Someone purporting to be Russavia appears to have added a number of people
from this list to a Google Group with a similar title to this list. Wearing
my mod hat, I just want to be clear: this list isn't going anywhere, the
Google Group is not WMF-sanctioned as far as I know, and scraping list
members to add people to a third-party mailing list is terrible netiquette
that will get you kicked off this list.
-Leigh
--
Leigh Honeywell
http://hypatia.ca
@hypatiadotca
Checking the votes at
<https://vote.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?limit=1000&title=Special%3ASecurePol…>
against the English Wikipedia database, shows an interesting
statistic. Of the 590 votes cast only *one* voter has an account
marked with their gender as female.
Obviously many people prefer not to use the user preferences on-wiki
to mark their gender, however it still seems a remarkably low figure
for a project which has a strategic objective to be welcoming to users
who identify as women.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
I do agree that people often work out their disputes, but i have also seen, and been involved in, cases where the one with the ability to block wins. That is the sort of thing that not only drives people out of the project, but also causes them to advocate against the project to people they meet.
Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE device
------ Original message------
From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case
Date: Wed, Dec 10, 2014 11:16 PM
To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com;Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase theparticipation of women within Wikimedia projects.;
Subject:Re: [Gendergap] Arbcom election
What’s missing from this?:
>I don’t think most disputes get “resolved”. I think one person simply gives up. Maybe they don’t think the issue is that important, >maybe they feel that they don’t have the time to argue it, maybe they feel that the other person involved is too unpleasant to want to try to engage with, maybe they’ve found that no matter what they do, they never make a difference.
Give up? It’s “maybe one person realizes the other person was right, and does it their way from then on, without any hard feelings.” It has happened to me quite a few times. That’s the sort of outcome I was talking about.
Of course, I think of these in terms of pure content disputes (should we or should we not mention something? how should we format this table? and so forth ...) because that’s what most of those I’ve been involved in have been. Disputes over someone’s conduct are something else entirely, because it’s harder for people to admit they were wrong in that department. And why I always say it cannot be repeated enough that, when you realize the argument is no longer about what you were originally arguing about but has instead become a meta-argument about the argument itself, you should stop immediately as it will no longer accomplish anything constructive to continue.
Daniel Case
I agree with most of what risker says. There are several groups on the project that exert undue influence over their articles whether male or female. If the wmf gets involvedvat all, it should be to ensure that policies are enforced evenly throughout the project and these,power cabals are broken up.
Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE device
------ Original message------
From: Risker
Date: Wed, Dec 10, 2014 2:46 PM
To: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation of women within Wikimedia projects.;
Subject:Re: [Gendergap] Women, cliques and Wikipedia's tyranny of structurelessness
Carol said:
I do think there are structural things that can be imposed by the Wikimedia Foundation to make reforms happen. (Whether they'll choose the right reforms and the right people to make them happen is a whole 'nother story.) But the purpose of this thread is not to discuss specific reforms, but to focus on the issue of male dominated Wikipedia cliques intent on keeping Wikipedia a place where dominant males don't have to put up with these damned women (or "radical feminist c*nts/tw*ats" in their minds) who keep yammering about making Wikipedia a nice (or even safe!) place to edit. Discussion of some womens' complicity in all this obviously is relevant too.
I'm not certain you've got it right here, Carol. I think the cliques (which, given the overall makeup of the project, are almost always male-dominated) don't want to put up with *anyone*, male or female, that opposes their view. I've seen female-dominated cliques on the project (rare as they are) behave equally appallingly. There are corners of the project where any interloper, regardless of gender, is treated with the back of the hand by the "regulars", whether those regulars are male or female.
A friend of mine recently reminded me of the language of "southern ladies" and how they often use perfectly normal sounding phrases to cut people to the core. (A classic example would be "bless his heart" or, more emphatically, "bless his dear little heart" - which to all the world reads like a slight eye-roll, but is actually properly decoded as "that idiot" or (more emphatically) "that *frickin* idiot".) I've seen a lot of examples of that on Wikipedia, where it's been so obvious that the written word *reads* civilly but is intended as a cutting insult - in my experience, women editors use this method out of proportion to the percentage of women on the project - and in some ways it is an even greater insult because it's hard to persuade others that what look like civil words are being used to convey quite the opposite meaning.
