The gender gap on Wikipedia (BBC News)

[YoungDemCA]

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

snip:

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.

"That disparity means that a lot of perspectives are being left out," says Adrianne Wadewitz, a fellow at Occidental College who also serves on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation.

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...the list of pornographic actresses from the 1950s to the present is more than three times longer than the list of notable Native American women. It also has more names on it than the list of female poets and "sports women" combined.

To limit inaccurate or frivolous content, Wikipedia has "notability" and "verifiability" standards for what merits an article - meaning a person is notable only if he or she has received "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".

But some Wikipedians say those guidelines make it harder for many female figures to attain pages because historically, they didn't receive as much publicity or recognition as their male counterparts, leaving a much shallower pool of available reference material.

More: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26828726

When certain perspectives-women, minorities, and much of the "developing world's" population-are extremely underrepresented, the type of information that is available on sites like Wikipedia will be far from representative of the perspectives of the whole population.

Or to put it another way: there are already plenty of educated white men from America and Europe whose voices are being heard. Their perspectives are readily available, being members and beneficiaries of the dominant culture. What's more, it's been that way for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Women, along with other groups that are systematically excluded from full participation in their societies, must be much better represented. Otherwise, we will continue to have societies that reflect the narrow prejudices and groupthink of the dominant class of educated, wealthy, straight white men from America and Europe. And that would simply be unacceptable.