Gendergap February 2011

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93 participants
146 discussions

Wikipedia's gender gap: discussion on Metafilter
by Sue Gardner 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

FYI: I found this discussion really interesting: http://www.metafilter.com/100081/Wikipedia-Snips-and-Snails-Sugar-and-Spice Metafilter is a really interesting online community. I am guessing it's 2/3 male, which is more gender-balanced than we are. In recent years, it's made a serious effort --with strong support from its moderation staff-- to stomp out talk that women there find alienating and marginalizing (e.g., rape jokes). As a reader I think those efforts are succeeding: the rest of the community there seems to have stretched itself to accommodate those women's perspectives. Metafilter is very different from us (we're not a discussion forum, etc.), but I think their core community has lots of attitudinal/demographic overlap with ours. The women there presumably could potentially have become Wikipedians, and in theory still might. They are geeky, internet-centric, smart. So they're worth listening to. * One of the takeaways for me from the thread: the women there say they don't want to have to repeatedly make a case for topic notability in the face of what they are perceiving as clueless male "obnoxious gatekeepers." They clearly find it exhausting, and many explicitly say that they deliberately sought more friendly environments that were receptive to their work. * And -- a lesson from Metafilter's own experience, described in that thread: "I'm reminded of how painful and drawn-out it was to remove "I'd hit it!" from the basic lexicon here at MetaFilter. Changing a basic, organically-grown aspect of a community's culture is really hard to do, and requires smart and dedicated people willing to get in your face about it." There's some other good stuff there; that's just two bits. Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Hello
by Sydney Poore 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

Joined the mailing list today. I have a long standing interest in the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. My view is that the gender gap is real (based on stats and experience ) and harming our content because of the biases introduced from a male heavy culture. Sydney. Poore (FloNight)

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Diana Harrelson: outreach recommendations from Fedora
by Sue Gardner 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

Below is a comment made on my blog by a woman named Jenny: .. February 1, 2011 at 6:26 PM After reading your piece in the Times I came across the blog of “cyber anthropologist” Diana Harrelson. She just completed a study of the Fedora community, an open source project that seems very similar to Wikipedia. Here are some (decidedly gender-neutral) recommendations she makes based on her study of this community: * Explicitly state the minimum required for people to be able to contribute * Provide easily accessible step-by-step information on how to go through the technical steps required; include these even if they are optional. * Provide easily accessible contact information for people who are willing and able to mentor new contributors. * Reaffirm to the established contributors the benefit of new talent to the project and set up ways established contributors can easily make new comers feel welcome. A simple, clear set of guidelines that welcomes all-comers might avoid the hot-button issue of gender altogether and help to attract other underrepresented groups, not just women. .. Here's a link to the study: http://www.cyber-anthro.com/beta-an-exploration-of-fedora%E2%80%99s-online-… .. And here's a quote from it. Which does sound pretty familiar to me: I hear similar things from Wikimedians. "As an interviewee stated: "So I think we are pretty bad at having resources where novices can stumble across things on their own and "get into" the community all by themselves. But we’re really good at – when an existing community member meets a new person, they can usually help them get started very well. And that’s the thing – I think that our materials, perhaps, should be more geared towards "find a person to help you through this stuff." I think they try to be, but they aren’t always clear enough. Because being part of the community is about working with the people." Beyond the process behind the idea of becoming a contributor, the idea of just exactly how to contribute seems to be another barrier to entering the community. Though users may be familiar with the idea of open source from a users perspective, this does not mean they fully understand what it means to be a contributor to an open source project. This is especially true for those who come from traditional leader base backgrounds where someone ‘in charge’ directs their actions. Survey respondents stated: * The second barrier was figuring out that I had the authority to do stuff. I kept waiting on people to tell me what to do, which doesn’t work well. * It’s difficult to find your entry point, no matter how welcoming people can be. * I’m new here, want to contribute more, but don’t know how. * Very easy, the hardest part is getting started and helping out. * Well, I’ve gone from user to contributor (as previously described), and that feels great – I’ve wanted to do it for years, but never figured out how (or was aware that I was "worthy" to do so) until relatively recently." Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Hi - short introduction
by Sandra ordonez 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

HI Everyone, I'm Sandy Ordonez. I am so excited this group was started!! I don't like writing long emails, but I'm thought i can introduce myself and share my experience with Wiki on my first email :) I feel into Wikipedia in an untraditional way - I worked for them for a short time. I had moved to Florida, and they were the only New York-like website and nonprofit in the area that I had fallen in love with b/c of how much easier my online life was because of them, so I was like a bee to honey. When I started the job, i expected it to be very similar to any other web production or communication job I had. Imagine my surprise. lol. I ilterally had to learn the wiki ethos and culture BY FIRE in a very short time. Needles to say, there were things I found very challenging. Ironically, I remember this one night in the very beginning that I had reached my breaking point, and this female Wikipedian reached out to me. I hadn't share what i was feeling with anyone, but she knew exactly what I was going through. Her message was: You might be going through a, b, c, d but hang in there,..I know certain aspects suck, but the bigger picture is beautiful." For some strange reason, being able to realize that it wasn't just me, made handling the aspects I found challenging easier. I have no idea if my experiences were gender based or not. However, I do have to say that finding other women in the project that I vibed with made things a lot more comfortable. I do feel as though the challenges in gender gap are more reflective of technology in general, but b/c Wikipedia is a big part of knowledge creation and sharing worldwide, it is kinda a big deal to improve this area.. I also do think that its the only culture worldwide to be able to honestly look at a problem like this, and come up with some freakin cool solutions...so for me, its also a learning experience to see how I can improve representations in the many worlds I encounter. I'm looking forward towards whatever I can to help out. By no means am I hardcore Wikipedian. I am the first to admit that I don't edit very often - its not my strength or something i would just do for fun. However, I do feel that I am very passionate about what the projects represent, and hope my particular skill set might help in whatever way it can!! Enough rambling. lol Warm vibes!! best :) Sandy

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Introducing ourselves :-)
by Sue Gardner 31 Jan '11

31 Jan '11

Hey folks! When Asaf of the Israeli chapter started up the Wikipedia in Developing Countries list, he did something that I thought was really great: he asked everybody who joined to introduce themselves, and talk a little about why they were interested in the list topic. Why don't we do the same thing here? I can start: I'm Sue Gardner; I'm the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia. I'm interested in the Wikipedia gender gap for two reasons: 1) I'm a woman, and I am sometimes surprised/irritated/appalled at how thin Wikipedia is on some topics that interest me. I want Wikipedia to be as rich and complete and broad and deep as it possibly can be, so that I find what I'm looking for when I read it. And 2) I'm the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, and our mission is to make the sum total of all human knowledge available to everyone. I know that Wikipedia is only going to be as good as the breadth & diversity of the people who contribute to it, so ensuring that women are fully represented on Wikipedia is, I think, a part of my job. A little more background on me personally: I know that a lot of women on Wikipedia operate in predominantly male environments such as science, technology, engineering and math. That's not my situation. I spent most of my career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is an extremely female-friendly environment with lots of women throughout the organization at every level, and I also worked at the Women's Television Network, which had at the time a 98% female staff. So I am very used to operating in female-majority cultures. This means that when I first joined Wikimedia in 2007, it was a pretty big culture shock to me. But I'll also say that I've never personally witnessed misogyny on the Wikimedia projects, and I don't believe that Wikimedia editors, by and large, are sexist. (I know that some people would disagree with that.) I think our gender gap has its origins mainly in the external environment, and the contributing factors are many of the same ones that result in women being underrepresented in the STEM fields. Plus I don't think the Wikimedia movement has yet done a sufficiently good job of stressing the societal benefits of our work (which I think would be appealing for lots of women): rather, we've let our work be defined by others as solely technical and 'geeky.' Plus, women don't typically have as much leisure time as men for pursuits like Wikipedia, and the time they do have tends to be spent in groups rather than at a computer. I say all that only because I think lots of women would edit Wikipedia if they had a clearer understanding of what it is, and why it exists. I should also say: I think that all forms of diversity --geographic, political, ideological, cultural, sexual, age-related, etc.-- are important. But having said that, I do think our gender skew is particularly bad, so even though I feel uncomfortable paying special attention to it, I believe it's probably defensible. My hope for this list is that it'll become a space where Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians can share research and information and tactics for making Wikipedia more attractive to women editors. Myself, I'm not particularly interested in debates about 'how bad the problem is' or 'is there really a problem' or 'whose fault is this problem anyway.' I'm actually not all that interested in the origins of the gender gap, except insofar as they shed light on possible solutions. Following the story in the Times today, I got lots of e-mails from people who want to help us fix things. I'm not going to forward the mails here without people's permission, but I will probably reach out to many of those folks and invite them to join this list. Oh: and a little background. Erik Moeller, my deputy, created this list today because I asked him to, and after floating the notion on the internal-l mailing list, it looked like there might be sufficient interest to make it worthwhile. My understanding is that this is NOT a women-only list; it's a list for people who are interested in the gender gap on Wikipedia, who want to help attract/support more female editors. Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Hello and welcome!
by aude 31 Jan '11

31 Jan '11

Good to see this topic of gender gap getting more attention and a dedicated place of discussion! Of course, I won't turn down opportunity to join another wikimedia mailing list ;) Look forward to the discussions here. Cheers, Katie (@aude)

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Gendergap February 2011