Sarah's conclusions are in sync with what I've heard from the team at the Wikimedia Foundation. But, and that's a crucial point, the goal with the collaborations with the universites is not to make everyone a Wikipedian. I know, that may be strange or counter-intuitive. It certainly was for me. Instead, the goal is to increase the quality of those articles that they university courses are working on, and if some of those who edited during the course stays on as Wikipedians, that's terrific, but it cannot be the goal. I am sure that Frank Schulenburg, Rod Dunican, LiAnna Davis or the other people in the (now) Global Education team can provide more insight into their original thinking. Or Pete Forsythe, for that matter, who I know is on this list.
I know that is but one of the aspects of Sarah's email, but it's the one aspect I know something about :-)
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 10:30:10 -0400
From: sarah.stierch@gmail.com
To: fredbaud@fairpoint.net; gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Supporting Campus Ambassador programs [Fwd: Issue of Copy-Pasting]
I took some time last week and actually went through the "female" editors (many of the students openly identify their real names and/or genders) participating in class programs.
1) Most don't edit Wikipedia after the class is over - and this goes beyond gender. I determined this by studying their user contributions and also using a tool to examine contributions and gender for specific WikiProjects (specifically WP:Public art which developed as a program with students before the Campus Ambassador program existed)
2) A nice amount of them generally get slaps on the hand for their lack of understanding on "How Wikipedia Works"
I'm not sure if this means that something in the system is broken (i.e. we're not educating students and professors on how Wikipedia works write, we're not providing ongoing outreach - which seems to be a problem in a lot of areas of WP outreach...), that the students genuinely have no interest (and that's fine, they are "forced" to do it, after all), or what..
Some of these problems involve image deletion (due to lack of understanding on how fair use/copyright works in Wikipedia), article deletion, blocking of accounts, or just plain calling people out on their talk pages. I didn't gather all this information in a pile - I've looked at upwards of a thousand female editors accounts over the past two weeks - but, it's there, if you dig around a bit.
-Sarah
--
GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for WikimediaWikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American Art
and
Sarah Stierch Consulting
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