Some of all human knowledge: gender and participation in peer production.

ABSTRACTThe promise of peer production includes resources produced by volunteers and released freely for the world to use. Wikipedia and Open Source Software are famous examples of peer-produced projects. Anyone is free to participate, but not everybody does. Wikipedia aims to collect the "sum of all human knowledge", but only about 13% of editors on the site are female [3]. In Open Source Software, the percentage of female contributors has been estimated near 1% [4]. If women are not well represented among authors of the most widely accessed reference source on the planet, are important voices muted? Could these projects be even more impactful with more female participation? This panel includes experts in gender theory and open collaboration, activists, and representatives from peer-produced projects to discuss recent findings and trends in this complex and often contentious research space.