It is a man's world. Actually, it is a very young man's world, at least with Wikipedia. The free online encyclopaedia, which is the sixth biggest internet site, is written by 75 per cent males who are on average 25 years old, a study has found. Yes, 300 million monthly users are getting their knowledge from twentysomethings.
In order to change that Wikipedia plans a redesign which has been beta-tested by 500,000 users and is now to roll out from April 5. The revamp will overhaul the homepage a bit and adjusts the navigation of the site to current standards but most importantly it will make it easier to edit.
"Editing pages will be easier, thanks to a new editing toolbar. And we've simplified the site navigation, relocated the search box to satisfy user expectations and to follow other web standards, reduced some of the clutter," says Naoko Komura, the program manager for Wikimedia's Stanton Foundation Usability Project, in a blogpost.
Studying the findings of the multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation, this is more than necessary as younger users tend to be less inhibited about making small changes to Wikipedia than those over 45.
Trial and error
Young people learned about making changes by trial and error, while older users tended to give up more readily, fearing they might "break" things.
The study found that 80 per cent of users have not edited Wikipedia, but are willing to contribute. At the moment, only 1 per cent of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits.
