Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody.
Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
I read that as wikipedia should be factual and facts don't need to care about the background of the person. Citations are always needed.
Diversity in race imo is a bad diversity criteria for some things. For one, it separates people living long time at a particular place (think 2-3 generations) as different people because they are not white so they must be different.
Anyone who talks about diversity I have seen has stereotypes of their own on what people from different races are like.
The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
Way to assume my gender and preferred pronouns. Bet you're glad that HN has no CoC that would get you a stern warning for this.
> The only way to do so is to discard the interests and knowledge while putting great emphasis on experiences - and immediately assume they will end manifest as bulk personal anecdotes.
No. One very obvious way to do so is to recognize that Wikipedia isn't about interests and experiences and the contributors/authors of articles but about sourced information. It's an encyclopedia, not a social network or a blog. The articles are supposed to represent information gathered from other sources (and they take other literal there, Original Research by the author is not desired [1]), not the knowledge, interests or experiences of the person adding information to the article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic. The whole "sourced information therefore pre-existing knowledge, interests and experiences dont play role" is obvious nonsense.
Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
I find the whole assumption weird that something would fundamentally change. It's not like Wikipedia claims to be "the world's knowledge at your fingertips", but is barely more than a bunch of pages on programming and ango-american cultural concepts. The English Wikipedia hosts over six million articles. Let that sink in: six. million. articles.
What are they missing, what are they suppressing, as somebody else suggested?
> This has zero to do with original research, that is red herring trying to shift the topic.
It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
> Experiences influence what you write about, what you put emphasis on and how you write.
And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the topic of what it wants to be [1]: Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge. The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style". Articles should have an encyclopedic style with a formal tone instead of essay-like, argumentative, promotional or opinionated writing.
You may argue that it should want to be something totally different. But that's not really talking about Wikipedia, that would be watwutpedia, which might be a great project as well, but I hope you agree that it would be a different project.
Different demographics have different interests on average.
> If you add more women, will there be more knitting-articles? Won't women who studied physics work on physics related articles?
The two are not mutually exclusive. In that case there will likely get both women writing about physics and about knitting. Sometimes, it will be exactly same woman writing both articles. Kind of like same man can write about physics, wood carving, league of legends and embroidery.
> It has everything to do with it. An encyclopedia relies not on first hand knowledge, experiences and interests but on compressing third party information. It's basically an organized collection of book reports, only it's about topics, not individual books, and you get to add the bits of information that you discovered in some book to what others have discovered.
That is completely offtopic, because no one suggested people would write anything except third party information.
> And, again, Wikipedia emphasizes that they do not want editorialized articles, don't want your individual writing style and personal opinions. They want a neutral point of view (that term is used so much on Wikipedia that they just say NPOV), they aim for a constant style of little variance. Again, it's an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog site. They very much do not want to give a small world to each and every editor where they can present their world view, opinions and experiences in whatever way they deem fit. There are sites for that, but Wikipedia is not it.
Again, the only person suggesting that there would be editorialized articles or personal opinions is you.
But actually, yes, individual writing style shows up on wikipedia. Some pages are horribly written and others are well written - that is individual writing style.