Gendergap February 2017

gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org

25 participants
13 discussions

Introducing the Wikimedia Resource Center
by Maria Cruz 29 Jul '17

29 Jul '17

Hi all, As we have stated in our annual plan [1], “currently, community members must search many pages and places to stay informed about Foundation activities and resources.” We have worked in the past two quarters to create a single point of entry. We call it the Wikimedia Resource Center, and its alpha version is now live on Meta Wikimedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Resource_Center As the movement expands to include more affiliates and more programmatic activities every year, newer Wikimedians are faced with lack of experience in the movement and its various channels for requesting support. In order to expand Wikimedia communities’ efforts, we want to provide easy access to resources that support their very important work. The [[m:Wikimedia Resource Center]] is a hub designed in response to this issue: it is intended to evolve into a single point of entry for Wikimedians all over the world to the variety of resources and types of staff support they may need to develop new initiatives or also expand existing ones. This version of the Resource Center is only the beginning. For phase two of the project, we will enable volunteer Wikimedians to add resources developed by other individuals or organizations to the Wikimedia Resource Center, and in phase three, the Wikimedia Resource Center will include features to better connect Wikimedians to other Wikimedians that can support them. We want to hear what you think about this prototype and our plans for it! If you have comments about the Wikimedia Resource Center, you can submit your feedback publicly, on the Talk Page, or privately, via a survey hosted by a third party, that shouldn’t take you more than 4 minutes to complete. A feedback button is on the top right corner on every page of the hub. Looking forward to more collaborations! Best, María [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2016-2017/… -- María Cruz Communications and Outreach Project Manager, Community Engagement

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"A Call to Men UK " manhood workshops
by Neotarf 14 Apr '17

14 Apr '17

"A Call to Men UK has 55 coaches working in schools, youth justice departments and youth centres across Worcestershire. The organisation has one principal aim, explains development manager Michael Conroy: to spark a 'cultural shift in the way boys relate to girls', and through this to prevent violence against women and girls.... 'As a culture it’s time that we gave our young men permission to be complex, sensitive and happy human beings who transmit positivity and respect to others'.” [1] They have a program "for young men from 11-19", which if you think about it, is pretty much the demographic of Wikimedia's admins and functionaries. [2] This is all the more interesting right now because of the recent Newmark Foundation grant to combat harassment, which it seems is to be used for developing more forceful blocking tools for admins and functionaries "with the participation and support of the volunteers who will be using the tools". If anyone has not seen the Susan J Fowler / Uber piece on harassment that has started going viral in the last 24 hours, it is here. "...they didn't do anything because the manager who threatened me was a 'high performer.'" [3] Sound familiar? This happened in a company with HR oversight; Wikimedia admins and functionaries have no oversight at all. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2017/feb/20/teaching-boys-a… [2] http://acalltomenuk.org.uk/ [3] https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-…

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US government website for International Women of Courage Award is down
by Ellie Kesselman 08 Mar '17

08 Mar '17

I searched the U.S. State Department website, and while I got many hits, see here https://findit.state.gov/search?query=International+Women+of+Courage+Award&… the only page that was not 404 error not found was this https://www.state.gov/s/gwi/iwoc/index.htm I don't know what is going on, nor whether it is temporary. I doubt that it is due to the new Trump administration, as there was continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations. FeralOink

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Question for people working on women's day events
by Marta Delatte 28 Feb '17

28 Feb '17

Dear group, We are preparing our bias detection <http://net.wanderingliquen.com/> tool to help us to track content bias about women that can be edited during this month, to know how the tool works, you can watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mgYvTuUphE We are inviting groups working on events and edit-a-thones to let us know which categories will be working on in order to upload those categories as new maps in the app (For example, Wikimujeres is working on an event to edit content related to women in science and our suggestion is to work with the category "scientists", if the category is too big, for example, "science", the app may take too long to render the map being a major usability set back) We will release weekly reports listing the problematic pages per category indicating which bias has been detected in each page, so any volunteer can pick up the lead and and review+improve any of the listed pages. The idea is that this weekly reports will go on for the whole month as kind of an online support for the women's day events I am aware that these days are really busy, but If you want to let me know which categories would you want to be uploaded for reviewing I will highly appreciated! Best, Marta Marta Delatte creative director and co-founder ellenjames.net <http://www.ellenjames.net/> @martadelatte PhD Researcher Media & Memory Research Initiative University of Hull (UK) 44 (0) 7923 528128 liquendatalab.com <https://www.liquendatalab.com/> @liquen_

