Certainly my own experience with edit training and edit-a-thons is that,
while people (both male and female) seem to enjoy the workshop, they don't
come back for more. I increasingly share the view that Wikipedians are born
not made. I am not sure that outreach achieves very much, given it is very
difficult to scale. So, I am inclined to think that the best investments are
in nurturing new organic (as in "self-selecting") editors and maintaining
the enthusiasm of the longer-terms editors. I think it is ultimately "the
community" that grinds all of us down in the long term. I've heard it
expressed in different ways by different folks. Some say they've just sick
of the vandalism fighting. Personally I did a very short stint as a reviewer
for Articles for Review because so many were of them looked dubious
notability and probably CoI that I thought why am I bothering (the wrong
attitude I know but at least know I understand why AfR produces so few
accepted articles - I think you either walk away or turn into a Auto-Reject
Reviewer). Others get tired of fixing problems created by an endless stream
of newbies making the same well-intentioned but inappropriate edits. My
personal peeve is the Lamington article which is frequently changed to say
it was invented in New Zealand, but with no sources provided, in an article
that currently documents every known early mentions of lamingtons and shows
all of them are Australian in origin (sorry, Kiwis, but you need evidence to
back up your persistent claims). Others get tired of having run-ins with
same grumpy old editors, the gatekeepers, etc. The interaction between the
I've-really-had-enough-of-these-newbies and the
bumbling-but-well-intentioned newbie is clearly a bit part of the problem;
it seems one of them gets burned by the interaction (either the old hand
flays the newbie or the old hand gives and walks away)..
My solution is not female-specific, but I think we do have to recognise that
we have years of effort gone into many articles. The people who put that
effort in don't want to keep dealing with the newbie edits on what is often
very stable text. I think we have to consider that it isn't appropriate to
have immature editors messing with mature content. It would be kinder to all
parties if we could (automatically) flag text that has achieved "maturity"
and give it some semi-protection from the newcomers, directing them to the
talk page rather than direct edits to the page itself. But let other
articles or parts of articles that don't have maturity to be more able to
directly edits by relative newcomers. How do we measure maturity? I am not
sure, but I think indicators are survival of much of the text over a long
period (disregarding short-lived reverted edits), large number of editors
who have contributed to the development of this articles, large watchlist,
.., these are machine-measurable things, i.e. could be automated.
I think if we can prevent the interactions likely to be unpleasant then
maybe people can co-exist a little happier.
Kerry