Thanks Steven and Ryan for posting this.
I've been thinking a lot about Gender Gap and women's issues in Wikipedia of
the past week, thanks to my experience at Wikimania. Speaking with women who
attended from throughout the world it was quite clear that outreach is in
demand to address the desires expressed by WMF's five-year strategic. I'd
like to use this as a platform just to babble a bit about my thoughts, if
you all don't mind. ;)
They mention Taniguchi's research about women volunteering more than men -
it is true - working in the museum industry it's even more so. At Wikimania,
fellow female-Wikimedian Lori Byrd Phillips (user:LoriLee) presented about
E-Volunteers, a great concept that will provide a great basis for
encouraging "volunteerism" over "editing" for women. (You can read
more here<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cyipKr7-uucWNFb0ITgXBzNh_pzQOnbsONjMDf-…>.)
I like the idea of promoting Wikipedia as needing "volunteers," something
that has been working wonders for non-profits for years, but, obviously is
not serving the open source community as it could be. Instead of having
events where we "teach women how to edit" we can teach people how to
"volunteer for Wikimedia".
Just seeing the charge with the numbers stating how many of what gender are
editing what (441 female editors vs. 3,673 male editors regarding people) is
hard for me to read. :(
*ON THAT NOTE*
On that note, I'd like to ask the list as whole - do you feel that this
survey, and recent survey/reports from WMF, have supplied us with enough
data in order to proceed with planning an appropriate outreach movement
within Wikiimedia hopefully sponsored by WMF? (This of course will lead to
more discoveries, but would focus more on outreach over statistical
examination.)
-Sarah
--
GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for the Wikimedia
Foundation<http://www.glamwiki.org>
Wikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American
Art<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch>
and
Sarah Stierch Consulting
*Historical, cultural & artistic research & advising.*
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sarahstierch.com/
Hey all,
I wanted to forward along a link to a detailed new study covering the topic
of gender on Wikipedia which will be presented at WikiSym soon. The
GroupLens research group has done a great deal of work on Wikipedia in the
past, and one of their PhD candidates is actually at the Wikimedia
Foundation for the summer studying broader editing trends.
I highly encourage anyone interested in seeing hard data on this issue to
read it. There's a PDF in the link below...
Title: WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
Link: http://www.grouplens.org/node/466
Abstract: "Wikipedia has rapidly become an invaluable destination for
millions of information-seeking users. However, media reports suggest an
important challenge: only a small fraction of Wikipedia’s legion of
volunteer editors are female. In the current work, we present a scientific
exploration of the gender imbalance in the English Wikipedia’s population of
editors. We look at the nature of the imbalance itself, its effects on the
quality of the encyclopedia, and several conflict-related factors that may
be contributing to the gender gap. Our findings confirm the presence of a
large gender gap among editors and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity
in the content of Wikipedia’s articles. Further, we find evidence hinting at
a culture that may be resistant to female participation."
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
Hi list,I thought this article might be of interest-Pete
http://www.fastcompany.com/1769217/there-are-no-secrets-from-twitter
You Can't Keep Your Secrets From TwitterBY DAVID
ZAX<http://www.fastcompany.com/user/253232>Tue
Jul 26, 2011
On the Internet, no one knows you're secretly a man (or woman), right? Think
again. Just by examining patterns in tweets, you can infer a Twitter user's
gender. A look at the words (Etsy, Jeep, redneck...) that make men and women
give themselves away.