As for the lurking culture war and worrying about the word 'inclusivity' it is hard to imagine a less important issue. Wikipedia is one of the most structurally democratic organisations on the entire planet, and possibly the knowledge accumulating enterprise most resistant to social pigeonholing of its members. Even I could literally copy their software and content and rehost the whole thing if I don't like how the project is run. The Wikimedia Foundation can do whatever it thinks is best; good luck to them. There is no reasonable problem here, even for the paranoid.
The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.
And it's conceivable that it's only a relatively small percentage of all practitioners who actually upload patterns.
That holds for anything through - including programming. Why would it be so hard to accept that a group of people can be active on internet without adding stuff to wikipedia?
Wikipedia is crappy about anything sewing, knitting, embroidery etc related. But whenever I need something, I can find information on reddit or blogs or youtube quickly and easily. It is not that information does not exist on the internet in general, it is that those groups dont find wikipedia place to put stuff in. It is not even that those groups cry for wikipedia to add them in cause they are helpless without that. Wikipedia is not a thing in that space, because who cares about wikipedia and anecdotally those few who tried found it generally waste of time and frustrating.
This is wikipedia finding about situation, because its mission is "to be the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written" and it is failing in these areas. And somehow people take offence on that.
Well, probably not heavy Wikipedia editors, but then neither are most heavy internet users, so concluding that they aren't heavy internet users is probably unwarranted.
Not a problem for me, I agree with your post.
Or MAYBE the Internet is structured in such a way that knitters are systematically discouraged from participating? Maybe non-knitters are getting favourable treatment?
The second question: No, I cannot explain how the Internet is structured to discourage knitters to contributing, just like I can't explain how STEM or tech jobs are supposed to be structured to exclude women.. Except, from my educations, there were _ZERO_ women from the start, so somehow, even before education started, they must have been structurally excluded, it's the only explanation, next to "the females didn't apply", which is entirely too reasonable to be true, especially considering that it's not even serving any political agenda.