Wikipedia on the hunt for female contributors

by Steven Mostyn - Aug 10 2011, 08:29

We’ve never perused Wikipedia with a sense that its content contributors are predominantly male, but apparently that’s the case and something the online knowledge database is keen to remedy.

More pointedly, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced a gender-specific recruitment drive to help provide balance to the contingent of “26-year-old geeky, male” contributors that currently power the site. There’s gratitude for you.

According to Wales, while Wikipedia’s male editors are perfectly suited to when it comes to topic pages covering science and technology, more female staff are required to provide more focused expertise in other areas.

“The main thing is to bring in people of all different backgrounds,” he explained during an interview with The Independent. “If you do that, you increase the knowledge base of the site, which can only be a good thing.”

“At the moment, we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare,” he added.

If the recruitment drive proves fruitful and meets targets outlined by Wales, Wikipedia should have doubled its pool of content contributors within the next 12 months—shifting from around 35,000 to somewhere in the vicinity of 70,000.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001and has since become the Internet’s leading—though not always reliable—information hub. All of its contributors and editors work on a voluntary basis.

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