From: Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org>
To: fredbaud@fairpoint.net; Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects <gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tue, February 22, 2011 12:52:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Women's issues noticeboard
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Fred Bauder
<fredbaud@fairpoint.net> wrote:
> Given the demographic imbalance in our community, and the resultant risk
> of systemic bias in our editorial decisions, it might make sense to
> create a Women's issues noticeboard in en:WP and other Wikipedias, where
> related matters can be brought up for review.
> Thoughts?
> Andreas
Fred
Noticeboards are huge magnets for drama.
There are longtime English Wikipedia editors already starting to grumble about this effort. If we're going to make progress by bringing the community along with this, rather than having them fight us, we should try to minimize the potential for drama, especially of the accusatory kind that gets performed on incident noticeboards.
I would suggest we not create not a noticeboard for this issue specifically.
Noticeboards are the only way I am aware of for handling systematic problems in any sort of regular fashion. I would suggest that is systematic problems that are magnets for drama, not the fact that someone creates space name "Foo Noticeboard". And frankly drama is primarily caused by ego and speed. While we can hardly banish people who are controlled by their egos, we can make an effort to take things slowly. Make certain to get the full history of an issue is collected before posting personal judgments. Don't assume anyone who is brought to the noticeboard has any understanding of why women's issues are a systematic problem on Wikipedia. Focus on educating people and bringing their level of understanding up to speed rather than just condemning their thoughtless errors. That might cut the drama
by half.
Of course, not allowing any space for the people who understand these concerns as a systematic issue to be available to review the everyday sorts of decisions that are made on an case-by-case basis without any particular context would be even less drama. But the goal of this whole effort, or even en.WP in particular, is not "avoid drama at all costs". The goal of Wikipedia is to create a free, neutral, verifiable encyclopedia. Drama is inevitable, the best we can strive for is that the drama is as cost-effective as possible.
I don't understand how you imagine the wikis will actually work on any kind of systematic problem without these kinds of spaces.
Birgitte SB