On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:

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? 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.

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