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)
Ryan Kaldari
Well you can start by just looking at the pictures taken at Wikimania over the years. That pretty much shows our editor demographics as well as Wikimania attendees
2013/7/19, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org:
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)
Ryan Kaldari
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Yeah, that was high on my list of anecdotal evidence :)
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Well you can start by just looking at the pictures taken at Wikimania over the years. That pretty much shows our editor demographics as well as Wikimania attendees
2013/7/19, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org:
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)
Ryan Kaldari
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Only if you think that Wikimania attendees aee at all representative of our general editing cohort, which I think is a very questionable proposition.
Cheers, Craig On 20/07/2013 8:30 AM, "Jane Darnell" jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Well you can start by just looking at the pictures taken at Wikimania over the years. That pretty much shows our editor demographics as well as Wikimania attendees
2013/7/19, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org:
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)
Ryan Kaldari
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
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;p... (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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
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;p... (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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
What if we only asked the question in countries where it was culturally appropriate? Even a single data point would be more useful than none.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.orgwrote:
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;p... (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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Ryan: suppose you would have this information what would change? Would we prioritize features differently? Would we stop doing certain things, start doing things? I am having a hard time finding a use case.
D — Sent from Mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
What if we only asked the question in countries where it was culturally appropriate? Even a single data point would be more useful than none. Ryan Kaldari On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.orgwrote:
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;p... (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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Sure, we could ask the Education program to reach out to universities or university programs related to under-represented groups. The reason I ask isn't just to stir up controversy. I've done a lot of editing related to the US Civil Rights Movement, and I've noticed that there are virtually no other Wikipedians actively working on these articles (and lots of red links). The reason I ask is because I'm wondering if this lack of content is related to demographic issue or not. It seems like a fairly analogous problem to the gender gap, and thus worth doing some research on.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Ryan: suppose you would have this information what would change? Would we prioritize features differently? Would we stop doing certain things, start doing things? I am having a hard time finding a use case.
D — Sent from Mailbox https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:
What if we only asked the question in countries where it was culturally appropriate? Even a single data point would be more useful than none.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.orgwrote:
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;p... (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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.orghave 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.
On Saturday, July 20, 2013, Dan Andreescu 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.
This too is potentially problematic. I lived in CNMI for a while. The local population that was the dominant group was Chamorros. There were 13 white people on the whole island I lived on and 3 African Americans out of about 3,000 people. There was a sizeable chunk of Chinese workers who worked at the casino. Yes, I was part of the minority community as a white person and, yes, I was subject to bias. (It gave me a much better appreciation for African Americans in the USA to be watched like a hawk everytime I entered a store, having people occasionally follow me around to watch me.) Some countries have radically different experiences with race. Think of Japan, or places like Korea. I have had white, female American acquaintences tell me they were mistaken for Russian prostitutes in both countries.
If I was trying to get a better feel for this as a potential issue, I would do a combination of research methods and then collect them all, and try to arrive at a wider picture. This would include examining any survey research done on the existing body of literature, getting infobox data for things like race (and then tabulating that against country of origins and native language), looking at where identified "minority" editors are contributing article wise, looking at those experiences in terms of say total edit reversions on articles related to that topic. (I can remember an issue about African American women in professions categories that led to the creation of the article "African American women in politics" on English Wikipedia because there was a rationale that the failure of an article existed showed the lack of necessity for this specific category grouping.) I would also do sampling on photos from meetups. I would go through any chapter reports and see what chapters have written about this internally inside their own research or based on their own membership details. I would look at the representation of who was selected by the WMF in fundraising banners. (Indians from India is different than Indians from say the USA or Australia because of the bias inside their own country.) Then I would compile that all together. While it would not be as simple or pretty as one methodology, a mixed methods approach would more likely give a better idea of the picture when the population boundaries are clearly unknown.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
You could also just approach the issue from the other side; namely that Wikipedia editors are heavily overrepresented by young white males in North America and Europe. The whole example of lack of coverage on civil rights cases in the Southern US states is just as big a gap as the lack of coverage on pedagogical issues for example, as the group of young parents worldwide is also underrepresented.
2013/7/20, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com:
On Saturday, July 20, 2013, Dan Andreescu 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.
This too is potentially problematic. I lived in CNMI for a while. The local population that was the dominant group was Chamorros. There were 13 white people on the whole island I lived on and 3 African Americans out of about 3,000 people. There was a sizeable chunk of Chinese workers who worked at the casino. Yes, I was part of the minority community as a white person and, yes, I was subject to bias. (It gave me a much better appreciation for African Americans in the USA to be watched like a hawk everytime I entered a store, having people occasionally follow me around to watch me.) Some countries have radically different experiences with race. Think of Japan, or places like Korea. I have had white, female American acquaintences tell me they were mistaken for Russian prostitutes in both countries.
If I was trying to get a better feel for this as a potential issue, I would do a combination of research methods and then collect them all, and try to arrive at a wider picture. This would include examining any survey research done on the existing body of literature, getting infobox data for things like race (and then tabulating that against country of origins and native language), looking at where identified "minority" editors are contributing article wise, looking at those experiences in terms of say total edit reversions on articles related to that topic. (I can remember an issue about African American women in professions categories that led to the creation of the article "African American women in politics" on English Wikipedia because there was a rationale that the failure of an article existed showed the lack of necessity for this specific category grouping.) I would also do sampling on photos from meetups. I would go through any chapter reports and see what chapters have written about this internally inside their own research or based on their own membership details. I would look at the representation of who was selected by the WMF in fundraising banners. (Indians from India is different than Indians from say the USA or Australia because of the bias inside their own country.) Then I would compile that all together. While it would not be as simple or pretty as one methodology, a mixed methods approach would more likely give a better idea of the picture when the population boundaries are clearly unknown.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
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On 07/20/2013 12:57 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote:
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
In every local society (country or region) there are some questions that are asked in censuses and surveys. In Sweden, it used to be "social group", which defined group 1 as academics, group 2 as those with secondary education, and 3 as workers and farmers. Today, as almost everybody has a secondary education but Sweden has become an immigration destination, a more common division is foreign-born and foreign background (having foreign-born parents). Such questions that are included in national statistics, could also be asked to the wiki community. We could work with Eurostat to find some question that can be used throughout the European Union.
