fact, that some entries MAY be from people who wouldn't know their arse from a hole-in-the-ground.