Next Step: Cake • A Wikipedia Scavenger Hunt Challenge

A Wikipedia Scavenger Hunt Challenge

(Cross-posted from my Wordpress)

So in one of my classes recently, we had a guest speaker come in to talk about wikipedia, and one of the points he made that really hit home was that Wikipedia has a huge gender gap problem. For the majority of articles, around 90% are all edits made by men. It’s bad to the point where a 70/30 male/female gender split among editors of a certain page is considered extremely good. When asked of any pages with a majority female editorship, the presenter couldn’t actually think of any examples. And this is kind of a huge problem. Wikipedia is one of the biggest resources for information in the world, and having that be so utterly and completely male-dominated is a little unnerving. However, talking about this made me curious: are there any subjects where women actually dominate? I tried looking for pages that I though might be likely to be majority female: Patriarchy, childbirth, Audre Lorde, tampons…..but all still have a majority of male editors.

Now, to get to point of all this:

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to attempt to find articles with at least 300 registered edits, in which the number of edits by women outnumbers the men. (Pages with a majority of women that are under 300 total edits are still of interest, but they are more a side bonus than the main goal. )

A useful tool for searching editor stats is the Wikitrip site: http://sonetlab.fbk.eu/wikitrip/

This is no mean feat. After I showed him the wikitrip tools, fellow ace blogger Andrew went on a hunt for pages of >500 edits with majority female editorship - and found only two. I have been poking around and so far have found only a few pages with female majority, and all of those were very small pages with few edits.

The list so far of >300 pages with majority female editorship include:

-Maya Angelou

-Transsexualism

-(send me more if you find any!)

Other smaller pages with majority female include:

Diva Cup, Pleats, Vagina Monologues, etc.