[toomuchtodo]

The comment I replied to mentioned gender about a cohort of participants ("I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated"), hence where my statement comes from. I want to see quality work regardless of who is doing it, and the folks doing this are uncompensated volunteers.

EDIT: @TheNorthman I cannot reply to your comment as I'm throttled by HN. Put bluntly, the gender of contributors does not matter and shouldn't even be considered. Let contributions stand on their own merit.

[wombatmobile]

You are right, toomuchtodo, that anyone can edit Wikipedia. If you want to see "quality work regardless of who is doing it" then it would pay to look deeper into the dynamics of gender.

Why?

Male editing culture tends to work differently to female editing culture.

How?

One tends to be hierarchical. The other tends to be cooperative.

It's possible to develop a system that uses both of these modes to sharpen the editorial process, but that doesn't happen through self organisation when the starting point is a large gender imbalance.

Resolving this conflict is one of the biggest challenges faced by Wikipedia.

The difficulty is, however, that WMF isn't directly involved with Wikipedia content, which comes from the community. WMF is just a software company responsible for the tools the community uses for publishing.

[TheNorthman]

Sure. I'm not disputing them bringing up gender diversity, I'm simply stating that nobody but you were talking about requirements and keeping people out to meet certain `diversity requirements'. You were, simply put, attacking your own straw-man.