Marie,

Thanks very much for this overview of your early experience as an editor. Would you mind sending this email to the editor growth team so that they can look at your experience for ideas about what they can improve? Their email list is called "Editor Engagement" and you can find it on lists.wikimedia.org.

I'm also pinging Mssemantics who may be interested in your experience for her research.

Pine

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Marie Earley <eiryel@hotmail.com> wrote:

What's interesting to me about this discussion, and Gender Gap generally, is the discrepancy between what is perceived as being driving women editors away (and if you really want to see a classic example then the 'drop the sticks' closed section of this discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive263#Topic_ban_proposal_for_Gibson_Flying_V ) and the things that I have actually found difficult on Wikipedia. These are my bullet points about my first few months of joining Wikipedia.

1. Was reading something on WP and, out of curiousity, clicked on the other tabs 'edit' 'history' and 'discussion' just to see what they were about.
2. Realized they were discussions about editing WP and decided to look further & considered editing WP myself.
3. One tab open with daunting looking amounts of code that I could make absolutely nothing of, and another tab open next to it with a thing called 'Sandbox'.
4. Almost gave up there and then due to the mistaken idea that I if I wanted to write an article then I would have nothing but a completely blank canvass and have to write all the code from scratch by myself.
5. Came back to it the next day thinking, "That can't be it.", created an account and started making small edits, single lines with a citation, obvious copy edit errors and asked for help on noticeboards when I was stuck.
6. I had some stuff seized on, deleted as 'unimportant' or tagged for 'not enough refs', 'orphan', as well as some curt / abrasive comments but nice and helpful ones too. I should say something more about this - Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum, either online or in the world, if nasty comments are the reason that women don't edit Wikipedia then they wouldn't use social media either - but they do. Did I think that my edits were being treated disproportionately to male editors? Yes, but I am female and the off-line world that I inhabit is also sexist - so what else is new?.
7. So what did have me tearing my hair out early on? I would say that it was what I would call 'the washing machine effect'. I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I had had a quick-start guide that explained Help:XXXX, Template:XXXX, WP:XXXX. I would click 'Help' and be taken to the help homepage, search 'X', be taken to Help:'X', click on 'Y' - and here was the bit I didn't realize - when I clicked on 'Y' I was also, by default, leaving 'Help'. I regarded clicking the Help button as walking into the the lobby of Hotel Help, I would go through 2-3 links and then think, "Wait a minute, this is just ordinary Wikipedia, and this is just a definition of [word]. When did I leave Help?" Back button, back button, back button. "Okay, start over..." I would go around, and around like this for ages, either stumbling across what I was looking for, finding another way of doing what I wanted to do, or ask at the Teahouse (not New Users House? Why?).
8. I only ever visited the Commons when I need a picture for something, used the search engine to see if the Commons had what I wanted and then went back to Wikipedia. I didn't stick around to read the conversations so I didn't even know much about that side of it until I joined Gender Gap.

>Things that I think might help:
1. A culture of irresponsible behaviour stems from bad people. A culture of responsible behaviour stems from good people. The way to really make a difference is to crowd out the bad with the good so they bad get bored and go and find a new place to play. An increased number of sexist images will then be deleted by the improved culture of the community.
2. The greatest form of outreach is Wikipedia itself. When I was a student what was valuable to me was a way of accessing resources on topics. I recently went through Amartya Sen's page and fixed the bibliography / referencing including author / editor links. This is what his bibliography looked like before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#Publications and this is it now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#Bibliography The same with the referencing section, before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#References and after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#References Similar clean ups / new articles on other academics from the world of feminist economics / political science / political psychology / sociology / care work / human development etc. will increasingly gain Wikipedia a reputation amongst students and scholars as a useful reference tool and recruiting new editors from that pool of visitors would change the culture. A similar thing needs to happen with articles like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies
3. I recently added the biography of the political theorist Jane Bennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_(political_theorist). I had in draft for a long time, I took her bibliography from her CV and worked through it item by item. As I did this I checked to see if any co-authors had biographies so I could author-link them. Michael J. Shapiro was one, I went through his bibliography and cleaned it up, the co-authors of his books include James Der Derian, Hayward Alker, David Campbell (academic) - I added author-links on Shapiro's bio but all three of them need their bibliographies sorting out in a similar way and their pages need checking for infoboxes, authority control boxes and LCCN ref no. in authority control boxes.
4. Where dates of birth are known on biographies they should be added to WP's calender, I've added Jane Bennett's, 31 July 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_July#Births
5. When you first 'land' on Wikipedia what are the key pages beyond the main page:
> Contents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents
> Outlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines
> Portals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Portals
> Lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Lists
> Glossaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Glossaries
> Indexes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Indexes
6. The 12 groupings are: General reference / Culture and the arts / Geography and places / Health and fitness / History and events / Mathematics and logic / Natural and physical sciences / People and self / Philosophy and thinking / Religion and belief systems / Society and social sciences / Technology and applied sciences
A quick glance at the Outline for Philosophy and thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_and_thinking shows 'Ethics' with 'Sexual ethics' singled out for special mention - why? Under Indexes for Society and social sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Indexes#Society_and_social_sciences we have an index for BDSM but red links for Social Policy, Political Science and Development Studies.
7. There are no Portals of the following names: Pro-life portal / Pro-choice portal / Abortion debates portal / Same-sex marriage debates portal... so why is there an, equally contentious, 'Pornography portal', shouldn't it at least be a 'Pornography debates portal'?
8. For me issues like particular pictures making it onto the Commons only matter if they are put into articles or if they become featured / POTD. If there is a debate then fine, mention on Gender Gap and give a link, the same with other debates where a 'support' or 'oppose' may be needed. Taking on sexist editors and trying to find new systems of dealing with them and the images they want to put up is admirable, but there is an element of fiddling while Rome burns, for instance this is a video on how to edit Wikipedia - which new editors is this likely to attract? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvsVaTymzM Recruitment of better editors = better content = attracting better editors = crowding out the bad.

Marie