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Hello, Laurob04, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Week 8 Thinking about Wikipedia

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Does it matter who writes Wikipedia? If so, why?

Yes it does matter who writes Wikipedia because almost everyone in the general public uses Wikipedia as a source of information, potentially not for academic research but for quick understandings of topics or someone or something they were just exposed to in their daily life. It matters who write Wikipedia because the writer demographics should reflect the reader demographics. Overall, in a worldwide population that is not nearly exclusively composed of white men, in fact, 52% of the world's population are women, men and especially white men should not be the only writers for Wikipedia. This makes a difference because people are naturally more compelled to write about people that represent them and maybe are less prone to noticing that they are using sources from only one particular group of people. An increase in women writers and non-white writers could improve Wikipedia's article choices and sourcing by including more information on and sources by women and people of color.

Laurob04 (talk) 14:20, 18 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Gusk80, Ksully9900, and Quannnn.4: Laurob04 (talk) 14:24, 18 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

I wrote about this question too because I also found it really important to talk about. Wikipedia is a very popular website and it is very important for the information on it to be well rounded. I agree with you that more diverse groups of people writing for the website will create more diverse articles for Wikipedia overall. I think that this subject is very important because diversity of Wikipedia will help their users become more educated on topics that are not commonly talked about because there aren't writers willing to write about them. Ksully9900 (talk) 11:17, 23 October 2020 (UTC)Reply