Category: Social Media

Melinda Casino points to this longish, well documented essay, Why are there so few women on Digg by Academic Pointillism. The author is a Digg subscriber who wonders at the lack of women participating in the site.

One of the possible reasons given for the lack of women is that many of the stories are male centric. I checked today, and found about half the stories interesting and only one really being male centric. The one I found most interesting is the site with the babies swimming and not because I’m into the maternal thing, but because I found the photography to be really excellent (the site has since been taken down–see below). There was also a fun Google images game that reminds me of a Flickr game that Scott Reynen created.

Other reasons the author gives have to do with sexism, racism, and homophobia in the comments, as well as objectification of women. She has a couple of suggestions, one of which–get more women involved in the development of the site and how it’s architected–I can get behind completely. By women, I mean women in technology–not marketing, not human resources.

What was said about Digg could be same about Slashdot, as well as the sites like Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite: it’s rare for a female voice to be heard in any of these environments.

I can agree with some of the author’s opinions, but not all. Objectification of women is an issue, but I think the idea that women can’t go online and express a strong opinion without getting sexual and violent threats has been badly overplayed lately. Is it a problem? Yes, but not as pervasive as others. I think women’s biggest problem is we’re not heard, or when we are, not always given equal respect. There’s few things that will discourage a person more than feeling like we’re not heard, and I include getting dismissive and demeaning responses in the ‘not being heard’ category.

Then there is the question: are women as interested? I find sites like Digg and Slashdot to be occasionally interesting, I tip into Metafilter from time to time, I rarely read mailing lists, and only read the tech sheets once a day to see what the artificially inflated stories are. I just have better uses of my time. Now, I don’t know if I’m representative of women (or older techs) or not–all I can do is give anecdotal data.

Regardless, it’s a thoughtful, well researched, and objectively detailed writing and I’ll do my little bit to try and get this on to the tech sheets.

Seth Finklestein provided great coverage on the recent controversy over Wikipedia editor/community manager “Essjay” (one, two, three, four, five, and six).

The gentleman in question misrepresented himself as a tenured professor, both in an interview and in Wikipedia. Rather than show him the door, Jimmy Wales defended him–boys will be boys or some rot. It was only when Wales found out that Essjay lied to people ‘within’ the Wikipedia community that he was subsequently banished.

Essjay’s apology, if such can be said about it, was that he fabricated the information about himself to protect himself in this dangerous world. You don’t know how much my fingers itched to go out and do a little ‘self-protecting’ with my own page. Letsee…triple PhD holder, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Ms. Universe.

I refrained though. Instead, I invite you all to do the same–the three most colorful entries get a copy of either Practical RDF or Learning JavaScript, or the upcoming Adding Ajax.

Essjay’s ‘apology’ was an unbelievably silly excuse, but the irony doesn’t enter the picture until you view Essjay’s farewell page. Checking the history, most of the critical comments have been edited out.

I’ve recently stopped using Wikipedia, or stopped using it as an original source. I’ve found two things:

First, Google’s results have degraded in the last year or so. When one ignores Wikipedia in the results, on many subjects most of the results are placement by search engine optimization–typically garbage–or some form of comment or usenet group or some such that’s not especially helpful. Good results are now more likely found in the second or third pages.

Second, I find that I’m having to go to more than one page to find information, but when I do, I uncover all sorts of new and interesting goodies. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of Wikipedia (aside from the whole ‘truth’ thing), or any single-source of information: we lose the ability to discover things on the net through sheer serendipity.

I still respect many of the authors in Wikipedia, and think it’s a good source. However, this event only strengthens my belief that Wikipedia should be pulled to the side for search engine results, like the Ask definition for words that match in Google, and people go back to searching the web by actually searching the web.

