On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:30 PM, jessamyn c. west &lt;jessamyn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Hi Jessamyn! Fancy seeing you here :) Very nice to have you. I'd be interested in hearing more about the specific techniques the MeFi mods have used in visible norm-setting, and how much help you get from community members "self-policing"; has this changed over time? Do you have specific policies or is it all cultural? Most recently I participated in a very long This sucks. But I'm also curious if you'd ever had to deal with [for yourself or others] similar situations at MeFi, and if so how? (so many questions, sorry!) I know the community dynamics over there are quite different from Wikipedia's, and I've always gotten the impression that people at MeFi are really supportive of their fellow community members. cheers, Phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

On 2 February 2011 21:30, jessamyn c. west &lt;jessamyn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Jessamyn, welcome: thanks for coming here. I "know" you from Metafilter: you are great there. And I also liked your piece for the Times :-) So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature. ((( Kind of like the Less Wrong community too. Essentially --- part of what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls “the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd.” Not everyone at Wikimedia is all those things, but I'd say we skew towards them. ))) So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to women. What's tough though is that the conversation on Metafilter happens in one place (or I guess several places: Ask Metafilter, Metafilter, Metatalk, etc.) -- whereas on the Wikimedia projects there is no single gathering point for discussion: discussion takes place on a multitude of talk pages and user pages and other places such as IRC, mailing lists, etc. Which means the task of influencing discussion is less easy. And our spaces themselves, to an extent, grow out of a gendered place. For example, someone said earlier in this thread that IRC might be a good tool for offering coaching/guidance/support to new people... I liked the impulse behind the suggestion, but I actually think IRC is unlikely to provide solutions for us. Because IRC itself is so heavily gendered: it's a tool used by "people like us" (see technophile/Silicon-Valley-programmer etc., above), and it's a tool NOT used by the people we want to attract. I remember reading a critique of IRC on one of the geek women type blogs/spaces, where someone said she tends to stay out of IRC chat rooms, because they are rife with boys making sex jokes. Wikimedia's IRC chat rooms, in my experience, are much less like that than non-Wikimedia chat rooms, but still: the line of argument resonated for me. I'd be really surprised if IRC usage in general didn't skew heavily male. I think it would be helpful for us to hone in a little more directly on what the actual problem is, so we can develop solutions targeted to exactly what we want to achieve. We need a kind of 'theory of the problem.' Something like this: We want women to contribute to Wikipedia because we want Wikipedia to contain the sum of all human knowledge, not just the stuff that men know. Currently some women contribute to Wikipedia, which is terrific, but we want more. We're agnostic on what they contribute: women on Wikipedia should write about whatever interests them, be it Barbie dolls or feminist authors or nanotechnology. And we don't particularly want to make assumptions about what might or might not interest women: it's not necessary, and it can trigger lots of angry excited conversation about gender differences, which is a distraction from the actual recruitment itself. Why don't women contribute? Partly it's because, for many reasons that there's no point articulating because they're outside our control, women tend to be less tech-centric than men, and they tend to see technology as less "fun." This means that the hurdle of learning wiki syntax is a higher barricade for (many) women, than it is for (many) men. We're addressing that barricade --slowly, painfully-- through our usability efforts. It is also true that women tend to have less free time than men, and they tend to spend their free time less in solitary pursuits. (And interestingly, anecdotally we hear that women experience Wikipedia as a solitary experience rather than a communal one, which is counter-intuitive and problematic.) Once women learn wiki syntax, there are additional social/cultural barricades. To be clear, these barricades affect men too, but they seem to be disproportionately dissuading for women. The social/cultural barricade is essentially: women (tend to) dislike fighty cultures more than men. And the culture likely is experienced by (many) women as fightier than it is for men --- just as I believe for example Indian people experience Wikipedia as fightier than Americans do. Basically, underrepresented groups have a tougher time on Wikipedia than well-represented groups, because of our consensus decisionmaking model. (Witness for example the discussion about whether to name the Ganges article "Ganges" or "Ganga," in which Indian enWP editors are getting squelched by non-Indian enWP editors. Witness also Jessamyn's earlier "why bother" comment about drama and conflict, and the myriad other feedback we've gotten from women on describing --on Metafilter, Jezabel, and here-- their Wikipedia editing experiences as exhausting, draining, boring.) So to the extent that that's a reasonable theory about what's happening, what do we do about it? Where can we focus our efforts, and how can we help women who want to contribute and would be good editors? I have some ideas which I'll post later, and I would love to hear from everyone here. I'm rushing to a meeting right now, so I've written this super-fast and rough ...... but I'll be back later. And again, thanks Jessamyn for joining us here. Your experience will I think be invaluable. Metafilter is the only place I know of that has successfully created a culture change like what we're aiming to do; it's impressive and I think we can learn from it :-) Thanks, Sue