Gender gap stories
This page collects anecdotal evidence of why women stopped editing, or never began.
[edit] Deletions of new articles, amount of time required to contribute
A new editor on en:WP created an article on the founder of a notable independent music label. Although she cited three sources with in-depth coverage, including features in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian and his New York Times obituary, the article was deleted a few hours after creation, apparently due to a bot-applied "Movies" tag. After discussion with the admin, and intervention of her husband, who is an established editor, the article was restored.
A few weeks later, she had researched another article and began drafting it. After writing the first couple of sentences, she accidentally clicked "Save" instead of "Preview". One minute later, the article was nominated for speedy deletion by a new-page patroller who had awarded himself a barnstar on his user page saying "You play whack-a-mole with terrible new pages like no one I've ever seen! Awesome!"
Although the article was eventually kept after other editors got involved, the attitude and self-image of the new-page patroller left a poor impression on her. She resented having to spend time defending the article in discussions with someone who did not know anything about the subject. In combination the two incidents left her feeling that she did not want to contribute further new articles to Wikipedia, as she assumed the attitudes displayed were representative of the bureaucratic arm of the project.
That said, she was very impressed how a mention of her experiences in the Gendergap list some months later led to several editors speaking out against the new-page patroller's behaviour and a subsequent RfC/U against him, demonstrating that his behaviour differed considerably from the recommended policy on dealing with new articles/new editors.
However, she is also wary of the time-consuming and addictive aspects of Wikipedia (having experienced her husband devote more and more time to this project, most of it in discussion rather than new-article creation, to the detriment of other areas of their professional and private lives. ;) ) --JN466 14:59, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
