Hi all -
I'm at Wikimania currently, at one of the tracks related to women and
wikis, at a talk titled 'Women on wikiHow,' given by Krystle Chung, a
community manager for wikiHow. I figured there would be some interest
on this topic on this list among those not here, so here's a kind of
lame bullet-pointed summary, paraphrasing the presenter in the first
person:
:Wikipedia has gotten a lot of publicity over the gendergap; wikiHow
doesn't appear to have a (very huge) gender gap - what differences
resulted in this?
::We (wikiHow) didn't ever aim to have a balanced gender ratio - what
is it about us that resulted in a more balanced gender ratio?
:About wikiHow: started in 2005 by Jack Herrick, technically a
for-profit org, we consider ourselves a non-profit. 141,000 how-to
articles, 16,000 main namespace edits a month, about 1,000 new
articles a week. 300 editors with >5 edits in the past week, 50-70
contributors who made their tenth edit in the past week, 65 active
editors with over 500 total edits (10+ in the past week,) 75 editors
with more than 100 edits in the past month. (We haven't done intense
official surveys of contributors before, because we have a very small
staff.)
::I looked in to our gender ratio by looking at several groups of
editors for a three week period - very active editors, top 50 editors,
new editors, top 20 over-all authors, etc. 274 looked at in total, I
sent them all a survey asking about gender and age. I excluded any
editors under 15 because we don't track very young editors. We also
asked if they edited anonymously, what their preferred activities
were, etc.
::Of 274 surveys sent out, 126 people answered, 56% of respondents
were female. (We reached out via individualized talk page message
because our community is traditionally guarded about personal info.)
We think survey roughly reflects reality, but doubt you could draw
statistically significant conclusions from it.
::52% are 15 or younger, 24% are 16-25, females outnumber males among
editors 25 and younger. The older the contributor, the more likely to
be male. (presenter is now displaying a graph showing ratio of gender
and age groups - ridiculously pretty correlation between age and
gender.)
::No apparent difference in preferred editing activities and gender.
Longest standing and most active editors are more male than female;
new editors are substantially more female than male.
:Potential reasons why our gender ratio is balanced:
::we have an unusually friendly culture compared to other communities
::we have very low barriers to entry (no need for wikisyntax on wikiHow)
::the nature of our content
::our small community size
:Friendly culture
::Established early on by our founder - he reached out to all new
editors directly and individually for a long time. Also, very even
staff gender ratio. (kevinnote: WMF also has a much more balanced
staff gender ratio than the wikimedia movement as a whole does)
::Very minimal policy and templates. Coaching templates require
community approval, we got rid of welcome templates because we thought
they sucked (people were putting a lot of 'dont do this' warnings in
them - plus they were getting colorful and made us seem like
myspace...)
::community as a whole has very good "soft skills" - how you say
things is as important in our community as what you say, we get rid of
argumentative trolls even if they are raising good points
:Low barriers to entry
::newbie friendly tools like spell checker, intro image adder, and
quality guardian (a tool kind of like recent changes patrol, but
friendlier. takes multiple 'bad edit' votes to remove an edit)
::anons are welcomed upon first edit
::'patrol coach' - our recent change patrollers are randomly tested
with already flagged changes, if they get them right they get a
congratulations, if they get them wrong they get a friendly message
asking them to improve and their last fifty patrols are undone
:nature of content
::We're okay with multiple ways to skin a cat, no need to argue about
one right answer
:small community size
::we're under dunbar's number
::we don't have as much of an issue with exclusivity (but we're
starting to develop wikipedia-like problems; we can learn a lot from
wikipedia here)
:Ideas on Wikipedia
::I'm not familiar with Wikipedia policies, but I feel that Jack
(founder's) leadership established a pattern of mutual respect
::MOAR TEAHOUSE! (teahouse has ~78% women)
::Act more like Wikipedians actually do in real life?
Q&A session:
Questioner: it seems like you have a big gender drop off as
activity/total edit count builds - do you think gender is serving as a
proxy for other demographic factors like technical expertise?
Krystle: We've not done any other surveys; we'll look at in the
future, reaching out more actively to people who stop editing. I
agree that it could be reflective of differing skillsets or areas of
interest or other other factors than gender.
Audience member: I can help answer I think, I'm one of those
older-women-on-wikiHow. I think a lot of it is lack of tech expertise
and feelings of nervousness with contributing. One reason I've stuck
around is just that friendly community has helped me overcome my
technophobic little-old-ladyness. I'm still surprised I've been here
for five and a half years and 17k edits, two hundred articles, ten
million pageviews. I wouldn't be here today if other users hadn't
walked aside me early on.
Sorry for any typos or misstatements in this email; I'm taking live
notes and sending this out right after, rather than holding off and
proofing/revising it fully first. I may bork up some of the finer
points of the talk slightly; if you're here, feel free to correct me.
All first person statements in the bulleted points are from the
perspective of the presenter - any notes I've added are marked as
kevinnotes.
----
User:Kevin Gorman