I spent my walk home thinking about an article I read just before leaving the office: How can Wikipedia woo women editors?

Unlike some of the comments (yes, I read them) I don’t think the problem has arisen because women have ‘less interest in general knowledge than men’ due to ‘women’s TV’. For the record, I think Wikipedia needs more women editors, just like it needs more contributors and editors of colour, and outside the west, and of diverse sexualities and gender identities.

What I have more of a problem with is the conflation of Wikipedia content about women with Wikipedia content written by women, and the idea that women are inherently more likely to write about (for example) female artists than pornstars. The BBC News Magazine article behind the link above seems to suggest the only way to get more content about women onto the site is to get women to write it. Or, even more problematically, to suggest there is not enough content about particular types of women on the site because there are not as many women editors.

To my mind it is far more important (while also more ambitious) to examine the culture and content of Wikipedia more broadly, with sex, race, sexuality and other factors only one part of a much more complex beast.

Some stats from a whirlwind tour down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

  • Joy Hester is in there with a measly 561 words, but is only just outdone by John Perceval (768 words). Albert Tucker has 1,515 words, and a major Australian artist like Sidney Nolan 3,385 words.
  • New York School poet Frank O’Hara has 3,306 words; Juliet O’Hara, who Wikipedia reliably informs me is ‘a character on the American comedy Psych played by Maggie Lawson’, has 5,170 words; and Maggie Lawson herself: 954 words.
  • Author Marguerite Duras – 1,980 words; Cordelia Chase (the character from Buffy) – 7,635 words.

What does this completely unscientific study demonstrate, other than the peculiar workings of my mind? Nothing in particular; but it does reinforce my hunch. To look at the examples in the BBC article, I would argue porn stars are more prominent in Wikipedia than Native American women for much the same reason Frank O’Hara gets substantially less coverage than fictional character Juliet O’Hara (who I’ve never heard of), and Marguerite Duras gets fewer words than Cordelia Chase.

Reducing the matter to a simple man/woman binary with underlying assumptions (men interested in men stuff/women interested in women stuff) will not ultimately result in change. The ‘men like porn, so if we want coverage of female artists we need more women editors’ argument is massively simplistic and mashes together far too many other factors.

We need to tease out some issues here. If we want to explore gender bias on Wikipedia (which I am sure exists) there are a bunch of questions we could ask. How many contributors who write about male artists also write about female artists? How many contributors who write about French authors from the 20th century write about female French authors as well as male French authors; and what is the balance? How many contributors who write about fictional television characters write about female characters and how many write about male characters?

We could go further. Looking at artists from a particular era, how do the lengths of their Wikipedia entries relate to the lengths of their active careers and volume of known works? When these are plotted against gender is there a difference?

More questions. Are people writing extensively about women artists on other parts of the web, and if so why aren’t they contributing content to Wikipedia? Should we expect them to? Do people interested in Native American women use and trust Wikipedia? And is Wikipedia the most comprehensive source about Cordelia Chase on the web?

I could go even further, but I won’t. Too many Wikipedia editors are men. More women editors are needed. And I have no doubt there is a gender bias there. But based on the cultural bias toward fictional characters, episodes of Deep Space Nine and detailed explorations of Game of Thrones episodes – A Game of Thrones (card game) has a 7,445 word entry – many of the reasons why there are not comprehensive entries on Native American women and women artists have nothing to do with sex.