" Without a healthy and diverse community of participants, the quality of our content will suffer."

Diversity within Wikipedia is unlikely to happen before it becomes a better environment for more of its editors.

The culture currently is suited to the comfort of its majority editorial population - single, white, men - often with a belief in their intellectual superiority and having the time and energy to devote to combat with any editors who challenge their view of themselves. That makes Wikipedia an unpleasant working environment for a lot of women... and also for the many men who aren't comfortable with socially combative environments.

The lack of diversity on Wikipedia may represent in some areas the state of society. But as far as gender diversity goes - and possibly age but I don't know enough to comment on that - it definitely reflects a male-orientated, combative culture. Since there are many areas of the net not dominated by this kind of culture - Project Gutenberg for example - changing this culture and the lack of diversity resulting from it is definitely a realistic goal for Wikipedia.

I'm curious, do you know any stats on Project Gutenberg and their diversity?

Sorry, should have clarified that the statement was purely subjective personal experience - and back in the 90's at that. I volunteered with Project Gutenberg for several years working on editing previously scanned in documents. The culture there was not combative or male-orientated in my (obviously limited) experience... but whether that was reflected in gender-diversity or any other kind of diversity I couldn't say - though I'll see if I can track down any stats. On Wikipedia I'm very aware of my gender - and my English reserved nationality! - in a way that didn't seem to be at all relevant there. I'd guess that the delayed publishing and hierarchy in editorial process helped with that. Things that probably couldn't be applied to Wiki - although the editors with admin privilleges go some way towards that and I'd personally like to see more of them around to create more leadership within the community. There may be other ways in which Gutenberg manage their volunteers that might provide useful pointers. If you're interested I'll go see what I can dredge up.

Yeah, I'm very interested. A lot of open source projects involve some friction and push-and-pull. So I'm curious which ones have been more welcoming. This is somewhat related to gender, but it's much bigger than that really.

I do not share your view, Dakinijones, and I feel strongly that it is deeply misguided. The idea that Wikipedia has a "combative" culture has taken a life of its own and, unfortunately, does not represent reality well. My experiences have been anything but combative and I encounter more people who are helpful, nice, and intelligent than those who are rude or ignorant. In that respect, Wikipedia is not much different than real life. Disagreements and even arguments naturally arise when collaborating on something. Nothing will change this and it has nothing to do with gender. It has a lot to do with people being passionate about making a good encyclopedia and sometimes that passion spills over. I believe strongly that Wikipedia is not much more "combative" than any other free and open collaborative project.

Suppose there existed a wiki-style encyclopedia edited only by women. Would this be some wonderful utopia where people do nothing but smile and sing while writing articles and then send each other baked brownies when they are done? We both aren't naive enough to believe that. My suggestion is that such an encyclopedia would be roughly just as "combative" as the current Wikipedia.

There's one last aspect of this that I want to mention. It's that part of the perceived "combativeness" arises from the success of Wikipedia producing a high-quality product. As the bar has been raised in terms of quality, it stands to reason that less people can make beneficial contributions. When these people have their edits reverted, they feel a sense of hostility from the other editors who have "blocked their additions". By definition, these editors are unaware that their additions lowered the quality of the article; and thusly the label of "hostile" or "combative" is unfairly achieved.

The notion that Wikipedia is excessively combative is a cancer. I passionately hate it because it is unfairly slanderous and largely without merit beyond what is to be expected.

I appreciate your point, Jason.

Dan Kahneman gave a wonderful talk at TED this past year. He noted that there's an important distinction between our experience and our recollection of that experience.

He shared an example of patients undergoing colonoscopies, a generally unpleasant experience (or so I hear). He noted that people who had longer procedures that ended comfortably recalled a more pleasant experience than those who had shorter procedures that ended uncomfortably. This, of course, does not map to the reality of the experience.

We have to be careful not to let our recollection of our experiences on Wikimedia projects unfairly color our actual experiences. I suspect that most people have a largely positive experience here, but the bad experiences are the ones that stick. To the extent that we can reverse this, we should, but self-awareness is the first step toward improvement.