GENDER GAP

Study: Men Control Wikipedia

Contributors are 87 percent male.

How egalitarian is this? According to a recently published study, only about 13 percent of those who edit or write articles for Wikipedia are women—the average Wikipedia contributor is a male in his mid-20s. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, has declared it her goal to raise that number to 25 percent by 2015. A male-dominated computer culture and obsessive fact-loving by men seem to be the causes of the disparity. The move to include more women isn't about feminism or equality, she says, but an effort to make the encyclopedia as good as it can be—the entry for Sex and the City, for example, is tiny compared to the detailed rumination on The Sopranos. "Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table," she says. "If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb."