Next Thursday (August 18th) there will be another Girl Geek Dinners event in Bristol. The guest speaker is Fiona Apps, who is an administrator on the English Wikipedia and a member of Wikimedia’s Volunteer Response Team. Naturally the topic for discussion is getting women involved with Wikipedia. Go here to book a place.

If you think that’s a non-issue, take a look at this recent research from the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering. One of the significant findings is:

The research indicates that the articles females tend to edit are twice as likely to be about controversial or contentious topics. In addition, female editors are significantly more likely to have their early contributions undone by their fellow editors, and are more likely to be indefinitely blocked by fellow editors. Taken together, these findings hint at a culture that may be resistant to female participation.

The researchers say they are surprised that women tend to edit more controversial articles, but looking at the paper I see that their definition of a “controversial” article is one that has a lot of edit wars. If work by women editors is much more likely to be attacked than work by men, then of course women will appear to be focusing on controversial subjects. I also note that women editors are slightly more likely to be banned from Wikipedia than men. The researchers suggest this may be because male trolls disguise their gender in the hope of more lenient treatment, but my own suspicion is that those women who don’t just give up will often get very, very angry, and get banned as a result.

Oh, and to save you reading the comments at that link, yes there is someone who claims that this proves that women are stupid and incompetent.