The past weekend was great! Wikimedia was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open
Source Software Developers' European Meeting, organised as the university
ULB in Brussels, Belgium! We had there a stand with flyers about Wikipedia,
Wikimedia, Wikimedia Belgium, and a lot of goodies.

In the Wikimedia movement we often discuss the Gendergap, as one of the
gaps we have. Wikipedia/Wikimedia looks very much likes FOSDEM, but there
the Gendergap is even larger. Wikipedia/Wikimedia needs a more social
development, we need software which enables users to form groups in an easy
way. The female contributors to Wikipedia do like two things: having in
person meetings to socialize with other editors, and second they need more
social software. The education extension is a primitive form of what is
needed. We need an extension where users easily can form groups (namespace
Groups: or something, used by an extension), where they easily can see the
recent changes of edits of group members only, to be able to actively
interact with other group members and having a long term participation in
Wikipedia. Having software where users, interest groups or a group of
editors from an external organisation can work together.

To translate it for the tech community: Wikipedia needs a kind of
*phabricator* with groups, tasks, assignments, and so on, but then for on
Wikipedia itself.

Yes, Wikipedia is not a social network, but we need to create an
environment in what we enable people to have a collaboration on a more
visible way (if people want to).

That is my clear conclusion after this conference where I spoke with a lot
of women about editing on Wikipedia, but also based on many project of the
past years we organised.

[...]

Romaine

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Romaine's thoughts echo some of my own, as expressed here: