I teach librarianship and have a course," Knowledge Management and Wikipedia." Most of my students are women. We discuss the Gendergap and some students have made this a focus.
However, in reviewing the class results I found that men in the class were more active than women. Several of the men did 3x the work requested and were quite vocal about their enthusiasm--far more than the women tho the students did the same assignments...and I certainly made every effort to treat them equitably.
The only difference I could find was that the treatment by editors was received with more angst by women than men. The women expressed discouragement. The men expressed belligerence. I do think that a lot of the drop off of women is hasty deletion.
One especially disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright. Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women more than men.
--Kathleen
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Amanda Menking amenking@uw.edu wrote:
Hi All,
I recently received a Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) to continue research re: the gender gap. As a part of the IEG, I’ll be attending Wikimania in London this August, and I’d love to start scheduling interviews to take place during Wikimania.
You can review my IEG proposal here, and you can take a look at my project plan for the work I’ve been doing since January (16 interviews completed thus far; thanks to all who have helped) here.
My primary goal is to interview en.wikipedia editors who self-identify as women, but I’d also love to talk to editors who edit other languages and who do not self-identify as women. Please note: I want to collect a diverse range of stories and voices, so please consider!
You can reach me via amending@uw.edu or via Mssemantics on en.wikipedia and meta. I haven’t booked my travel arrangements yet, so my schedule for interviews is pretty flexible.
Best, Amanda/Mssemantics
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