Tag Archives: Reagle

A recent study conducted by Wikimedia Foundation and reported on in the The New York Times highlights a severe gap between men and women contributors to entries on Wikipedia.  According to the study, only 13% of contributors, those who write and edit all the entries on Wikipedia, are women.  The Times makes an argument that it is possibly the very openness of Wikipedia that is that is the cause of this problem.

But because of its early contributors 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.” Mr. Reagle is also the author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.”

Reagle’s argument here, however, brings to mind a number of the arguments one encounters around the gender gaps inherent in the traditional understanding of the “public sphere.”  As we read in the Wikipedia entry for “the public sphere,” feminists like Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib pointed out way before the Internet was a regular part of our lives that the public sphere has always been a male-dominated space that uses a masculine hegemonic ideology to push what is considered of “woman’s interest” (this designation in and of itself being determined by men) into the private realm, creating a boundary (a region, perhaps, in the Goffmannian sense) between what is and what is not worth discussing.  Hence, if we take Wikipedia and other open, collaborative Web 2.0 websites as inheritors of Habermas’s public sphere, then Joseph Reagle’s analysis seems to push the historical causes of the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors up about 2500 years.