Anne Zelensky attended the recent Adobe Engage. She writes of her experience, being one of the few women present:

There were slights throughout the day: a mention of “granny mode” for a beginner’s big fonts mode of some Adobe software, a comment from some developer along the lines of “our users aren’t technically astute, they’re mature mothers,” and an example of a cell phone graphic for girls that was pink with cutesy animals. Stereotypes of females attended in greater numbers than actual females, if you don’t include the Adobe women who were there. No wonder these stereotypes prevail. If you work in an environment with actual women you might learn that some are technically oriented and some less so, some like pink and some do not, some are airbrushed and perfect like a Victoria’s Secret model… but most are not. I am not airbrushed and perfect, as anyone who has met me online or in person knows. But I am real in a way that those Victoria’s Secret models and clueless LASIK-free grannies and imagined versions of mature mothers are not.
…
I didn’t speak up yesterday with my complaints except on the ad hoc Twitter back channel because I do want to work within this space of blogging and technology and influence. I don’t want to fight against it and be labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult. That’s why I so appreciate James’ speaking out. James is not going to get labeled shrill–only women are called shrill. And it’s fine within tech blogging for men to speak for or against diversity.

Being one who is labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult, Amen.

The discussion thread just mentioned in the last story is also a good demonstration of what can happen when newspapers and other localized publications open up discussion threads. In particular, the St. Louis Today site, which runs its weblogs using WordPress, doesn’t put much in the way of restrictions on comments. What’s happened is a group of people have moved into the discussion area and setup housekeeping.

You can’t read a thread where it isn’t dominated by people like robsmyth and others, with their own insider language and discussion–usually only incidentally related to the topic.

danah boyd is going through Wikipedia deletion pains. The comments on her Articles for Deletion page and Discussion page have been very interesting reading.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has been pointing out my own entry on women in Wikipedia, but my preferred post on that particular event was Yo Sock Puppets; much of the discussion about Wikipedia occurred in the later post.

One of the most fascinating elements to come out of the discussion on danah’s entry has to do with her name: danah is legally ‘danah boyd’. She was born ‘danah michele mattas’–different last name, but same use of lowercase; she uses danah boyd for all of her own work. However, the Wikipedia editors won’t allow her entry to reflect the case on her name–insisting that since the publications that reference her name give her name as “Danah Boyd”, the Wikipedia entry must do the same. Why? Because, to quote a Wikipedia editor:

Unfortunately, you seem to have a misconception of how Wikipedia works. I strongly recommend reading the policies and guidelines at Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:No original research. In a nutshell: Wikipedia is not for placing “the truth”, it is for placing summaries of information that is already published in other credible news sources. If you can’t convince the NY Times, NPR, USA Today, and Fox News to lowercase your name, that makes a really tough case to argue on Wikipedia, since the policy here is to only incorporate information after it’s been published elsewhere. If, however, you *can* convince the major media outlets to print it differently in future press, then that will make a stronger case to get the Wikipedia article adapted to match. Or in other words, don’t sweat it for an immediate change — take the long view.

(emph. mine)

The point of the editor is that because of danah’s appearance in these publications as Danah Boyd, most lookups on her name would occur because of this case. Those who know danah as ‘danah’, most likely wouldn’t be looking up her name. Still, I would assume that Wikipedia would accept danah’s verification of the accuracy of her name, and that the tool is intelligent enough to manage differing case when performing a lookup on her name.

What’s more relevant to a discussion on Wikipedia at large is the direct admission that Wikipedia is not the place for ‘truth’. This, to me, is an extremely honest and important statement to make. I would hope the statement is pasted all over Wikipedia, because this is the ‘truth’ of Wikipedia, of any encyclopedia: what’s contained is less a matter of philosophical truth than verifiable source. Where Wikipedia editors are making a mistake is treating danah’s work as it appears in non-mainstream publications such as the ACM or her own birth certificate as less ‘worthy’ than those that appear in Fox.

The editor then responds with confrontations in this regard with a recommendation to danah to get the publications to use the proper case, which would then make a better argument for correcting the case in Wikipedia. My goodness–what an intransigent viewpoint, and almost bizarre recommendation.

At first glance, the editor’s comments are baffling, in the extreme. I think what’s happening with Wikipedia, though, is that given the lack of early structure for the online site, the editors have, over time, formulated rules of their own. As happens in cases such as these, they then maintain a far more rigid adherence to said rules then if there had been a structure in place in the beginning. As time passes, Wikipedia becomes less a tribute to fact and more a tribute to process.

This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia doesn’t have value–I still use it to look up information, though I don’t consider it the definitive authority on a topic. As the editors would say, only a fool would rely solely on what’s written in Wikipedia. Still, at what point does the rigid adherence to process outweigh the usefulness of the data? In other words: what is Wikipedia’s tipping point? And has it been reached?