How can Wikipedia woo women editors?

BBC News ^ | 7 April 2014 | Lynsea Garrison

[MinorityRepublican]

Women make up only 9% of Wikipedia editors. Educators say raising that number is key to improving the online encyclopaedia, and have started campaigns to do just that.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Depression-era artist Natalie Smith Henry's vivid depiction of a farm family hangs high on the wall.

But until recently, Henry didn't exist, at least not according to Wikipedia. Then Chelsea Tufarolo, a student at American University, decided to write her an article about her.

It was Tufarolo's first post on the world's largest knowledge-sharing resource.

Editors and activists are trying to address the root of what critics describe as a major information gap on Wikipedia by getting more women to post. Roughly 91% of Wikipedia's editors are men, according to a 2011 Wikimedia Foundation survey.

Wikipedia purports to capture the sum of the world's knowledge, says Sara Snyder, deputy chief of the Media and Technology Office at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

But "it's not accurate to call it the world's knowledge if it's just half the population's knowledge," she says.

Wikipedia hosts 4.4 million articles and consistently ranks as one of the top 10 most-visited websites in the world. Yet a Wikimedia study in 2011 revealed a fairly uniform picture of the writers behind Wikipedia - the average Wikipedian is a white, educated, computer-savvy man who lives in the US or Europe.

[a fool in paradise]

I’m going by the internet top Yahoo/Google news items.

Of course we COULD use more revisionist history from the types of Gloria Steinem...