[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 17 November 2010 13:35, 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.
>
> Oh gosh, I want to jump in here too, super-fast. Good question, Milos :-)
>
> I think the answer to this question is complicated, but known/knowable.
>
> Essentially I think it's fairly obvious that US Wikimedians are
> disproportionately male and disproportionately white -- like Phoebe,
> that's definitely been my own anecdotal experience in meeting
> Wikipedians, and although the people we meet face-to-face may not be
> perfectly representative of all Wikipedians, we don't have any reason
> to think the actual US Wikimedia editor population is dramatically
> different from the people we happen to meet.
>
> I would attribute the maleness and whiteness mostly to the
> tech-centricity of the Wikimedia community. We know it's a
> tech-centric group, presumably because editors were in the beginning
> early adopter types, and continuing because the editing interface is
> still relatively non-user-friendly.
>
> And we know that the tech community in general (in the United States)
> skews male, white and Asian ... And that that is self-reinforcing over
> time. In fact, this research
> http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_14383730?nclick_check=1&forced=true
> found that blacks, Latinos and women are losing ground in (Silicon
> Valley) tech, not gaining it.
>
> I would expect that all the factors that skew tech community
> demographics, have a big overlap with the factors that skew Wikimedia
> community demographics. There's lots of good research and thinking
> about that. (For example, the book Unlocking the Clubhouse has lots of
> good thinking about gender, and some about African-Americans and
> Latino-Americans.) There is lots of available information.

Have there been any studies on this issue within the open source community?
Their community would be even more skewed towards tech, and their
movement is a few steps ahead of us.

--
John Vandenberg