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Craigslist founder donates $500K to curb Wikipedia trolls
by Trevor Bolliger 20 Feb '17

20 Feb '17

Hello, everyone. I’m Trevor, a new Product Manager here at the WMF and I’ll be working on the Community Health Initiative. If you’re looking to read press about this new initiative, I personally think the two best articles are the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post published on January 26th 2017[1] and Craig Newmark’s blog post published the following day.[2] This specific Newmark Foundation grant will be used to staff a software development team to research, design, and build tools for wiki contributors and functionaries to detect, report, and evaluate incidents of harassment and block offenders if appropriate. At this moment in time we believe all four pillars — detection, reporting, evaluation, and blocking — are equally important. This initiative is not just about blocking users. If you’re looking for in-depth details, the best places to learn more are the Meta page on the Community Health Initiative[3] (which is admittedly still a work-in-progress) and the 14-page grant proposal.[4] But ‘Tools’ is just part of the equation. An equally important part of this initiative is will be to work with the communities to evaluate and improve the conduct policies and dispute resolution processes. This is outside the scope of this specific Newmark Foundation grant but is crucial to the goal of reducing the frequency of harassment and complexity of resolving harassment reports. One of the challenges for this initiative will be crafting, committing to, and executing an inclusive and open communication strategy that encourages and fosters constructive participation into the process. Community input is vital to this initiative. As we staff up this new team we’ll begin making decisions on best to include everyone who wants to be involved. Until then, I personally encourage you to discuss this initiative on its talk page.[5] Thank you! [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/01/26/community-health-initiative-grant/ [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-newmark/how-wikipedia-is-fighting_b_144… [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_grant_proposal_-_… [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative

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URGENT. Looking for developers (online bias detection tool for Art+Feminism edit-a-thon 2017)
by Marta Delatte 14 Feb '17

14 Feb '17

Dear all, I am writing you on behalf of my group (www.liquendatalab.com) <https://www.liquendatalab.com/>. During the last months we have been working on building an online bias detection tool in order to help fight systemic bias in Wikipedia, but unfortuntaley we have lost our developer before finishing the project. This is why I would love to ask you for assitance to finish this digital project in time for the next Art+Feminism edit-a-thon, which is in less than 4 weeks. Our prototype has been designed in order to allow women, black and queer folks react to biased content without exposing themselves to online abuse taking under consideration issues of oppressed group identities within the Wikipedia communit. access the prototype here --> http://net.wanderingliquen.com/ A brief description of the project: When accessing the prototype for Art+Feminism, users can explore 7 Wikipedia categories and react with the feedback buttons they think that there is any biased information. Users need to register before accessing. After registering the app offers a series of maps (vector graphs) to explore Wikipedia categories. The maps are build with vector graphs where nodes represent pages and subcategories. Red nodes indicate controversy in the page (controversy is calculated by counting the number of comments on the discussion page of each Wikipedia entry). When clicking the node, a module appears in the left side of the screen showing the article abstract and the article link to access the Wikipedia page. Users then can check the information on Wikipedia and, if they think that the information is biased, they can react with the feedback buttons. The bias button aims to tackle precisely this time-consuming process of locating biased content. The feedback button work in a similar way than the Facebook like button, but instead of implying ‘I like this content’ with their reaction, users can imply: ‘I think this content is biased’ because is islamophobic, or sexist, or ageist, or ableist, or homophobic etc. This particular feature may result useful first to gather quantitative evidence regarding biased content in Wikipedia, because they - the community- are pointing out where we have issues, and which are those issues. Also it is expected that this information, and other features for collaborative working still to be developed, will be of assistance to the community of editors, specially for online collaboration during the editathones that Wikimedia organize yearly around Women’s Day. The long term goal of the application is to give feminist communities an alternative space from sexist environments to allow them to keep focused on women-centred knowledge production. Nevertheless there are still some work to do on the app, as to redesign the backend and the front end focusing on usability issues, and also improve some of the functionallities adding a text selector and charts to visualize the information about user reactions gathered by app. We are looking for a volunteer developer willing to help us during this last stage, and I am wandering if we could find them whitin this community. Please find attached a more comprehensive report for the proposal and please don't hesitate if you have any doubt or comment. Many thanks in advance, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zTOWYaTRvgDyTb_ OgkFTzzJoDU4ooyH0PuQX-tjT7Ks/edit?usp=sharing Marta Delatte creative director and co-founder ellenjames.net <http://www.ellenjames.net/> @martadelatte PhD Researcher Media & Memory Research Initiative University of Hull (UK) 44 (0) 7923 528128 liquendatalab.com <https://www.liquendatalab.com/> @liquen_

