Sure, we could ask the Education program to reach out to universities or
university programs related to under-represented groups. The reason I ask
isn't just to stir up controversy. I've done a lot of editing related to
the US Civil Rights Movement, and I've noticed that there are virtually no
other Wikipedians actively working on these articles (and lots of red
links). The reason I ask is because I'm wondering if this lack of content
is related to demographic issue or not. It seems like a fairly analogous
problem to the gender gap, and thus worth doing some research on.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
> Ryan: suppose you would have this information what would change? Would we
> prioritize features differently? Would we stop doing certain things, start
> doing things? I am having a hard time finding a use case.
>
> D
> —
> Sent from Mailbox <https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox> for iPhone
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
>
>> What if we only asked the question in countries where it was culturally
>> appropriate? Even a single data point would be more useful than none.
>>
>> Ryan Kaldari
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu
<dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
>>
>>> That's a great point Tillman, and some very interesting reading
>>> material. As I was reading, I was thinking, perhaps asking "Do you
>>> consider yourself to be part of a (a) minority ethnicity or (b) majority
>>> ethnicity?" might suffice. It's kind of what we're after and it
seems more
>>> universal than the US-centric "what ethnicity are you" question.
>>>
>>> Dan
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Tilman Bayer
<tbayer(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
>>>
>>>> With all due respect and appreciation for the highly commendable
>>>> intention behind the question, it is itself a symptom of systemic
>>>> bias.
>>>>
>>>> A while ago a community member asked me the same thing - why we
don't
>>>> ask for the editor's race in the WMF editor surveys. I wasn't
around
>>>> when the demographics part of the current editor surveys series was
>>>> designed, but after looking into this topic a bit, I think the answer
>>>> is simple: Because these are international surveys.
>>>>
>>>> Survey questions about race are vastly more common and accepted in the
>>>> US (and some other countries like, afaik, the UK or Australia) than in
>>>> many other countries. In much of Europe, for example, asking people
>>>> about their race, or classifying them racially, is considered very
>>>> offensive (cf.
>>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_classification)#European_Union
>>>> ). This is particularly true in my home country, Germany, for
>>>> historical reasons - personally, I don't hold very strong views on
the
>>>> topic, but as a German who moved to the US last year, I can tell you
>>>> that it was quite an unusual experience to be asked to state my race
>>>> on an official form for the first time.
>>>>
>>>> What's more, even when switching from "race" to the
somewhat less
>>>> offensive (but even more complicated) concept of "ethnicity",
it seems
>>>> difficult to come up with an internationally accepted list for the
>>>> purposes of a global survey, cf.
>>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_censuses .
>>>>
>>>> If you want to wade deeper into this morass, the following monograph
>>>> has some interesting information:
>>>>
>>>> Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Uwe Warner (2009): "Die Abfrage von
>>>> 'Ethnizität' in der international vergleichenden
Survey-Forschung".
>>>> ISBN 3-924725-15-2
http://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/5917
>>>>
>>>> It's in German, but there is an appendix ("Anhang A1"
starting on
>>>> p.60) which excerpts definitions of ethnicity or migratory background
>>>> from censuses of 27 countries, most of them in an English translation.
>>>>
>>>> They also quote (p.150) an internal working paper of the ISSP
>>>> (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Social_Survey_Programme )
>>>> which recommended to drop the "ethnic" variable from their
>>>> international surveys entirely:
>>>>
>>>> "We do not see any chance that any revision [of the questionnaires]
>>>> would give something comparable across all countries. The problem is
>>>> located at the conceptual level [...]. There are even big differences
>>>> for the 'developed' world. For instance, for the American
perspective
>>>> an internal differentiation of US citizens is crucial while a
>>>> differentiation of people with passports from other countries is
>>>> rather meaningless. For other countries, e.g. Germany or Ireland, the
>>>> reverse is true."
>>>>
>>>> All that said, regarding diversity efforts that focus exclusively on
>>>> the United States of America, a national editor survey in the US might
>>>> not encounter the above issues. You may recall this mailing list
>>>> thread from 2010:
>>>>
>>>>
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/engine?do=post_view_flat;post=215980;…
>>>> (aptly titled "A question for American Wikimedians")
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari
<rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
>>>
wrote:
>>>> > At the recent gendergap strategy retreat the issue of racial
>>>> demographics
>>>> > was briefly brought up but no one had any numbers on it, so we
didn't
>>>> know
>>>> > if it was an actual issue or not. Anecdotal evidence suggests there
>>>> is also
>>>> > a "racial gap" among editors, but it would be nice to have
some
>>>> numbers on
>>>> > this to facilitate discussion. I did some digging and the only
>>>> statistics I
>>>> > could find were about the racial demographics of American readers
>>>> > (
>>>>
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/American_Wikipedia_reader_demographics
>>>> ).
>>>> > It seems that none of our editor surveys have asked about race,
>>>> although
>>>> > we've asked almost every other demographic question imaginable.
>>>> >
>>>> > Does anyone know of any research or statistics related to the
racial
>>>> > demographics of Wikipedia editors?
>>>> >
>>>> > If not, should we consider doing a micro-survey as was done for
gender
>>>> > recently? (
>>>>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey)
>>>> Most definitely not, unless it is geolocated to the US and maybe a
>>>> select few other countries.
>>>> >
>>>> > Ryan Kaldari
>>>> >
>>>> > _______________________________________________
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Tilman Bayer
>>>> Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>> IRC (Freenode): HaeB
>>>>
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