Hmm. I stopped editing the Dutch Wikipedia because it just wasn't any fun anymore. I would never say I experienced barriers to entry or that there were barriers to continued participation. It is more that there was a continuous vacuum of silence that made participation feel like I was on an island all of the time. I was never invited to the discussion table on any specific subject, and if I stumbled across one, once there, my replies to statements were never answered directly, but indirectly in replies to others. I was never addressed personally and asked for an opinion. That doesn't happen regularly on Commons or the English Wikipedia either, but I feel much less on an island in bth of those projects and much more a part of a community. Any contribution I made to an ongoing discussion on the Dutch Wikipedia just stopped the discussion altogether or was simply ignored. I vaguely remember a few deletion discussions where my objections were brushed off with ridiculous arguments - so ridiculous that I wouldn't know what to reply in all seriousness. Of course I can't back this up with diffs and it is just a feeling, but it's because of the feeling that I stopped contributing. I guess I also got tired of always linking to redlinks in my area of interest - there are just more people working in my area of interest on the English Wikipedia, so that I feel I can lean more on the work of others.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Carol Moore dc <carolmooredc@verizon.net> wrote:

This point is so important I gave it its own subject line. Perhaps this language can be worked into the statement of purpose of all the WMF Gender gap projects... I also think Kerry should turn her whole excellent statement into an essay for the WMF site and it should be linked from GGTF main page.

On 12/29/2014 4:07 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:

Does it matter? Believe me, a lot of people get really stuck at this point and frame it as “well, if women don’t want to edit Wikipedia, does it really matter? It’s their choice, isn’t it?” This is something that really needs to get reframed. Yes, of course, many women don’t Wikipedia because they simply aren’t interested in doing so (ditto many men). But there are barriers to entry and barriers to continued participation by women who are interested in doing so compared to men. Try to reframe it “are women equally able to edit Wikipedia” or “are there barriers to women editing?”.

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