Risker/Anne
This NY Times article - "Learning to Love Criticism" by Tara Mohrsept -
itself has been criticized for downplaying the negative effects constant
criticism has on women; salient quotes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/learning-to-love-criticism…
/A NEW study by the linguist and tech entrepreneur Kieran Snyder, done
for Fortune.com, found two differences between workplace performance
reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies,
managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative
feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the
negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality
criticism, such as comments that the woman was "abrasive," "judgmental"
or "strident." Only 2 percent of men's critical reviews included
negative personality comments.//
//
//... If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she's going
to be criticized --- with comments not just about her work but also
about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that
allows her to persevere in the face of it....//
//
//... For centuries, women couldn't protect their own safety through
physical, legal or financial means. We couldn't rely on the law if our
safety was threatened. We couldn't use our own money to escape or
safeguard ourselves and our children, because we could not own property.
Being likable, or at least acceptable to stronger, more powerful others,
was one of our primary available survival strategies. For many women
around the world, this is still the reality, but all women inherit the
psychological legacy of that history. Disapproval, criticism and the
withdrawal of others' approval can feel so petrifying for us at times
--- life-threatening even --- because for millenniums, it was.//
//Add to this history what we see in our time: Powerful women tend to
receive overreactive, shaming and inappropriately personal criticism.
//... /
She then goes on to explore some ways women can adjust their own
attitudes to deal with all this criticism. *And while most strategies
seem OK, she ignores that womens real work has to be adjusting the
mindsets of those males who believe that unrelenting criticism of women
is permissible and even laudatory.*
Right now on Wikipedia various womens' adjustment strategies or coping
mechanisms include: 1) run away from any article where there's
criticism; 2) be nice to/ make friends with powerful editors who will
protect you from critics; 3) become one of the boys (even if it means
not letting them know you are a woman); 4) don't respond to critics and
harassers, just build up a record you can take to ANI maybe someday; 5)
defend yourself/argue back (and get labeled drama queens and
troublemakers); 6) some combination of the above; 7) the most popular
option - QUIT!
What's the problem and what's the solution? Wikipedia suffers from the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness
*The current organizational structure (or lack thereof) encourages the
most dominating and manipulative males with a strong pro-male/pro-male
gang mentality to drive out anyone, male or female, who doesn't hop to
their political, policy or other agenda. It's a problem infecting
editors, administrators and more and more ArbCom.*
The "Tyranny of Structurelessness" essay is a feminist analysis of
consensus-oriented groups without formal leaders. It discusses how "this
apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal,
unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more
pernicious because its very existence was denied."
I myself like spontaneous order and participatory, consensus oriented
democracy, but I've also seen no rules and minimal rules abused by
cliques in organizations, activist groups and at Wikipedia. Let's face
it, some people are very clique oriented in organization settings.
Clique members often are "apparatchiks" - people who may or may not
believe in the cause, but definitely believe in getting all the power,
perks and privileges out of the organization they can. Both more and
less structured organizations always have a fight to keep these cliques
from looting the organization and/or pushing through agendas with which
the great majority of supporters and participants disagree.
Other organizational members reject joining such tight knit clique,
though they may make friends or join loose alliances. Others can't help
but fight the cliques - and take their punishment for doing so. Their
alliances usually aren't as strong as the cliques, til the clique goes
too far and then the un-allied and more loosely allied join them, and
you have revolution. *GGTF and this email list have enough malcontents
to threaten the power of the controlling male-dominated cliques. Thus
the massive over-reaction to GGTF.*
I haven't studied the Wikimedia Foundation enough yet, or its more
unpopular initiatives, to say how its structure and its various cliques
either a) effect the drop in editor participation in general or b)
really want increased participation by women in a more civil environment
(though as I've ranted here and there, I assume it only will become a
high priority if there's intense outside pressure on WMF).
