What it would take to close the gender gap?
That WMF would realize itself that Wikipedia misses social software to give female contributors a comfortable feeling because of the social environment.
Giving many workshops for new female contributors, we notice that they experience Wikipedia as a difficult place to start and a difficult place to collaborate easily with other users. The collaborating they expect is more than only editing an article and writing messages on talk pages, that is our current primitive situation that is not sufficient to retain many contributors, and especially female contributors. They expect a social environment, with easy interaction, where they are stimulated and can form groups to be able not to feel alone on the wiki and to work together, where they can get constructive feedback, where they can follow easily what colleagues, friends and other people they know personally are doing on Wikipedia.
As example, there is no way for people to follow friends/colleagues on what they have written. There is no easy way to say to a group of users (friends/colleagues) you have written a new article and you like suggestions. Or answer to a question.
It is time for Wikipedia to go to the next generation. It is time for Wikipedia getting social.
Romaine
Read more at: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/January_2015/Contents/Be... https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/11/wikimedia-at-fosdem-2015/
2015-05-31 21:18 GMT+02:00 Jason Radford jsradford@uchicago.edu:
Hi,
Since participating in the Inspire campaign, I got interested in the question of exactly how many women would be needed on Wikipedia to close the gender gap. I ran some simulations and came up with some fairly radical numbers. For example, according to my calculations, there are so few current and new female editors that, even if every current and new active, female editor stayed active for ten years, we wouldn't close the gap.
I've posted the results https://civilsociology.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/closing-the-gender-gap-on-wikipedia-results-from-some-simulations/ to my blog. It's password protected so I can share the results and get feedback without making it pubic. You can access them by using the password "wikipedia". I'm looking for feedback to see if I'm missing anything, if it's unrealistic, or anything else.
Thanks! Jason
-- Jason Radford Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University *Connect*: LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/jsradford, Twitter http://www.twitter.com/jsradford, University of Chicago http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejsradford/ *Play Games for Science at Volunteer Science http://www.volunteerscience.com*
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