WASHINGTON — Millions of people looking for answers go online to Wikipedia every month, but Wikipedia officials are scratching their heads for ways to increase contributors, especially women, to the voluminous database of articles.
“We need more participation from those who are not necessarily tech savvy, but are knowledgeable in certain fields to share on our website,” said Jimmy Wales, the dynamic co-founder of the online nonprofit Wikipedia at Thursday’s opening ceremony of its annual international conference, called Wikimania. “We need to change the attitude and software,” said Wales. “We want to attract a whole group of users who are geeks but not computer geeks.”
While officials said the site has 500 million visitors every month, a huge part of the “geek” population that Wikipedia is missing out on is women. While about 30 percent of Wikipedia users are women, only 10 percent of the edits to the articles is done by women, according to a survey.
To change that, Wikipedia has partnered with Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture.
“Draw people with different perspectives and knowledge,” said Gardiner. “There has to be an exchange to serve those [minority] people.”
Wikipedia is trying to make it easier to make contributions on the site. It implemented visual editor software 18 months ago on smaller Wikipedia sites.
“We want to make it easy for people to edit Wikipedia as easy as it is to update your status on facebook,“ said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Although contributions in the Western world are staggering, Wikipedia said the grow in contributions from Africa, specifically Nigeria, has been dramatic.
In 2000, only 0.1 percent of the Nigerian population had access to the Internet, but it had grown to 29 percent in 2011. During this same period, articles in African languages of Yoruba, Swahili, and Afrikaans grew to a total of about 77,000 from virtually none.
“In the coming years, we won’t be talking about ’Oh, those poor Africans,” said Wales. “Instead it will be a story about normalization and joining the global conversation.”
While technology has liberated the exchange of information in Africa, regulations are stifling them in certain countries, and Wikipedia is poised to take a stand.
Wikipedia is prepared to hold more demonstrations that even include blackouts, said Wales, as the website staged a 24-hour blackout two days ago in Russia to protest the country’s proposed censorship law.
Wikimania 2012 will run until July 12. The final day will be highlighted by WikiExpedition, a photography event based on photographing certain targets around the DC area.