That's a great point Tillman, and some very interesting reading material.  As I was reading, I was thinking, perhaps asking "Do you consider yourself to be part of a (a) minority ethnicity or (b) majority ethnicity?" might suffice.  It's kind of what we're after and it seems more universal than the US-centric "what ethnicity are you" question.

Dan

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.org> wrote:

With all due respect and appreciation for the highly commendable
intention behind the question, it is itself a symptom of systemic
bias.

A while ago a community member asked me the same thing - why we don't
ask for the editor's race in the WMF editor surveys. I wasn't around
when the demographics part of the current editor surveys series was
designed, but after looking into this topic a bit, I think the answer
is simple: Because these are international surveys.

Survey questions about race are vastly more common and accepted in the
US (and some other countries like, afaik, the UK or Australia) than in
many other countries. In much of Europe, for example, asking people
about their race, or classifying them racially, is considered very
offensive (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_classification)#European_Union
). This is particularly true in my home country, Germany, for
historical reasons - personally, I don't hold very strong views on the
topic, but as a German who moved to the US last year, I can tell you
that it was quite an unusual experience to be asked to state my race
on an official form for the first time.

What's more, even when switching from "race" to the somewhat less
offensive (but even more complicated) concept of "ethnicity", it seems
difficult to come up with an internationally accepted list for the
purposes of a global survey, cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_censuses .

If you want to wade deeper into this morass, the following monograph
has some interesting information:

Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Uwe Warner (2009): "Die Abfrage von
'Ethnizität' in der international vergleichenden Survey-Forschung".
ISBN 3-924725-15-2 http://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/5917

It's in German, but there is an appendix ("Anhang A1" starting on
p.60) which excerpts definitions of ethnicity or migratory background
from censuses of 27 countries, most of them in an English translation.

They also quote (p.150) an internal working paper of the ISSP
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Social_Survey_Programme )
which recommended to drop the "ethnic" variable from their
international surveys entirely:

"We do not see any chance that any revision [of the questionnaires]
would give something comparable across all countries. The problem is
located at the conceptual level [...]. There are even big differences
for the 'developed' world. For instance, for the American perspective
an internal differentiation of US citizens is crucial while a
differentiation of people with passports from other countries is
rather meaningless. For other countries, e.g. Germany or Ireland, the
reverse is true."

All that said, regarding diversity efforts that focus exclusively on
the United States of America, a national editor survey in the US might
not encounter the above issues. You may recall this mailing list
thread from 2010:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/engine?do=post_view_flat;post=215980;page=1;mh=-1;list=wiki;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC
 (aptly titled "A question for American Wikimedians")

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> At the recent gendergap strategy retreat the issue of racial demographics
> was briefly brought up but no one had any numbers on it, so we didn't know
> if it was an actual issue or not. Anecdotal evidence suggests there is also
> a "racial gap" among editors, but it would be nice to have some numbers on
> this to facilitate discussion. I did some digging and the only statistics I
> could find were about the racial demographics of American readers
> (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/American_Wikipedia_reader_demographics).
> It seems that none of our editor surveys have asked about race, although
> we've asked almost every other demographic question imaginable.
>
> Does anyone know of any research or statistics related to the racial
> demographics of Wikipedia editors?
>
> If not, should we consider doing a micro-survey as was done for gender
> recently? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey)

Most definitely not, unless it is geolocated to the US and maybe a
select few other countries.

>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
> _______________________________________________
> Analytics mailing list
> Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
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--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB

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