Dear all,

Just plucked this off WM Israel's June report on wikimedia-l posted July 15 and wanted to share here in case you'll had missed it.

Fifth Wikipedia Academy Conference 

The fifth Wikipedia Academy conference in Israel was held on June 2, 2013 in the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. The central theme of this year's conference, which attracted an audience of 150—among them Wikipedians, members of the academia and the business world—was "Why are there fewer women editors on Wikipedia".

We were honored to welcome the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees member Bishakha Datta , as our keynote speaker. We also had a women's panel with some of our Wikipedia Israel community members, and several professional researchers.


Wikimedia Israel Survey

On June 2013, Wikimedia Israel conducted a survey, according to which 23% of Israeli Wikipedians are women (compared to 10–15% in other parts of the world), 57% of Wikipedians are single and have a bachelor's or master's degree, 15% are under the age of 15 and 5% are over 60. Only 29% of the editors said they wrote new articles; the others engaged in adding content to existing articles, correcting mistakes and adding media.

You will find the exact statistics on this press release.

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Some additional comments:

While researching my presentation, I went through every single email on this list since January and found it incredibly useful. So thank you, all. And thanks, Sue, for your foresight in getting this up and going. (In an aside, I also found myself comparing and contrasting the tone/s and styles of posting on this list and on wikimedia-l, which would be worth a research study of its own someday).

But wanted to draw your attention to the conference itself, which was excellently organized, meaty, and buzzing with men and women from within and outside of wikimedia (bloggers, academics, students, researchers) engaged in productive conversations, largely in Hebrew, which I followed via informal translations. The conference room was full and everyone present was deeply engaged.

Apart from all that is documented in the links above, we had an interesting micro-exchange on gender habits related to editing: some editors felt that men will confidently place information on a wiki page, even if not totally sure about the veracity of this information. They said that women will hesitate many times before hitting 'save'; checking and cross-checking the information until they are certain of it beyond doubt.

This discussion was prompted by a study of women and knowledge of politics in the US; a survey showed that women would click 'don't know' far more than men, who would guess an answer if they didn't know one, instead of hitting don't know. Removing 'don't know' was suggested as an option to get women to change this 'uncertain' behaviour. Obviously, this doesn't hold for all women or all men, but just wanted to put it out.

I also met the Monday Group, a small group of women, who edit every Monday - they get together and get snacks and drinks and have fun editing together. After the conference, we had a cozy wikichix dinner, with editors working on Hebrew wikipedia. A lovely end to a wonderful day.

Best
Bishakha