Women and Wikipedia. Sexism, hostility, harassment and only 9% of contributors are women

[CircleSquareCircleSquare]

I was shocked to read on the “Cis as a slur” thread that only 9% of contributors (globally) to Wikipedia are women.

The Wikipedia article for “Woman” now includes gender
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman

As @AnitaLovesVictor pointed out
The wiki entry had that line removed yesterday, with the comment:

"With no citation or definition talks about people of the male sex, who are, according to any objective and biological definition, and also common speech, men, being women. No citation. Furthermore, refers to 'intersex and transgender conditions'. These are not comprable. Intersex people have conditions affecting normal sexual development, trans-identified males are sexually normal men who 'feel they are women'. There is no evidence for gender identity. Keep ideology out of encyclopaedias.)"

6 minutes later it was restored. So the TRAs are all over this. hmm

Here are some interesting articles
Harvard Business Review - Why do so few women edit Wikipedia?
hbr.org/2016/06/why-do-so-few-women-edit-wikipedia

Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is-hostile-to-women/411619/

Wikipedia is a source that whilst not taken seriously in academia etc., is referenced constantly and is a go-to rescourse for great swathes of an internet based society.

Would it be worth talking about how we women can edit more articles (not even anything to do with the self ID etc debate) and support each other in doing so?

RationalWiki is a totally separate site to Wikipedia, they have no links as far as I can tell. RationalWiki seems to be edited by people with a particular world view (very anti gender critical radical feminists for example), and doesn't accept any changes to that.

A "wiki" is just a type of website that allows users to edit and update the website content. There are loads of examples of these, with Wikipedia being the best known example.

I just had a look on the talk page for woman. (That's a tab on the Wikipedia page next to "Article" which everyone can click on and read).

It's taken an involved discussion between five people and two full days to get a footnote on this sentence removed:

Most girls go through menarche and are then able to become pregnant and bear children.

The footnote tried to imply that transgender ppl (from the discussion it was clear they really meant transwomen) have fertility issues, ie transwomen are a subset of infertile women. Whoever did it once again tried to sneak it in under the guise of "intersex and transgender". I don't think it'll stay deleted for long though.