[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[theo10011]

Well why only African American Wikimedians, I think the issue might be the
same with other Racial Minorities in the US. How about Hispanic American or
Asian American Wikimedians. Apart from social issues inherent to minorities,
I think there might be something worth looking into, I doubt there would be
any data available to look into it yet.


I seem to recall, there was also the issue of Gender bias among Wikimedians
that was brought up earlier this year.


Regards


Theo


On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:05 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any
> > African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in
> > a European country without African population, so everything seemed to
> > me quite normal for a long time.
> >
> > I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans,
> > but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with
> > university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are
> > African Americans and present US president is almost, too.
> >
> > What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively
> white?
> >
> > Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we
> > solve to get more contributors.
>
> I ask myself the same question whenever I go to teach the incoming
> classes of computer science students here at my university. Although
> this is California, and we are close to having no ethnic majority in
> the state as a whole,*  the university population doesn't neatly
> mirror state demographics;** and the CS classes, anecdotally speaking,
> mirror it much less so. (It would be easy to claim that this is true
> nationwide, though the data*** doesn't actually back that up). And
> anyway, we know that formal education is a poor proxy for being a
> Wikipedian, or even for computer culture as a whole. You could
> probably just as helpfully look at the demographics of Silicon
> Valley,**** or any other big tech center in the U.S., and wonder why
> it was skewed white.
>
> I've only personally met a couple of black Americans in my time going
> around the U.S. meeting Wikipedians, which again is totally anecdotal,
> but considering that I've met a few hundred American Wikipedians in
> total would seem to argue for a low rate of participation. But then
> again, the people I've met at Wikimania and elsewhere are highly
> self-selected, and don't necessarily match our actual editor base with
> any certainty (I think about the black editor I met once at a small
> meetup who had never been to any sort of meetup before, or as far as I
> know since). I think the truth is that we just don't know, the same
> way that we just don't know exactly how many women participate or why.
>
> We *do* know -- both anecdotally and statistically, based on the
> readership to editorship conversion rates -- that all Wikipedians are
> outliers: we are all unusual in some way. It is not common to both
> want to participate in a wiki project and then to expend significant
> amounts of time doing so, and we more or less know the general reasons
> why someone does become a Wikipedian. These motivations, from what I
> can tell, cut across nationality and gender and all other possible
> categories: and I've been wondering if we've been going about this
> diversity discussion rather the wrong way for a long time -- if we
> should focus not on why so few people out of the general population
> participate, but rather who is likely to make a good Wikipedian and
> how we can encourage them, in all circumstances.*****
>
> -- phoebe
>
> p.s. race in America, as you can gather from reading the Wikipedia
> article below, is far from a dichotomy: I'd frame this question rather
> as what's our overall diversity, in terms of ethnicity and class and
> gender, with an eye to how we succeed or fail at being welcoming and
> representative; and how we address topical systemic bias overall.
>
>
> * http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po40.htm
> ** http://statfinder.ucop.edu/library/tables/table_106.aspx
> *** http://elliottback.com/wp/black-diversity-in-it-and-computer-science/,
> data from here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf07308/pdf/tab13.pdf;
> compare to national demographics:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Racial_makeup_of_the_U.S._population
> ****
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County,_California#Demographics
> ***** Things like university outreach programs do exactly this.
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
> <at> gmail.com *
>
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