From the NY Times, 1/31/11, on gender disparity among Wikipedia contributors:

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men…

Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.

“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.”

I love Noam Cohen’s implication that what puts women off about the Internet is that it’s a “fact loving realm.” Everyone knows how much we gals hate facts. “Oh you and your silly ol’ facts!” we say, stamping our little feet and pouting adorably when one of those obsessive, fact-loving males tells us that Hitler was a leftist, Virigina Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” a work of fiction, President Obama a secret Muslim, and Henry Luce a pinko-commie spy.*

(*Yes, these are actual things men have told me on Internet discussion boards.)

I also like Joseph Reagle’s admission that the “openness” of the Internet can result in a “culture that may discourage women.” He just can’t come out and say “making the Internet a more comfortable environment for women would piss off the many, many, misogynists that infest it.” Instead, he’s got to sidle up to this reality, presenting it as a sort of brow-furrowing conundrum. It’s a brand of “egalitarianism” that treats the merits of misogyny as just another matter upon which intelligent and moral people can disagree.

“…you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem,” Reagle says. Well, see, that’s the problem. When the merits of misogyny are open for discussion, attacks on a female poster because she is female get treated with the same weight as reasoned debate about the issue she’s trying to discuss. Online discussions are derailed into long, ugly, personal wrangles. The female poster has to deal with male posters who want to discuss her looks, and/or her age, and/or her emotional and mental stability when she’s trying to talk about gun control, or the war on terrorism, or prison reform, or reproductive rights.

That said, there’s a great unspoken looming over this New York Times piece, one that transcends sexual politics, and cuts right to the heart of Wikipedia as an alleged source of accurate information. It’s why, when I’ve considered signing on as a contributor I've ultimately decided against it, even though I’m fairly used to online misogyny, have a zest for argument, and enjoy research and writing.

Wikipedia is not, in reality, “fact obsessed.” Wikipedia is consensus obsessed. Facts are sometimes determined by a show of hands.

A year or two ago when I was writing a piece on Internet discussions, I decided to include some references to the right wing website, Free Republic. I wanted to discuss one of the most notorious examples of “Freeping” – the behavior of Free Republic towards liberal voting rights activist Andy Stephenson.

In 2005, Andy Stephenson was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. He had no insurance, so his friends at the liberal website Democratic Underground quickly assembled a fundraising project top pay for his treatment.

The people at Free Republic did not like this. So, they “Freeped” Andy Stephenson. They posted long threads reviling him as a crook and accusing him of faking his illness. It’s a campaign that may very well have affected his paypal account and delayed his surgery. The abuse continued up to the day Stephenson died.

It had been a while since Andy Stephenson’s death. I decided to check out Wikipedia’s entry on Free Republic to see what else might have been written on the subject since I’d last done a search on it. There was not a single mention of the Andy Stephenson case in the Wikipedia entry on Free Republic. There still isn’t.

None of the facts I mentioned are in dispute. The actual threads reviling a dying man are still up at Free Republic to those who know to look for them. But anyone who looked up Free Republic at Wikipedia would be no wiser about it.

It’s kind of like someone posting an article about Joan Crawford without mentioning Mommie Dearest.

Perhaps nobody had thought to include it? I checked out the Free Republic history. Yes, it had been included, resulting in a long revert war, and finally a discussion. Ultimately the “consensus” was that references to Andy Stephenson – even thought they were factual and documented -- be removed.

In short, supporters of Free Republic were able to stage an extended tantrum that got a profoundly ugly and telling fact about Free Republic removed from a Wikipedia entry.

Sorry, but I see no reason to spend unpaid hours and effort writing, documenting, and setting up cites on a subject while batting away the occasional misogynistic troll -- at the risk of having it deleted, not because the facts were in question or badly supported, but because someone rounded up his like-minded buds to render them UNfacts with a show of hands.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes