Gendergap February 2011

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93 participants
146 discussions

Women and Wikipedia by Barbara Fisher
by Sarah Stierch 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

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. ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.sarahstierch.com/ <http://www.sarahstierch.com>

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US Small Business Administration is working on their own gendergap
by Jeremy Baron 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/02/04/am-new-small-busi… -Jeremy

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Hello and request for measurements to know the real situation.
by Joan Goma 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

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.

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Why do we want more women on the Wikimedia Projects?( was: Introduction and some thoughts)
by Delphine Ménard 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

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

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Wikipedia's gender gap: discussion on Metafilter
by jessamyn c. west 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

> 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

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Introducing myself
by Philippe Beaudette 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

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

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Question
by Sandra ordonez 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Is there a designated page where we can post ideas/challenges//solutions, thoughts? Or is it just the listserv for now?

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NY Times with a broad debate/op piece on 'where are the women in Wikipedia?'
by Jay Walsh 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wiki… There are six separate areas of discussion unfolding here, with some thoughtful discussion below the articles as well. -- Jay Walsh Head of Communications WikimediaFoundation.org blog.wikimedia.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 609, @jansonw

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NYT: Where Are The Women in Wikipedia? A room for debate..
by Sarah Stierch 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wiki… Updated this afternoon. -- Sarah Stierch Consulting Historical, cultural & artistic research, advising & event planning. ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.sarahstierch.com/ <http://www.sarahstierch.com>

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Introducing myself
by Ole Palnatoke Andersen 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

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

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Gendergap February 2011