I do think there are structural things that can be imposed by the
Wikimedia Foundation to make reforms happen. (Whether they'll choose
the right reforms and the right people to make them happen is a whole
'nother story.) *But the purpose of this thread is not to discuss
specific reforms, but to **focus on the issue of male dominated
Wikipedia cliques intent on keeping Wikipedia a place where dominant
males don't have to put up with these damned women (or "radical feminist
c*nts/tw*ats" in/their/ minds) who keep yammering about making Wikipedia
a nice (or even safe!) place to edit.* Discussion of some womens'
complicity in all this obviously is relevant too.
CM
Please take care when emailing replies to any inflammatory appearing
emails to the list. You may be receiving emails with identical subject
lines which are from a googlegroup rather than from a Wikimedia list
which will appear to be in the same email thread. An example has been
the discussion about the Arbcom election which even includes email
bodies from the gendergap list in order to fool users.
Checking the details will show "@googlegroups.com" in the from field
and in the footer or names such as "Russia Aviation", thought these
are likely to keep changing.
Unfortunately despite multiple complaints about this group hijacking
users from a Wikimedia list by maliciously harvesting email addresses,
Google has yet to take any visible action.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
In reply to Kerry Raymond's post...
QUANTIFICATION
If "all the studies on female participation come up with low percentages
around 10%" but there are anecdotes of a significant undercount from
Teahouse volunteers and such and if female participation at Wikimania
approaches one-third, would that not seem to fortify my point that there is
a need for reexamination of the magnitude of the gender gap? What is the
exact magnitude of the female undercount (or the male overcount)?
This does not even bring up the matter of dynamics — is the gender
disparity changing over time, and if so, which direction is it moving?
There is only one way to find this out: study, study, study, survey,
survey, survey...
That WMF has its own editor gender data from 2012 that it is not releasing,
as has been intimated, is annoying. Still: why is the GGTF waiting for San
Francisco at all? Why is quantification and surveying not a vital part of
the task force's mission?
That there is an editorial gender gap is beyond dispute. But how big is it
really and how is it changing over time?
PROACTIVE RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION
So if edit-a-thons don't work, as you indicate, why is the WMF still
spending money on them? Is it mere symbolism?
I have noted from working with a college class at WP that short-term class
assignments don't seem to create long-term Wikipedians. Students being
students, they slam out the minimum required right before deadline and move
along with their lives. I don't know what does create long-term content
people, other than a passion about SOMETHING and a desire to share the
information. Vandal fighters and quality control people may have a
different motivation.
Let's assume for the sake of the discussion that there is NOTHING that can
be done proactively to pick the needles out of the haystack — that it is
impossible for any bureaucratic entity to identify and activate the small
fraction of 1% of people that will eventually become long-term Wikipedia
volunteers.
This would mean that the "needles" are going to self-identify by
registering at WP and beginning work under their own volition. Therefore,
logically, primary attention should be focused on identifying and
cultivating "new editors" every day, nurturing the newbies as they start to
navigate the technical and cultural learning curves. In which case, Ms.
Stierch's "Teahouse" concept is 100% right on the money.
And that's where the gender gap can be addressed, by making sure that every
effort is made to teach and acclimate female newcomers in particular.
As for edit-a-thons and outreach recruiting, I personally believe that any
recruitment that is not focused on teachers and academics will probably not
produce lasting results. I'm also pretty well convinced that long term
Wikipedians are made one at a time.
Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on WP
Corvallis, OR
=========
Kerry Raymond wrote:
A. All the studies on female participation come up with low percentages
around 10% plus or minus a few percent. Of course, it is possible that in
all of the studies the women are choosing not to self-identify. It is an
inherent difficulty in any study if people choose to not reveal information.
But we know women make up large proportions of social media users, so if
womens participation in Wikipedia is actually higher than studies show due
to reluctance to self-identify, it begs the question of why they are so
unwilling to self-identify in the content of Wikipedia but not in other
contexts. Either way, it points to some problem. The last Wikimania recently
released data that does show a higher level of female participation, about 1
in 3, I think. It would be interesting to see how the male/female numbers
break down across the various types of attendees, e.g. WMF staff, Chapter
members, event organisers, etc. My suspicion is that women are in higher
proportion among staffers, chapters, etc and this skews the Wikimania
participation. I dont know how scholarships are awarded and whether women
are at any advantage in that process.
