It's hard for me to see how asking people about their race results in a win for WMF or for the movement.
First off, as others point out, race is a touchy subject. How do we ask people about their race without raising legitimate concerns among many of our respondent regarding *why* we're asking them for such highly personal information, and how we intend to use it? I feel like it's easier to provide a rationale for asking about gender (tho I know that can put people off as well).
Second, race (even "ethnicity") is closely tied to national/cultural/regional contexts. I don't know how Pew does it , but if we come up with our own list of racial categories, many of them are *going to be wrong*--maybe offensively so. Alternately, if we ask respondents to state their racial identity in terms that are meaningful to them, aggregating the information becomes a logistical nightmare.
Third... what *would* we do with this information? Conduct targeted outreach to encourage people in country FOO to edit, but *only* if they are members of ethnicity BAR?
Fourth, what are the potential unintended consequences of collecting and releasing the data? For instance, what are the consequences if we report that 80% of editors from an ethnically-divided country are members of an ethnic minority associated with an oppressive regime?
It's one thing for community members to self-identify and organize on-wiki around (impossible to verify) racial identity or race-related topics. It's another for the Wikimedia Foundation to be seen as taking a *stance* on the proper racial makeup of our volunteer community. A lot easier to take a stance on categories like gender, Global North/South etc. IMO but these are also potentially hot-button issues.
We have all sorts of racial gaps. Too many to address (or even articulate) individually given the resources we have. We also have socio-economic gaps, ideological gaps, and geographical gaps that are deeply intertwined with each other and with race. Which lens do we want to use?
If we do want to use race as a lever for increasing editor engagement and content quality, seems to me our best shot is to spread awareness around the major race-related gaps we know about (e.g. coverage of the US Civil Rights movement) as a way of drawing attention to the general problem that racial gaps create for our topical coverage and the POV of our content.
If we want to identify potential racial gaps without asking people sensitive questions, we might start by looking at language gaps. http://omnipedia.northwestern.edu/
In other words, don't tell people what flag to rally around; suggest opportunities for them to make meaningful contributions.
And please, please don't racially profile people based on photos :)
- J
On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 4:39 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
Laura Hale, 20/07/2013 11:05:
2) ask the question directly, "Why didn't you edit/register? ...x-1) Thought it was a male-only club, x) Oh, isn't Wikipedia a nerd cabal?, x+1) Because Wikipedia feels like a WASP-only thing" etc. This would require a lot of effort to come up with a good phrasing to cover all "discrimination" feelings and to avoid leading/loaded/biased questions which would skew results, but doesn't sound impossible. (Profs in my university regularly do such things for sexual harassment and other discrimination surveys in order to assess the scale of the problem.)This actually seems a bit backwards. Why not ask existing contributors why they contribute?
Perhaps we're talking about different things, (2) was meant to be for readers mainly, while (1) makes sense mainly for editors as the readership demographics is supposedly less skewed (though one could want to verify this). The option would integrate easily enough with questions we've already asked in the past: <https://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Research:Wikipedia_* *Readership_Survey_2011/Text#**PARTICIPATION_LEVELS_AND_** BARRIERS_.28EDITING_AND_**DONATING.29https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Readership_Survey_2011/Text#PARTICIPATION_LEVELS_AND_BARRIERS_.28EDITING_AND_DONATING.29> D2, D7, D10...
Especially amongst targeted populations? Develop
strategies for recruitment and retention based around those answers? My gut feeling is that a lot of the responses that would be listed in a questionere are based around answers like those listed. My own experience with getting female friends to edit has been more along the lines of: 1) If I want to contribute to something, I want to either get paid or get credit, 2) I do not see why I should bother to edit. What is in it for me? This issue has actually come up much, much, much more frequently for me than the issues of visual editors. I rarely see good arguments that work towards intrinsic motivation as to why a person should contribute. I'd love to see some good videos pitching why a person should contribute to Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikidata.
Sure, but this is already being done extensively, both by the storytellers and by LCA on non-English communities (mentioned on the annual plan, < https://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#** Other_2012-13_achievementshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#Other_2012-13_achievements>), though probably not for most sister projects yet. It's also unrelated on how to answer the original question of the thread.
Nemo
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