In my opinion, women should look to organising off-wiki. Women-only site Women.com was mentioned the other day on the Gender Gap Task Force page. Activism there could certainly fulfil a useful function.
Ultimately, I think there should be a separate site for the gender gap effort – combining a blog and a forum, much like Wikipediocracy – where women and men interested in narrowing the gender gap and documenting the existing problems can exchange views in an atmosphere undisturbed by men pretending to be women, men opposed to narrowing the gender gap, men arguing that it's not really proven that the gender gap is a problem, and so forth.
It could do wonders for the effort's signal-to-noise ratio, and could probably achieve exponentially more in terms of raising public awareness. As it is, discussions on-wiki get bogged down in arguments leading nowhere, and contributors' energies are dissipated.[1]
A well-publicised off-wiki site forming links to journalists and academics working in this field would be an ideal complement to this mailing list – which is useful for networking with researchers and Wikipedians, but creates little or no direct publicity. No journalist will comb through the voluminous discussions here. You need a place where you can summarise issues in a more easily digestible format.
Unrelated to this, some of you may be interested in an ongoing discussion of the Wikipedia gender gap happening on Hacker News / Y Combinator:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304173
[1] Note the current arbitration request on the English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Gender_Gap...
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Katherine Casey < fluffernutter.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think it's appropriate to use this list to link to pages that out other users. I understand your frustration with nothing onwiki getting done, Carol, I truly do, but part of the social contract of being a Wikipedian is that we're expected to not attack the "real lives" of other Wikipedians - even when we think they're terrible or totally wrong.
On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 6:44 PM, Carol Moore dc carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/07/wikipedia-and-the-war-on-womens-dignity...
This article mentions an individual who's caused problems at the Gender Gap task force.
Off wiki sites engaging in outing is, like hashtags, a two edged sword. It can be used against truly problematic individuals who troll behind anonymity. But it also can be used against solid editors whose job or other situation necessitates anonymity but who have angered the wrong troll by trying to comply with policy.
And the absurdities continue....
CM
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