Only 12pc of delegates for Wikimania conference in Hong Kong are women
Volunteers from around the world who put together the biggest and most used encyclopedia - Wikipedia - will converge on Hong Kong next month for the ninth global Wikimania conference - but most of them will be men.
It seems that internet geekdom is still very much a male thing.
Volunteers from around the world who put together the biggest and most used encyclopedia - Wikipedia - will converge on Hong Kong next month for the ninth global Wikimania conference - but most of them will be men.
Only 12 per cent of the delegates signed up for the conference at Polytechnic University from August 7 to 11 are female.
"When you look at the library and museum industry, they are very female-heavy. Wikipedia is very similar to them, it's about information management but only 20 per cent of the contributors are females," said Hong Kong chapter member Deryck Chan Yick-kiu.
To balance the geek-male bias, a speed-dating programme called Wiki Speed Geeking will take place during conference lunch breaks. There will also be a WikiWomen's lunch to address the gender issue in cyberspace.
The conference will feature a keynote address by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and a full test run of Wikipedia's new editorial technology - the Visual Editor - which should make it much easier for people to edit entries in the giant internet encyclopedia, which now has 30 million articles in 286 languages.
