On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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.

Even a general question like that is pretty complicated. What is a minority in one country is a majority in another, so to do this with any meaning, you'd have to also ask where people were located.

I think one way to get started on tackling this important but incredibly touchy subject is to collect the best research we can find on ethnic demographics among global Internet users. Organizations like pewinternet.org have done rigorous work on demographic questions like this, at least in the U.S. When it comes to the gender gap we know that we are subject to a bias that the rest of the Web does not, by and large, so a good place to start is probably understanding the context Wikipedia operates in on the matter.

Steven Walling

https://wikimediafoundation.org/