On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 8:03 AM, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: The women joined this list because several people in our Australian community thought it would be a good resource for them when engaging in their outreach to increase female participation on Wikipedia. It turned out not to be that. In fact, the list confirmed the worst of the worst about Wikipedia and its efforts to reach out to women from an institutional point of view ; they no longer found any value in doing the work they had otherwise been doing after joining the list. (The work the had done prior to joining the list included speaking to women's groups of different types, having had one or two editing workshops and appearing on at least one radio program, possibly two.) Sincerely, Laura Hale -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com

Quoting what Ryan said below.. Yes, this is something we've thought about when talking about closing the gap. I did a non-scientific study a few months back with women Wikimedians, who are English language speakers. The desire to see female role models and spokes people who are active editors and vocal participates in the movement is something desired. I do think that possibility has a real great opportunity to influence, especially in country's where chapters are prominent (like in Germany, Netherlands). I also wholeheartedly believe that knowing the value of what Wikipedia and related projects *provides* and gives to the world is a really major draw for those of us who do contribute. I also believe that bad manners, poor behavior, over burdening policies and the stereotypical "geek culture" of Wikipedia turns some people off; I don't want to generalize; this is just me speaking from my own experience as a Wikimedian and what turns me off in regards to the culture. If only Oprah was still on the air...I'd love to have seen Sue on Oprah ;-) -Sarah [[User:SarahStierch]] en.wp On 12/14/11 4:27 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: -- Sarah Stierch Consulting -- Historical, cultural, new media & artistic research & advising. http://www.sarahstierch.com

On 12/14/2011 7:08 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: When it comes to making real changes in the real world and building real things, males tend to be more possessive and territorial and competitive and play far rougher than females prefer; and far rougher than they do with males cause they don't want to be bested by a female. But they will just ignore the more "expressive" areas since that's not a competitive thing...

* Johannes Rohr wrote: I am saying that women are not driven to do this kind of thing; you'll hear from female non-contributors that they don't know why they should contribute. Almost a quarter of Wikipedia contributors also happen to contribute to open source software, even though they are probably less than a percent among users. They are driven to do this kind of thing. There is much you can do about it, but you have to first understand it is a general societal thing; contributing to Wikipedia is not blogging, and so even if there is not much of gender gap in blogging, that does tell you anything about the gender gap among contributors to Wikipedia. That women do not know why they should contribute to Wikipedia can be found in various surveys; beyond that I've not seen much of an attempt to underlying causes. Like in your initial question, people look for "deterrents", but not so much for motiviation or qualification beyond silly answer options like "I don't have enough information to share". You would have to ask questions like whether non-contributors are used to collaborate with large and diverse groups of mostly strangers. You would have to ask what people (intend to) do for a living. When they've last been recognized by a stranger for having built or made something, online in particular, perhaps from someone living on the other side of the planet. If they tell their friends they made some article about the local monument, would they find that cool, or not care, or what else do they think the reaction would be. Are they used to write texts in some semi-formal, fact-oriented writing style? Are they used to some form of markup, "bbcodes" on a forum, formatting tags on their blogs, perhaps a CMS syntax they use at work? Is there something they would like to see covered in Wikipedia that currently isn't, and do they feel able to do the research needed to make one, even if they don't have the time? How would they like to be among the people who made Wikipedia? Open source developers are hundreds of times as likely as women to be a Wikipedia contributor, they tend to "build stuff" for a living, they are likely to have experience with collaborating with strangers, they tend to write documentation in some non-personal writing style, they tend to have their contributions in this area recognized by their peers, they're likely to have experience with code, and so on. They probably often like this whole Sharing Stuff thing, the ability to find something online and add to it to make it better. Every time you load a Wikipedia page, it'll have run through hundreds of lines of code I wrote when in secondary e- ducation when friends of mine played some football game. I am quite sure I am getting a greater kick out of that than they got from their game. Instead of looking at this, you get survey reports with "Percent of female editors who reported experiencing the listed harassment" where one of the "listed harassments" is "Someone tried to flirt with me". -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

* Ryan Kaldari wrote: Read [[File:Editor Survey Report - April 2011.pdf]] on commons; Q9. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/