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/B…
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/11/wikimedia-at-fosdem-2015/
2015-05-31 21:18 GMT+02:00 Jason Radford <jsradford(a)uchicago.edu>du>:
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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