We had no new female candidates for board seats in the WMF election. For
affiliates, I know of at least two affiliates that also have male board
members saying that they/we would like to have more gender diversity on our
boards but women aren't generally volunteering to run. What could be done
to encourage more women to run for affiliate and WMF board seats?
Thanks,
Pine
Romaine Wiki says about women, participating as editors on Wikipedia:
>They expect a social environment, with easy interaction, where they are
stimulated and can form groups to be able not to feel alone on the wiki and
to work together, >where they can get constructive feedback, where they can
follow easily what colleagues, friends and other people they know
personally are doing on Wikipedia. As >example, there is no way for people
to follow friends/colleagues on what they have written. There is no easy
way to say to a group of users (friends/colleagues) >you have written a new
article and you like suggestions. It is time for Wikipedia to go to the
next generation. It is time for Wikipedia getting social.
One can't remain anonymous AND be social on Wikipedia, not in the way
described above. I disagree, that women need this aspect of being social in
order to find editing compelling. I like limiting interactions to talk
pages, and occasional off-Wiki emails about side points. I have sent and
received maybe five off-wiki emails in two years of daily editing.
As for keeping up with certain people, I do like doing that! You can do
that by following an editor's edit history. I think you can even set it up
as an RSS feed and track it in a feed reader if you really want to. When I
write a new article, approve an AfC or find an article that I think needs
deletion and want to share or get additional insight, I just copy the
relevant URL, then email or send by Twitter DM to Wikipedia editors with
whom I am friends, if I don't think they'll see it on their talk page. It
is a way of easily sharing. I try not to do it a lot, as Wikipedia is not a
social network. It is fun, and validating to discuss things, and support
other editors, but that can usually be accomplished using user talk pages
and article talk pages very easily, as well as Wikipedia project pages.
Wikipedia would need to be something else, in order to become social in the
same way as Twitter or Pinterest or Facebook.
~FeralOink (Ellie Kesselman)
Hi,
Since participating in the Inspire campaign, I got interested in the
question of exactly how many women would be needed on Wikipedia to close
the gender gap. I ran some simulations and came up with some fairly
radical numbers. For example, according to my calculations, there are so
few current and new female editors that, even if every current and new
active, female editor stayed active for ten years, we wouldn't close the
gap.
I've posted the results
<https://civilsociology.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/closing-the-gender-gap-on-w…>
to my blog. It's password protected so I can share the results and get
feedback without making it pubic. You can access them by using the
password "wikipedia". I'm looking for feedback to see if I'm missing
anything, if it's unrealistic, or anything else.
Thanks!
Jason
--
Jason Radford
Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago
Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University
*Connect*: LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/jsradford>, Twitter
<http://www.twitter.com/jsradford>, University of Chicago
<http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejsradford/>
*Play Games for Science at Volunteer Science
<http://www.volunteerscience.com>*
Hi,
Thank you all for your feedback. I've incorporated a number of them and
updated the report. It's now publicly available to share with folks who are
interested.
@Ellie, yes, the 75% retirement part was a typo on my part. Thanks for
pointing it out!
@Samuel and the group of people talking about how to re-design wikipedia.
I don't have a stake in the discussion because I just don't know enough of
the backstory on these discussions. But, I do have some hopes about it. I
hope the results highlight the importance of taking the kinds of bold
action you're suggesting. And, I hope this is the evidence you need for a
real conversation about seriously addressing questions of openness and
access.
Thank you for all of your comments!
Jason
--
Jason Radford
Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago
Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University
*Connect*: LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/jsradford>, Twitter
<http://www.twitter.com/jsradford>, University of Chicago
<http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejsradford/>
*Play Games for Science at Volunteer Science
<http://www.volunteerscience.com>*
Thank you so much, Jason Radford, for sharing your analysis!
Lennart Guldbrandsson said:
I know I was surprised to read that we would be better off trying to
> recruit new editors than to focus on retention (very simplified).
I noticed that too and found it very surprising.
Jason, I read that section of your blog post carefully. This was confusing
to me:
*Existing Editor Retention*: Currently, about 75% of editors retire every
> year or about 2.1% per month. In this simulation, we ask what happens if
> we were to reduce the retirement rate of existing female editors to 80%,
> 90%, or 100% while maintaining the existing retirement rate for male
> editors at 75%.
The reason it is confusing is because the accompanying
x-y
chart shows three time series, labelled 80% retention, 90% retention and
100% respectively, see below. Do you mean to say, "increase the retention
rate" to 80%, 90% or 100% instead of "reduce the retirement rate"? 80%,
90% and 100% retirement rates aren't an improvement.
Could you humor me, and confirm that this was just a wording error, and not
associated with anything in the underlying analysis?
Thank you,
~FeralOink (Ellie Kesselman)
Low participation of women is not only a Wikipedia issue. As we know, the
same pattern is found in the social and political participation areas of
our "advanced" societies, but there are exceptions. I want to share some
details on women in national parliaments and compare it to women presence
in wikis:
Country - Year - Women (%)
-------------------------------
Cuba - 2013 - 48.9%
Ecuador - 2013 - 41.6%
Colombia - 2014 - 19.9%
Saudi Arabia - 2013 - 19.9%
United States - 2014 - 19.4%
Uncyclopedia - 2008 - 9.6%
Wikipedia - 2011 - 8.5%
Source: http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm
Did you excepted this numbers? Just my two cents.
2015-06-02 2:09 GMT+02:00 Jason Radford <jsradford(a)uchicago.edu>:
> Hi,
>
> Since participating in the Inspire campaign, I got interested in the
> question of exactly how many women would be needed on Wikipedia to close
> the gender gap. I ran some simulations and came up with some fairly
> radical numbers. For example, according to my calculations, there are so
> few current and new female editors that, even if every current and new
> active, female editor stayed active for ten years, we wouldn't close the
> gap.
>
> I've posted the results
> <https://civilsociology.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/closing-the-gender-gap-on-w…>
> to my blog. It's password protected so I can share the results and get
> feedback without making it pubic. You can access them by using the
> password "wikipedia". I'm hoping some of you with experience researching
> gender representation on Wikipedia would be able to catch any errors.
>
> Thanks!
> Jason
> --
> Jason Radford
> Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago
> Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University
> *Connect*: LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/jsradford>, Twitter
> <http://www.twitter.com/jsradford>, University of Chicago
> <http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejsradford/>
> *Play Games for Science at Volunteer Science
> <http://www.volunteerscience.com>*
>
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