[[Joi Ito]] has some interesting comments about women in the wikipedia community.

I hope that wikipedia is a more welcoming community for women than most on the net. But I’m not quite sure how to analyze this. I have to admit that at Wikipedia meetups the ratio of men to women is about 8:1 overall. But that ratio does not hold in ever aspect of the community, and it is absolutely right to say that there are strong women who are in major leadership roles.

There are some cliches we could use to think about this: do women gain power because they are good at mediating conflict between warring men? So they come to be thought of as people who have authority to settle disputes? This sounds plausible to me, but I readily admit that it’s a cliche.