The point is that the relevance of research and of its authors becomes
increasingly clear from the data we hold in Wikidata.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Fri, 28 Sep 2018 at 02:05, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pine
This paper has some good studies about gender and new editors and reverting
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shilad_Sen/publication/221367798_WPClu…
It shows that both male and female newbies are equally likely to drop out
after being reverted for good-faith edits, BUT that female newbies are more
likely to be reverted than male newbies, leading to a greater proportion of
them dropping out.
It also shows that male and female editors tend to be attracted to
different types of topic. "There is a greater concentration of females in
the People and Arts areas, while males focus more on Geography and
Science." (see Table 1 in the paper). And their engagement with History
seems lower.
So why are newbie women reverted more? This paper does not investigate
that. But I think it has to be either than they are reverted because they
are women (i.e. conscious discrimination) or because women's edits are less
acceptable in some way.
I have *hypothesised* that newbie women may get reverted more because
women show higher interest in People but not in History suggesting women
are more likely to be editing articles about living people than about dead
people. BLP policy is stricter on verification compared with dead people
topics, or with topics in male-attracting topics like Geography and
Science, so women are perhaps doing more BLP edits as newbies and more
likely to be reverted because they fail to provide a citation or their
citation comes from a source which may not be considered reliable (e.g.
celebrity magazine).
If this could be established as at least a part of the problem, maybe
there might be targeted solutions to address the problem. E.g. maybe
newbies should not be allowed to edit articles which are BLP or have a high
revert history (suggesting it's dangerous territory for some reason, e.g.
real-world controversy, "ownership") and are deflected to the Talk page to
suggest edits (as with a protected article or semi-protected article).
Currently we auto-confirm user accounts at 10 edits or 4 days (from
memory). But these thresholds are based on the likelihood of vandalism
(early good-faith behaviour is a good predictor of future good faith
behaviour). But, having trained people, I know that the auto-confirmation
threshold should not be used as "beyond newbie" indicator; they are newbies
for many more edits.
How many edits do you need to stop being a newbie? I don't know, but as I
know myself with over 100k edits, if I edit an article outside my normal
interests, I am far more likely to be reverted than in my regular topic
area, so we can all be newbies in unfamiliar topic spaces. There is a lot
of convention, pre-existing consensus and other "norms" in topic spaces
that the "newbie to this topic" doesn't know. All editors in this
situation
may back off, but the established editor has a comfort zone (normal topic
space) to return to, the total newbie does not.
Kerry
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