"Seeing like a state" refers to the idea that scientifically created govt programs can fix things. However, most a created by and for special interest and thus their inability to foresee the inevitable negative consequences or adjust quickly to them. 

However, nonprofit and profit businesses usually have more flexibility, at least til they become too big.  So trying to come up with new programs like Samuel proposes below is more feasible.  I've suggested similar things in the past, but others doubted Wikimedia would take it on and otherwise it would take quite a bit of financial and organizational expertise.

Of course mere numbers will not solve the problem. Even having to 25 or 35% women would not necessarily increase the quality of the product if the women ended up having to spend too much time quarreling with male editors who resent their editing, should it disagree with theirs, or just because such assertive female activity annoys them.  Of course, that's still a major reason women don't last long at Wikipedia anyway.



On 6/1/2015 1:00 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
Thanks Jason.  I enjoyed reading this, though the conclusions remind me of _Seeing Like a State_.   Not all edits, editors, and subcommunities are equal.  Trying to shift about contributors en masse in a way that is convenient for large organizations (or for those of us who like crunching large datasets :)   can be a total failure in practice.  

Let's set up a new space where we can experiment with fast influxes of newbies.  The current large projects are not suited for this.

If we create a new space (workspace, namespace, knowledgespace) for people to develop a different sort of knowledge, or in a different way, that would be amenable to participation by tens of thousands of new users and would not directly interfere with existing workflows:  then a new founder effect, tone, and creator network could develop in tandem with existing communities.  In that scenario, we could have a surge of new editors, and could perhaps help them find one another and form groups and figure things out as they go.  And these could be recruited specifically from communities that currently are unwelcome or feel underrepresented.

If we want to prevent some groups from 'taking charge' and blocking or pushing out groups they don't agree with, this new workspace might benefit from supporting multiple drafts of the same idea, or multiple separate groups that can all have their own policies.  The current framework on the larger wikis of One Complete System, having lots of policy to read before getting involved, and veterans chastising newbies for getting things wrong, is not amenable to any rapid influx.

SJ

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Siko Bouterse <sbouterse@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Super interesting, thanks for sharing Jason. 

"Can Wikipedia increase the number of new female editors four-fold and increase new editor retention four-fold every month for three years?"

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:29 AM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011@reagle.org> wrote:
Interesting!