http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/women_and_wikipedia
Where is this from? "Many Wikipedians say anyone can contribute, so
women are to blame if they don't contribute more." That's a terribly
painful thing to hear and I'd probably physical injure anyone who said
something like that.
Check out the comments as well.
--
Sarah Stierch Consulting
Historical, cultural & artistic research, advising & event planning.
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http://www.sarahstierch.com/ <http://www.sarahstierch.com>
Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Joan Gomà and I am a man. As you
can understand my name very often produce funny situations. So I think
having a non biased view of the reality is important.
I am Catalan wikipedian and president of Amical Viquipèdia the Catalan
association of wikipedians.
I am highly interested in understanding and closing the gender’s gap for
many reasons. It is not the less important that I believe that closing the
gender gap can help us in closing the big gap.
For me the big gap is the gap between the people that could contribute to
Wikipedia and those who actually do. For example we need more people from
educational system where women are overrepresented.
We can build hypothesis, give opinions and make trials. For example Catalan
wikipedians we changed the name of our association from “Amics de la
Viquipèdia” (male friends of Wikipedia) to “Amical Vquipèdia” (friends of
wikipedia). Catalan wikipedians are happy with this change but we can’t say
that today there is a single wikipedian more because of it.
I think that we should start accurately measuring the amount of the gap. I
have reasons to think that our figures are biased.
To start they are based upon the people answering a survey. In Catalan
Wikipedia we survey the readers periodically and I can assure that people
answering is not representative of the general population. More than 30% of
the people answering the survey say they are authors of Wikipedia. This is
clearly far away from the average readership behaviour. So as we are using
figures based on the people answering the survey if women where less (or
more) inclined than men to answer we would have an underestimation (or
overestimation) of women writing wikipedia. I guess women are less inclined
than men to answer because only 15% of answers were from women and it seems
to me that the use of Wikipedia is much more equalitarian.
Another factor is the meaning of the words. In our survey we ask them for
the reasons not to contribute. There are several women saying: mmm… well… in
fact I have contributed a bit but not very often because…. It seems that
women have a more restrictive understanding off the words “contributing to
Wikipedia”. It could be that you have several women making a small
contribution once a month and saying they are not contributing to write
Wikipedia while several men having created their personal page several years
ago and doing nothing else saying yes I am contributor to wikipedia. This
feeling is reinforced when you look at this proportion by gender. 35% of men
answering the survey say they write while only 9% of women say they write.
We are looking for aids to finance a more rigorous survey based on personal
interviews. We will share with you our findings.
Clues we can learn from actual results come from differences in reasons to
read and write Wikipedia and the topics of interest. The vast majority of
them are very similar between men and women but there are few meaningful
differences:
In the reasons to read Wikipedia women use it more than men to study and as
a complementary source of information while men use it more than women as a
leisure activity. In the reasons to write men are more motivated than women
by patriotism while women are more motivated than men by developing writing
skills and knowing people.
Regarding the topics of interest women are underrepresented in technology.
On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
> The question remains: Why don't more women edit even those articles that
> we know women are interested in? And is there anything we can do to
> facilitate more participation?
Why should they?
Take this as a provocative question, but seriously, why should "women
edit even those articles that we know women are interested in?"
And to broaden the question, why is it that we want more women to edit
Wikipedia?
What does it bring?
What is missing if they don't?
I think this should probably be our very first question. It's been
given some answers in many emails on this list already, but I think
that a brainstorming thread dedicated to the question might trigger
some interesting responses.
Delphine
--
@notafish
NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost.
Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org
Photos with simple eyes: notaphoto - http://photo.notafish.org
> Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would
> spend a little time here :-)
Hi!
Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time
job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you
call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a
mod.
People have rightfully pointed out that our $5 barrier to entry is an
intentional growth-limiter and also more of a spam-defender. While our
user numbers are up in the 100K range, we have about 20K active
members and maybe a thousand or two active in any given day. This is
small by Wikipedia terms, very very small. That said our M/F ratio is
more like 60/40 m/f.
I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise
a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat
when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female
members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how
we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask
MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones.
Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also
have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a
different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message
that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by
racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because
we're a small site with a small mod team.
I'm also an editor at Wikipedia, username: jessamyn, usually working
on small projects like the Vermont town pages, new article creation
and a little vandalism undo-ing. I've also been on welcoming
committees in the past. Most recently I participated in a very long
and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time
[to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got
personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying
comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this
user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and
yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and
resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just
more of a "why bother" situation.
Anyhow, I'll go introduce myself in the introduction thread tomorrow,
just wanted to say hi, I'm around. Someone called me from the New York
Times today to talk about the issue [why me? I have no idea, honestly]
and there's a small piece that is up now with my comments and a few
other people's. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this
topic might do some PR work and make some comments if commenting is
allowed. I had about 400 words and a few hours to make my point, sorry
if it doesn't resonate for people.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wiki…
Thanks for inviting me in to talk about this.
Jessamyn West
_____________
librarian.net
Hi everyone,
I'm Philippe Beaudette, and I'm a community staff member at the WMF. I'm also (putatively) on vacation, so nobody tell my boss I'm here, okay? Oh.... uhm... hi, there, Sue!
But seriously, this is one of the most exciting topics I've seen in a long time. Like much of the community, I'm passionate about outreach and finding new ways to engage people, and i'm horrified by the numbers (both from the UNU-Merit survey and anecdotal) that show such a gender gap. I'm thrilled to see this mailing list exist.
I will likely be a lurker on this list, but my commitment to the list is to read it carefully and fully, though I don't think I'll engage much. I'm mostly here because i know there are smart, passionate people here thinking through these issues, and I'd like to learn from them.
Best wishes,
pb
_______________________
Philippe Beaudette
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://donate.wikimedia.org
Hi, I'm Ole, 43, and father of three. I do online stuff under the name
Palnatoke.
I am the chairman of Wikimedia Danmark and an admin on the Danish Wikipedia
and Wiktionary. Spending a fair amount of time online, I have begun
wondering why the very cool geek girls (their own term) that I know are not
on Wikipedia, so I asked them. They are quite busy, so they have given long
answers yet...
Regards,
Ole