I've always been in this trouble; putting issues up for discussion by the
community at large certainly does have the potential for "drama", and
even serious trouble, but also for involvement by the entire community
and an enlarged opportunity to wrestle with these issues and resolve
them.
And, note, where such issues would go now is Wikipedia:Administrator's
Noticeboard/incidents. Unless, of course, we adopt the posture that
gender issues need to be delicately handled; that does not scale.
Also, I think that there needs to be some feedback from the general
community regarding certain issues raised here, particularly those which
are grounded in actual edits. A discussion of "They deleted my edits" has
to grounded in an examination of the edits involved.
Fred
--- On Tue, 22/2/11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
Given the
demographic imbalance
in our community, and the resultant risk
of systemic bias in our editorial decisions, it
might
make sense to
create a Women's issues noticeboard in en:WP
and other
Wikipedias, where
related matters can be brought up for review.
Thoughts?
Andreas
Please create it and inform everyone.
Fred
Stephen Walling wrote:
Noticeboards are huge magnets for drama.
There are longtime English Wikipedia editors
already starting to
grumble
about this effort. If we're going to make progress by bringing the
community along with this, rather than having them fight us, we should
try
to minimize the potential for drama, especially of the accusatory kind
that gets performed on incident noticeboards.
I would suggest we not create not a noticeboard
for this issue
specifically.
Women's views are too often drowned out on talk pages, simply because of
their numerical inferiority. A noticeboard would help.
While I understand the concern about the potential for drama, I think
any method used to make Wikipedia more gender-neutral will attract a
share
of drama. Having an institution to look at women's issues is a pretty
mainstream idea.
The UK has a [[Minister for Women and Equalities]] (a poorly researched
article at this time); there is a [[Minister responsible for the Status
of
Women (Canada)]]; a [[Minister for the Status of Women (Australia)]];
even
Afghanistan has one: [[Ministry_of_Women's_Affairs_(Afghanistan)]].
Denmark has a [[Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(Denmark)]]; Sweden has a
[[Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality (Sweden)]], etc.
The United States have affirmative action. We should not fear
controversy,
or grumbling; our democratically elected governments don't let that stop
them either. If the Wikipedia community cannot support something that is
standard in democratic society, then we do have a problem with our
demographics, and whatever problem we have will become readily apparent.
I wouldn't mind calling it a gender issues noticeboard. (That would be
[[WP:GIN]] as opposed to [[WP:WIN]].)
Andreas