Wikipedia Oddity

For librarians with an ongoing interest in the back-story of Wikipedia, the world’s biggest encyclopedia.  Freakonomics Radio broadcast an interesting podcast entitled “Women Are Not Men.”  Stephen Dubner offers this introduction:

“we’re just trying to look at the data that show differences between men and women to figure out why those differences exist, and how meaningful they are."

The first story in the broadcast is about the gender gap among editors of Wikipedia.  The podcast addresses but does not resolve the issues surrounding why only 16% of Wikipedia’s editors are female – which is puzzling in that women outnumber men on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, online games, and certainly in the library profession where the ratio is 4:1.

You can hear the original broadcast here: http://freakonomics.com/2013/02/24/women-are-not-men-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/