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Intro
by Nelson Tayengwa 14 Feb '17

14 Feb '17

Hie everyone, my name is Nelson I'm from Zimbabwe Africa .I am a 21 year old male. I'm very happy to join this list.I hope my contributions are going to helpful. Thank you. Sent from my Windows Phone

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Feminism and Museums
by Lucy Crompton-Reid 10 Feb '17

10 Feb '17

Dear all Firstly apologies for any cross-posting. Over the next week I'll be finalising a piece for a new MuseumsEtc. publication, *Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption and Change.* The title of my chapter will be 'Closing the Gender Gap on Wikimedia' and the focus will be on the work of the global Wikimedia movement to develop responses to the exclusion or misrepresentation of women and their creative works, in relation to museums. I hope to be able to draw on case studies of good practice across the movement, showcasing partnership projects with museums or the wider cultural sector including galleries, archives and libraries, including those where the gender gap is compounded by geographic, linguistic and racial bias. I'd love to hear about any projects you've been involved with, however big or small, that might fit within the broad remit of feminism, culture and open knowledge. I have reached out to a number of different groups and individuals and have got a great response so far, but thought this would be a good place to post this request. With thanks and best wishes Lucy -- Lucy Crompton-Reid Chief Executive Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0991 <+44%2020%207065%200991> Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

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Re: [Gendergap] Craigslist founder donates $500K to curb Wikipedia trolls - Email filters?
by WereSpielChequers 10 Feb '17

10 Feb '17

Christophe, Carol and Fae's notes have set me thinking as to what we could do with these funds, One of the areas that I understand has been a problem is email harassment, particularly of women and I believe particularly from throwaway accounts. I was wondering what people on this list would think of some possible changes we could make to the "email this user" system. The first would be to allow editors to set their email to only receive from confirmed or even extended confirmed accounts. This would be invisible to new editors, they'd just not see the *email this user *option for people they weren't entitled to email. The second would be an opt in Email moderation service. Similarly to only receiving email from confirmed or extended confirmed accounts, this would enable editors to opt all or parts of their email via the "email this user" function into a moderated stream. Much as with moderated posts to lists like this, a list admin would see the email and either approve it or take other action. You'd presumably need to having something on the send email screen to say that "this editor has opted into email moderation and your email will be delayed slightly before being screened and forwarded" You'd also need a group of volunteers to do the moderation, spot abusive emails and block abusers. The third would be an AI driven filter that people could opt into and which would screen emails going through this system and put high risk ones into a moderation queue. What do people think, if this existed would it help, would anyone have used any of it? WSC

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Craigslist founder donates $500K to curb Wikipedia trolls
by Carol Moore dc 09 Feb '17

09 Feb '17

http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/craigslist-founder-donates-500k-to-curb-wiki… Wow! When I think of the 2 plus hrs a week x 385 odd weeks of hours I spent dealing with guys who just didn't like the idea that a "female" dared to edit - or worse, change their edit - I still tear my hair out. I just hope it helps!! I'd like to go back in a few years when hopefully have accomplished other goals. Or ENCOURAGE women to edit, as opposed to now having to warn them all the time about what they have to do to edit safely! CM

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Gendergap February 2017