Talk:Editor Survey 2011/Women Editors
Re. 3.5 Women make much fewer edits in general
My take on the "gender gap".
From what I have seen (this is mostly about natural sciences) many, but not all, female editors start out thinking that wikipedia is a kind of Facebook, where you can just write what you feel.
It seems to me that many of them leave when their articles have been corrected a few times, but that - when they have reached somewhere in the range 100-400 edits (very individual) - they have gained experience, and have realized that one needs to do intensive research before you edit. All by a sudden, their contributions are very rarely corrected, because they usually get it right the first time.
IMO what is needed is 'this here eddication' of budding female editors - get them to understand that research and knowledge, not opinion, is the crux of wikipedia - so they avoid the correction problem and stay on wikipedia.
- Edit: Read S. K. Lam & al.: "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance." WikiSym’11, 3.-5. oktober 2011, Mountain View, California, http://grouplens.org/system/files/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf
- in particular page 8, Table 5 (Average rate at which editors are reverted for nonvandalism - related reasons, by gender and by stage of editor tenure) which shows that when editors reach a certain stage, male and female editors are corrected on the same level.