[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> 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.
>
> The short answer: Wikipedia editors are volunteers and African-Americans
> rarely volunteer.

Regarding this claim in particular: incidentally, I was just at the
Boardsource conference last week, which is an annual conference for
board members and CEOs of non-profit organizations; it happened to be
in San Francisco this year. There were maybe 600+ people there from
organizations all over the country. Just from looking at the crowd, at
least 10% -- probably more -- of the people there were
African-American; these are all people who are leaders in their
respective organizations, which ranged all over the place but seemed
to be lots of health & human service organizations: child abuse
prevention, food banks, YMCA, etc; as well as many other types of
non-profits.

And according to the U.S. volunteer agency stats on the subject, rates
of African-American volunteerism are on the rise:
http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/assets/resources/FactSheetFinal.pdf
These rates lag behind the national average, but not by a huge amount.

-- phoebe