B. A very interesting research
paperhttp://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf shows
that women
are less likely to survive the newbie stage than men. But, perhaps contrary
to what many expected, their data does not suggest that women are more
easily discouraged by being reverted (they show men and womens survival
rates in the face of reversion are similar) but that more womens edits are
reverted than mens edits and this is the cause of higher attrition among
women. This has caused me to wonder if women as newbies are more attracted
to articles where the risk of reversion is higher perhaps because there are
more policies to be considered (e.g. biographies of living people, noting
that women are predominantly the purchasers of celebrity magazines which
deal mostly in content related to living people). The paper does show that
men and women edit in different areas (men are more likely to edit in
geography and science for example) but the analysis is too high level to
answer my question. The other inherent limitation in any study of newbies
that there is nothing in the initial signup to Wikipedia that asks you about
your gender (even optionally) so very few newbies are self-identifying as
either male or female at that time. So, its actually very hard to study the
non-surviving female newbies because you cant find them. This often means
our study of the experiences of newbies is based heavily on those who are
still around later to be studied or surveyed which introduces survivor bias
into the study. So this may be a consideration in relation to the findings
of this paper. Interview studies keep pointing to women not liking the
abrasive environment of Wikipedia. Civility is a part of that issue.
Although I think its not so much about the use of specific words, but
rather a general culture of aggression. The people who use the swear words
are simply much easier to spot and hold up as examples of the broader
problem than those who engage in equally aggressive behaviour but do so
citing [[WP:Policy]] and use the undo-button.
C. In relation to pro-active recruitment, I do a lot of that here in
Australia, edit training and edit-a-thons. While some of the edit-a-thons
have targeted women participants and are therefore predominantly women, edit
training events are generally not so targeted and attract both women and
men. From all of that I believe that women are not inherently disinterested
in contributing to Wikipedia. However, these events do not seem to create
ongoing editors (whether female or male) and this experience is not unique.
A recent survey by the foundation found that this is the case all over the
world. Generally, the one-event approach to edit training isnt sufficient.
Greater success seems to come from regular events usually in a
university/college setting, but regular events are a challenge to resource
with volunteers (we have other things that have to be done in our lives).
Interestingly, most of the people who currently attend our sessions are
middle aged and older. Many struggle with the markup; I hope the visual
editor will address some of that problem. So I think we need to look at
diversity in terms of age as well as gender. But I dont think outreach is
really the answer because it cannot be done at the necessary scale. Its not
that we need to have a team of mentors, we need everyone to be willing to
help one another.
D. One thing I learn from our outreach is that many of the newbies
(male and female) have unpleasant experiences even during the outreach
events as well as soon afterwards. Their edits are reverted (for what seems
to me to be no justifiable reason), new articles being speedily deleted or
splashed with messages about policies they dont know about and dont
comprehend, or left in an eternal limbo of rejection in Article for
Creation. These folks are all good faith and they are all newcomers but
the policies of assume good faith and dont bite the newbies are
completely ignored. We have many editors who are very aggressive. I have no
idea if they are just angry with the world as a whole, or actually enjoy
bullying the newbies. While obviously there are benefits to a culture of
mentoring, even when I am in hand-holding edit-training mode (about as
mentoring as it gets and I provide my contact details off-wiki as well as
on-wiki for any follow-up), its difficult for me to justify to them why the
newbies edits are being undone because the edits simply arent that bad.
The situation makes me very angry. It is not as if it is the same small pool
of editors creating these problems where maybe one could try to take action
against them. It seems that we have such a huge pool of aggressive editors
that our newbies will randomly attract the attention of one of them. (Or it
may be that some bullying personalities are actively on the lookout for
victims and newbies are a soft target).
So, all in all, I think if we need to go back to first principles the
encyclopaedia anyone can edit and see that the aggressive nature of the
community is working against this intention and seek to curb that
aggression. I think curbing the aggression would result in more editors both
male and female. So in that light, I would have to say that I find the
ArbCom decision distressing as it appears to acknowledge and reinforce that
the aggressive culture is both dominant and should continue to be so.
Kerry