2011/2/12 shirish शिरीष <shirishag75(a)gmail.com>
c. The only issue seems to be :-
1. Lack of commitment and a community which revolves around some topic
which is their baby. *scratch our itch* stuff. I know it contravens
what I said above but that is an issue.
b. Lack of helper/guider community .
c. Lack of referencing leading to deletion of article whatever leading
to not fun thing of adding more stuff.
Hey Shirish,
Been talking to lots of women about this - one barrier I'm finding from
informal chats with many women in India who are otherwise comfy with the net
is technical. At the first Mumbai meetup in Sept 2010, women who blog etc
regularly said they found the editing interface much harder to use, so
tried, then abandoned it.
At the Kolkata wiki 10 meetup in Jan 2011, a woman who had attended an
earlier meetup requested a wiki workshop for a group of women - she wanted a
separate workshop for women only so that women could really understand how
to edit and work through the editing interface and ask basic questions
without appearing stupid or ignorant. She felt constrained to ask these
questions in the more technologically-sophisticated environment of the
regular meetups.
Also, many women who are interested in editing are not necessarily willing
to learn how to edit + related policies on their own.
So yes, helpers and guides would be great - as well as workshops both aimed
specifically at women, and general workshops where we encourage more women
to participate. (We don't want to lump women into a separate category
necessarily, but if we really want to encourage more women to edit, we do
need to address barriers *they* identify as well - so a mixed strategy would
be great.)
Also, while we should, of course, continue to do workshops at IITs, VJTI and
other technical institutes, there's already a gender gap at these institutes
- where there are many more men than women. If we only look for women where
there are largely men, we are unlikely to find them. So it would be good to
look for IT or related departments at women's colleges such as SNDT etc too.
There are many other barriers, some general, some specific to women, as is
being discussed on gendergap...just wanted to highlight this.
Cheers
Bishakha