As pointed out by others, the highly contextualized nature of religion,
race, and ethnicity between countries makes it very difficult to impossible
to craft questions that are not overly reductive but still somewhat
universal. Despite this challenge, understanding diversity in a way that
captures these aspects is obviously quite important as they often figure
very strongly into power and representation within history, media, etc.
In general, if you're looking for large-scale surveys of editors, the Meta
category (Category:Editor surveys
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editor_surveys>) is actually
quite complete (same for readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Reader_surveys>). In particular,
I wrote what little I could find about these topics into this section of
our recently published knowledge gaps taxonomy:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.12314.pdf#subsubsection.3.1.7
The April 2011 editor survey took the approach of just asking people how
they felt they were different from others in the community -- this specific
question is not one that I would advocate today (asking people to identify
all the ways in which they may be "outsiders" is not particularly
welcoming) but this is also probably the style of approach (asking people
how well they feel represented within Wikipedia content or editor
community) that you'd have to take to get information on ethnicity / race /
religion without writing country-specific questions:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Editor_Survey_Report_-_…
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 6:12 AM Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The ethnicity / race question is an incredibly hard
question to
compose in an internationalised way.
Pretty much every country in the world uses different terms and there
are some very confusing cases where the same term is used in different
countries to mean very different things (e,g, "Asian" in UK English vs
New Zealand English). This is derived from varying legal definitions
(for example blood quantum vs one-drop laws); the history of
colonisation and waves of immigration to the country; along with
cultural differences.
cheers
stuart
--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 21:55, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Su-Laine Brodsky, 21/09/20 08:19:
> I’m wondering if any large-scale surveys have been done that ask
Wikipedia
editors about their race, ethnicity, or religion?
What international standards exist to phrase such questions?
Denominations commonly used in surveys in one country may be considered
horrific or even illegal in others.
I see OECD considers it a difficult problem too:
----
76. Current NSOs collection practices cluster around three broad
categories: 1) all OECD countries collect information on some diversity
proxies such as country of birth (36 OECD members); 2) a small majority,
mostly Eastern European countries, the United Kingdom and Ireland,
gather additional information on race and ethnicity (16 OECD members);
and 3) only a handful of countries in the Americas and Oceania collect
data on indigenous identity (6 OECD members). Diversity statistics are
collected from the perspective of either enumerating the size of the
relevant populations (typically in the census) or of comparing
well-being outcomes across different population groups.
77. While privacy and human rights legislation sometimes prevents or
discourages the routine collection of diversity data, the need to
improve data availability and quality is being recognised in most
countries. Many countries are piloting the addition of new ethnic
response options to more accurately reflect the make-up of their
societies (e.g. Ireland, the United States), while Belgium is
considering allowing collection of race and ethnicity data within the
restrictions imposed by the national legal framework. Within the
European Statistical System, the inclusion of more detailed migration
information is also being considered: The Framework Regulation for
Production of European Statistics on Persons and Households European
foresees the incorporation of questions on the country of birth of the
respondent’s parents in the Labour Force Surveys (from 2020), the
European Health Interview Survey, the European Union Statistics on
Income and Living Conditions, the Household Budget Surveys and the
Community surveys on ICT usage in households and by individuals. The
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights is pursuing its Roma and
Travellers Survey to collect comparable data in six selected Member
States in 2018 (FRA, 2018[77]).
----
https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=SDD/D…
Federico
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