On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:40 AM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.comwrote:
I think it is relevant to our understanding of how the gender gap developed on WMF wikis.
That was hard to pick up from the e-mail. :( I too was baffled as to how this connected. I still don't see how this connects to the gender gap. What are we supposed to do with it? What can learn from it? Is it a call for chapters to boycott Dell? (If so, nothing was posted to the chapters list, though maybe something posted to Internal.) Was she asking for women to write about it for Wikinews? (Wikinews loves women's contents and I know they like women contributors and wish they had more of them.) Sexism happens all the time at tech conferences and online. "There is something wrong on the Internet!" has practically become an internet meme in its own right. Context free, it is confusing... because it makes this list seem like a general feminist list to air grievance. I can get that any time I want in many other places. : /
So Sarah, you've got women and men who want to do something in response to Dell's latest behavior. How do you want us to assist and what are going to offer to assist us in that?
It's relevant because Wikipedia's gender gap doesn't exist in a vacuum, and neither its causes nor its solutions will be unique to Wikipedia. The Dell debacle is a really perfect example of the ignorance and lack of sensitivity to this issue that pervades the tech sector, both of which are quite strong factors in the gender gap on our own projects.