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Where are the women of Wikipedia?

THERE ARE OBJECTIVE TRUTHS in the universe, but they are few and far between. For everything else, we have Wikipedia.[1]

Wikipedia has become the de facto source for information. Stephen Colbert riffed on this idea for years with his Truthiness bit.[2] It was funny because it was true. We used to look to Encyclopedia Britannica and back issues of National Geographic to write grade-school essays on Mt. Vesuvius or the human circulatory system, but now we get all the information we need from Wikipedia, and we can reasonably assume that its the truth.

The promise of the future is finally realized! Except theres a problem: women dont contribute to Wikipedia. They make up less than 15 percent of contributors and as little as 8.5 percent of editors. History might be written by the winner, but truth, it seems, is mostly written by men.

So how does gender disparity manifest inside the worlds largest encyclopedia? After all, isnt truth absolute?[3]

As a general rule, there are fewer articles about women and the articles that do exist are, on average, much shorter. Topics that might be of more interest to women are also less extensively covered. A few years ago an editor tried to clean up the sites list of American novelists by removing all the women and relegating them to a new list called American women novelists.[4] On Wikipedia, as in so many other places, the default is straight and white and very, very male.

To combat gender disparity on the site, Wikipedia created a Gender Gap Task Force, with the goal of getting female participation up to 25 percent. One of its tactics is to hold edit-a-thons encouraging women to get involved. These have had limited success since Wikipedia is notoriously difficult for (and even hostile to) newcomers. After a dispute related to the Task Force last year, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committeea volunteer group thats basically the sites highest court[5]banned a prolific female editor after she was accused of promoting an anti-male agenda. The men she was arguing with were also sanctioned: they were told they couldnt use abusive language anymore.

In the wake of last years Gamergate controversythe most modern of culture wars and, no matter what its supporters say, a debate thats explicitly vitriolic toward womenWikipedia became a battleground with people on both sides working to create ostensibly objective articles while fundamentally disagreeing on what the objective facts were. This is known as an edit war and they happen all the time,[6] usually resulting in an article lockdown or sanctions against specific contributors/editors. In this case, it was five feminists and Gamergate critics who were banned from making further edits, leaving the pro-Gamergaters free to enshrine their version of events as truth on Wikipedias pages.

It would be laughably ironic if it werent so ironically tragic.

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Wiki gap