I'm attending an awesome wikipedia workshop which has helped me shape some
priorities, one of which was to be bold and start this project for women
writers. If you have any interests in WikiProject start-ups, please jump
in. There's a mountain of work to be done, and your various talents and
insights and lessons-learned from previous start-ups would be appreciated.
>From one woman writer to another, thanks in advance.
-Rosie
(Rosiestep)
People in the know can answer when it's covenient next week, but since
it's on my mind, posting now.
As we write on Gender Gap Task Force main page: "In 2014 Wikipedia
co-founder [[Jimmy Wales]] said the [[Wikimedia Foundation]] was
"doubling down" its efforts to reach that goal and would be doing more
outreach and software changes. Reference:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28701772 Wikipedia 'completely failed'
to fix gender imbalance, [[BBC]] interview August 8, 2014.
So info on status of interns, paid staffers working on this, volunteer
efforts, etc. and their relation to the Wikimedia Gender Gap Task force
would be helpful. I know Wikimedia Gender Gap project which is not very
active, though sub-projects like
WikiWomen's Collaborative are doing some things.
Reminder of temporary address of en.Wikipedia Gender Gap Task force's
big list of resources which is relevant to the above and does in fact
contain links where we can infer answers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carolmooredc/My_Sandbox_1 is
One reason I ask is I just put up this message at Wikimedia Gender Gap
project but then started wondering about the issues above.
/Should this project be listed on Outreach.wikimedia?? at
//https://meta.wikimedia.org/////Talk:Gender_gap#Should_this_project_be_listed_on_Outreach.wikimedia.3F.3F//
//
//https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page links to GLAM
(Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) and Wikimedia Education
Portal (re: different countries) (as well as Best Practices and Success
stories). Considering women are half the human race, it seems sensible
to include this project there. It probably would bring more willing
volunteers to outreach in general as well. I don't see any discussion of
this on this talk page and only a link to Outreach Village Pump as a
"good place to discuss outreach to women." /
So clarifications and updates would be great and I'm sure lots of us are
interested.
Thanks!!
CM
There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that
should be of interest to this list.
Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia:
Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is
that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:
"It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to
Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the
United Nations University survey found
<https://web.archive.org/web/20130821015449/http:/www.wikipediasurvey.org/do…>
that
only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The
difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the
survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male
and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the
age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics
typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of
participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family
responsibilities.
"Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of
contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies
somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of
Wikipedia contributors are mothers.
"That is less than 1 in 50."
Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
Thanks for finding that page. I don't know how much that kind of chat
system would help our editor numbers but it's worth discussing. Any
comments from the Growth and EE teams?
Pine
On Aug 12, 2014 8:10 PM, "quiddity" <pandiculation(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> The pro and cons of web-chat, and some technical options are collated at:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Live_Chat_System
> (especially the 2nd-to-last section, for "Why not IRC?")
> IRC makes followup discussion, or time-delayed discussion, too difficult,
> if the user doesn't use their identical username, and state their
> home-wiki. Also, it shows IPs if users don't obtain a cloak first.
>
> However, just for informational purposes, here are links for easy
> comparison:
> https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/test
> http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#test
> ( the default client uses http://www.qwebirc.org/ )
>
> HTH,
> Quiddity
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:45 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That proposal could be considered in the long term, but right now we have
>> plenty of people who seek and get help on IRC, and we can make incremental
>> improvements to their experience faster than we can build a new tool from
>> scratch. Few newbies fail hard at IRC. The basics are similar to texting
>> and private instant messaging software. Let's improve the newbie user
>> experience.
>>
>> Pine
>> On Aug 11, 2014 1:48 PM, "Nathan" <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Newbies are going to fail hard at IRC. Pretty much all of the questions
>>> Seb
>>> poses for a built-in newbie chat still exist with a built-in Freenode
>>> interface, with the addition of a complicated and often difficult (not to
>>> mention culturally... unique) environment. Much better to think along the
>>> lines of the Teahouse, but live. You can jump into a chat queue, and
>>> people
>>> who want to help chat with you, and you can close the chat whenever you
>>> want, and you can't contact people outside of the queue using chat.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>>> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> EE mailing list
>> EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> EE mailing list
> EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
>
>
As I've mentioned, the biggest problem we're having now is male attack
posts, female complaints about such attacks, generally
disruptive/tendentious threads which really are driving off people who
join the project, probably look at the page, and quickly leave.
I started this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Countering_systemi…
"Hatting vs. closing vs. immediate archiving vs. indexing on subpages"
It initially was responded to by all males, two of them wikihounders,
one who has some odd ball agenda, and a sensible one. (There also was a
discussion at another thread about the way another guy came in and
hatted complaint discussions about sexism that hadn't been finished,
which muddied the waters.)
Sarah (SlimVirgin) suggested a 30 day archiving regime which we've had
for a week or two. But I just got fed up and changed it to 15 days, but
don't know how long that would last.
It really would help if editors could come to the thread and tell us
what they think about leaving all those disruptive posts up there as
opposed to having ''active and constructive members" close/hat/archive
the most problematic ones as seems sensible on a case by case basis.
That proposal could be considered in the long term, but right now we have
plenty of people who seek and get help on IRC, and we can make incremental
improvements to their experience faster than we can build a new tool from
scratch. Few newbies fail hard at IRC. The basics are similar to texting
and private instant messaging software. Let's improve the newbie user
experience.
Pine
On Aug 11, 2014 1:48 PM, "Nathan" <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Newbies are going to fail hard at IRC. Pretty much all of the questions Seb
> poses for a built-in newbie chat still exist with a built-in Freenode
> interface, with the addition of a complicated and often difficult (not to
> mention culturally... unique) environment. Much better to think along the
> lines of the Teahouse, but live. You can jump into a chat queue, and people
> who want to help chat with you, and you can close the chat whenever you
> want, and you can't contact people outside of the queue using chat.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l