To me, a “practice wiki” is NOT the answer. But it’s what looks like an answer when you frame the issue as “let’s fix the problem with women” instead of “let’s fix the problem with Wikipedia”. I do not think a retreat to various “off-WMF” platforms is anything other that, a retreat.

I think the place to start is with the next WMF Strategic Planning cycle. Although I have not noticed anything being mentioned on-wiki yet, it’s being talked about in the Metrics & Activities meetings as something that has started with WMF. I presume soon it has to engage with the community. Let’s push for a target for female participation (the current one has one at 25% so just retaining that would be fine).

But let’s push for the things that WMF didn’t do last time in support of that goal.

1) Have a means to measure it. Create a demographic database within WMF and encourage new and existing users to provide information about themselves (by default or as a user-specified option, this information should be kept totally private and only used for statistical purposes to maximise people’s willingness to provide the information). Then with this information, we can track various kinds of diversity and therefore be able to produce “active women editor” graphs (or for any other group) as easily as “active editor graphs”.  There’s no point having a target if you have no way of knowing if you’ve reached it or not! I would also suggest this demographic database invited users to provide an email address to be used for other WMF-internal survey purposes. The primary one would be if their participation ceased for an extended period so they can be contacted for survey purposes. We need more information on why people leave because of editor decline more generally. I think the details of all this could be left in the hands of the WMF Analytics and Research team.

2) Experiment with platform-changes (usual A/B testing) to see if we can “design in” more gender-friendly solutions. As an engineer, Lila Tretikov probably understands this. It is very hard to change people’s behaviours (culture) *but* it is a lot easier to change the platform through which the behaviours/cultures are manifested to make some behaviours easier or harder. As a simple example, Facebook took away the “dislike” (thumbs down) button a long time ago. Today, you can only “like” someone else’s posting but have to bother to write a comment to express disagreement. That’s a good example of making a “socially-positive” behaviour easy and a “socially-negative’ behaviour harder. I suspect on Wikipedia, even ignoring vandalism, there are a lot more reverts than thanks. Is that socially-positive or socially-negative? If we have the user profiles (above), then changes to the platform (whether for gender-equity purposes or any other reason) can track the impact on editor behaviour (or more simply, does participation by women rise or fall or remain unchanged as a result).

3) Demand a higher proportion of self-identified women on committees etc. How high? Higher than the current self-identified female active editor proportion (because we are trying to lift the game) but not so high that female editors willing to serve on such things are exhausted by the workload. Maybe track it at 5% above the current female editor level or something like that. Did all the women on this list vote in the WMF Board of Trustee elections and any other elections that you were eligible to? No (and I confess I won’t always bother either) so

If we want change at a massive scale, we need scalable solutions. Hand-to-hand combat over specific issues is unlikely to achieve this. We need to lift our focus to winning the war, not winning the battle.

Kerry