My unscientific feeling is that the Swedish wiki community is the mostly the "white and nerdy" demographic, being young and having some college education themselves and Swedish-born grandparents with less education. To become more inclusive, the Swedish wiki community would need to reach out to more immigrants. But that seems to be about as hard as getting sports people to edit Wikipedia.
We could certainly survey current Swedish wikipedians to find out their social status and background, just like a U.S. survey could ask about race. But how should we use the results from such a survey? Should we start outreach programs to town districts where many immigrants live, and see if the survey next year gives any different results?
Lars Aronsson, 20/07/2013 02:19:
But that seems to be about as hard as getting sports people to edit Wikipedia.
That's hard on sv.wiki? Oh, the envy! </irony> I don't know if asking gender to people on a website is really more accepted/acceptable than other demographics questions, but that would seem wrong in itself to me. (Apart from the highly-connotated word "race" which is basically unusable unless you're talking with someone you know very well.) I don't see why gender would be more relevant than the social context of origin; it's definitely the opposite IMHO, gender is largely irrelevant in our case (unlike Facebook or a dating website). We have a focus on gender just because that's a problem so easily seen, not because it's actually more important. From a statistical point of view, Ryan's interest is definitely legit. We have some statistics from other resources like comScore or Google I think, but their focus is different and reliability always mysterious; Google is mostly interested in income and so on to tailor ads. It would make sense to put some effort in getting useful data ourselves if there are no other good sources. If asking about ethnicity is impossible, we could invest more efforts in measuring correlates, for instance: 1) find out what other metrics correlate best to ethnicity and focus on those, infer possible underrepresentations (is there more than income and education which we currently ask? do we have enough focus on those? we also don't ask about education of the family of origin IIRC and we were only able to conclude that wikimedia editors are more educated than average); 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.)
Nemo
On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
- 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.
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.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_achievements), though probably not for most sister projects yet. It's also unrelated on how to answer the original question of the thread.
Nemo
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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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.
I really like your point above Johnathan, and I'd like to second the "please don't racially profile people based on photos" plea. But in response to your paragraph above, maybe questions like this would be useful (substitute any under-covered area in here):
1. Coverage of the US Civil Rights Movement in Southern States is limited by Wikipedia standards. Are you someone who would like to see that change for the better?
2. Would you consider becoming an editor for the primary reason of increasing coverage here?
3. What are some things that keep you from becoming an editor?
a) time commitment b) voice drowned out by the majority c) technical challenge etc...
Yeah, I like the idea of making people aware of the impact of the racial gap on our content, rather than asking them about their own race.
- J
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.
I really like your point above Johnathan, and I'd like to second the "please don't racially profile people based on photos" plea. But in response to your paragraph above, maybe questions like this would be useful (substitute any under-covered area in here):
- Coverage of the US Civil Rights Movement in Southern States is limited
by Wikipedia standards. Are you someone who would like to see that change for the better?
- Would you consider becoming an editor for the primary reason of
increasing coverage here?
- What are some things that keep you from becoming an editor?
a) time commitment b) voice drowned out by the majority c) technical challenge etc...
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On 07/20/2013 11:05 AM, Laura Hale wrote:
This actually seems a bit backwards. Why not ask existing contributors why they contribute?
Can that ever be useful? People easily produce reasons after the fact, that are either untrue or impossible to apply to other individuals.
Just look here:
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?
Turn the problem around: What's wrong with you, Laura, (or me, for that matter) since we contribute without credit? In the larger population, we are the minority. Do we lack some basic street smarts, since we devote valuable time to a hopelessly utopian project that doesn't pay? Is our mental deficiency more common among men than women, since men seem to dominate those who do edit? Should we look for more individuals that already have this abnormal lack of a healthy level of greed?
The fact that we haven't addressed the recruiting of new volunteers in these terms of mental disability, is perhaps a lack of self-awareness? Are we living in denial?
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 07/20/2013 11:05 AM, Laura Hale wrote:
This actually seems a bit backwards. Why not ask existing contributors why they contribute?
Can that ever be useful? People easily produce reasons after the fact, that are either untrue or impossible to apply to other individuals.
Yes, it can be useful because understanding motivation can be a great tool for outreach and for editor retention. You can compare the list of motivations as to why people contribute versus why people fail to contribute. There often appears a great big disconnect between the list, and I have not seen much evidence to suggest that people have explored this.
Why is it that some people contribute because think free sharing of knowledge is an important activity to engage in in their free time? But others do not contribute because they think the editor is too complex? Perhaps, the motivation to overcome the editing problems is higher for some populations than others... because one set is willing to do that and it is a non-issue but for another, it is a non-starter.
On 07/19/2013 05:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
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)
I definitely don't think it should be asked with the same prominence as the gender survey. Although that is/was (it was removed from English Wikipedia, but is now on other Wikipedias) optional (there was an opt-out button), it was still a question that prominently met people immediately on signup.
Moreover, gender questions are fairly common online (as part of signup forms), much more so than racial surveys in my opinion. Although people may not want to share gender info with strangers, most people accept gender as a real concept.
A race question *might* fit in a broader editor survey, that people explicitly choose to take. In that case, it wouldn't be the only thing we're asking, nor would people feel pressured to even take the survey.
Matt Flaschen