Nice idea in principle, but there are still two hurdles to be overcome

 

  1. How do you get the cheatsheet to the new female editor? How do you spot new female editors? By what mechanism do you communicate with them? Can you assume they know about User Talk (my almost entirely unsuccessful attempts to communicate with new users in a friendly way to offer help suggests many don’t see the message.

 

  1. People don’t read user manuals, cheatsheets, etc. Every new Wikipedia user already gets one of those “Welcome to Wikipedia” on their User Tal which points them to a morass of information (which is admittedly written in the language of the expert Wikipedian not the new user) and I think these days they are also offered the “onboarding experience” (or whatever precisely it is called) which aims to teach them to do basic editing. However, generally what people (men and women) really want is “the answer to the question I have here and now” to get them past the immediate barrier to achieving their mission (whatever it was that motivated them to click that Edit button), not a set of lessons nor a set of documentation. Part of the problem we have created for ourselves is that all the policies and processes and technologies have set the bar far too high for many new editors to get started on their own. L

 

Kerry

 

 

From: gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Carol Moore dc
Sent: Thursday, 31 July 2014 10:24 AM
To: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participationof women within Wikimedia projects.
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] [Spam] Re: Sexualized environment on Commons

 

On 7/30/2014 5:51 AM, Marie Earley wrote:


>Things that I think might help:

Help pages wise, I'm sure they'd love to see you at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Help

I know I wasted a couple years learning the hard way because the Help pages didn't seem intuitive enough.

However one trick we have to remember is to go to the search box and type WP:_____ whatever the topic of interest is. One often gets a search return that get one just where one wants to go.

A "cheat sheet" of editing and conflict resolution tips for women would be a great addition to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force

Which is slowly but surely coming along.

CM