No. I’m not going to log in. I absolutely refuse.

A lot of sites these days require you to log in to get their content. Some of them even want you to pay for it. When that happens, my preferred option is to go somewhere else. I can vote with my mouse as easily as with my feet.

But being a journalist, I try to keep up with the news and Vice President Joe Biden’s activities – like many public figures, his activities often overlap with news, despite being vice president in a non-campaign year. So it really galls me when “The New York Times,” or “The Boston Globe” or “The Washington Post” demands that I log in to their website, giving them my e-mail address and creating another username and password to remember. If I was the kind of person who wrote comments or didn’t mind wading into the eldritch, twisted nightmare of Internet comment threads, I’d probably find it useful.

But I’m not that kind of person. I value my sanity too much. So I read newspapers for the articles, for information important and trivial, though hopefully not inane. For instance, I’m curious about the Egyptian protests and the international response, but not the inability of “The New York Times” writers to understand the Internet or Wikipedia.

“But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia, surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women,” wrote Noam Cohen in an article on Sunday entitled “Define gender gap? Look up Wikipedia’s contributor list.”

Alarmist headline aside, the article represents one of the greatest forays into the inane I’ve ever seen. The article essentially argued that because Wikipedia emerged out of a male-centered programming culture it retains elements of that culture that “discourage[s] women,” in the words of Harvard fellow Joseph Reagle. The article goes on to say that “Adopting openness means being ‘open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,’ [Reagle] said.”

Reagle, at the very least, should realize that’s not how Wikipedia works. Contributors generally work alone and register with the site, using usernames. One cannot tell sex, age or anything else from the vast majority of usernames. Contributors have their own user pages, where they choose what biographical information to provide. That’s right, the contributors can choose which gender other contributors think they belong to and as any Omegle user knows, there are a lot of people out there pretending to be members of the opposite sex.

The article also contained one of the best quotes ever (though unfortunately it wasn’t said by Vice President Joe Biden) by Catherine Orenstein, director of the OpEd Project. This is an organization trying to get women to contribute editorials more often. I highly approve of this project, especially if the women are “Five Colleges” students, and they’re contributing to The Daily Collegian. She said “When you have a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies.”

It’s a misogynistic stereotype that women can’t do math, and an empirical fact that journalists can’t, but I’m reasonably sure that when any group is approximately half of a population, that’s not a minority.

Personally, I suspect that that the Wikipedia disparity has more to do with the fact that men have the ability to memorize and retain reams of factoids, whereas most of the women I know are much better at recalling important things. I’m sure I could memorize “Harry Potter” wand lengths and cores in a few minutes, but if I don’t keep checking my syllabus I’ll completely forget I have homework due Wednesday (fun fact: the Wikipedia article on “Hogwarts” is longer than the one about the University of Massachusetts system). Most of the women I’ve known in my life will scoff at the first task, and just work on the second.

That’s another thing forcing site registration leads to: distraction. You get blocked by the registration wall or the pay wall (curse them), and try to get at the content with Google News. Only something ridiculous catches your eye, and you end up following that. That’s how I found out about that stupid astrological sign change. Was there anything more inane? St. Augustine of Hippo, who died some 1600 years ago, devoted a section of one of his theological works to disproving astrology by bringing up the case of twins.

I don’t want to register, I don’t want to log on, I just want to read the article. “Maximum content, minimum hassle” should be the marketer’s motto. There are few things more annoying than having to reload the whole page to click through a photo slideshow, or wait for an ad to play about a car I’ll never be able to afford.         

But if you are into registration, you can always vandalize the site’s Wikipedia page. As for me, I wonder what Vice President Joe Biden thinks about registration.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].