Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 8:20
PM
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Some Food for
Thought
Return food for thought:
Inferiority is not always something
you feel because of a problem that you have wrong inside you. Often times,
there are systematic problems that help reinforce this. Some people have
categorically treated as inferior. Having a male suggest this is all in
the minds of female contributors is not a useful contribution to the
conversation because it devalues the experiences of female contributors on
this list, on a list dedicated specifically to fixing these problems. We
want to empower female contributors and leaders. We want them to go back
to their communities and help work towards increasing overall participation to
Wikimedia projects and female participation to Wikimedia projects.
Dismissing real and valid concerns does not help: It hurts. A man
quoting a woman to dismiss valid concerns makes it worse. I know that
was probably not your intent. I know you probably did not intend to
cause additional hurt by dismissing valid concerns.
If we want to fix this problem, we need to remember this. If we have
women saying "I am having trouble connecting to this list. I do not feel
it represents my interests. The primary focus is on articles of interest
to a narrow audience," then we need to work to be more inclusive. I'd
love to know more about what is happening in regards to women's related
content on French Wikipedia, efforts being made by the community to increase
female participation on various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the quality of
women's related content on French Wikipedia. We don't often have a
chance to hear this narrative. There are 115 million native speakers of
the language and around 270 million people who can speak it. It is the
official language in some 29 countries around the globe including France.
France ranks ninth in the amount of visitors to English Wikipedia.
French Wikipedia accounts for 4.7% of traffic to ALL language Wikipedia.
There is a huge potential to grow the female participation rates and the
general French speaking participation rates on Wikimedia projects.
How
can we support this? How can we use the list to support contributors who
do not speak English? What steps can we take to make sure we are more
inclusive? One of the failings of the gender gap list is we so rarely do
that. :(
_____
Béria Lima
Wikimedia Portugal
(351) 963 953 042
Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa
a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento
humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho.
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