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