This may be a new low for the New York Times franchise: fill-in-the-blank news.

February 3, 2011 (9:34 am) Link

Words fail me …

— Jon Awbrey

This may be a new low for the New York Times franchise: fill-in-the-blank news.

"News by numbers" Only the internet could serve up such rubbish as that.

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 penis photos? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online defamation factory: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are teh gay.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-teens, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive-compulsive, porn-loving realm that is dominated by giant pink plastic sex toys, and, some say, uncomfortable for women…