Hello,
My name is Nicole Willson and I have been editing wikis for the past 5 years, mostly wikiHow. Some of you know me and some of you don't so I figured I'd write a brief intro first. I also was one of the organizers for Recent Changes Camp in Boston (which had a high percentage of female attendees), have taught wikis to middle schoolers and worked/interned at various feminist organizations including the New York City Chapter of NOW and the YWCA in Princeton.
I've been lurking on the list and have almost participated in some of the conversations, but wanted to get a feel for the culture here first. I considered contributing to the conversation about what motivates women to edit but didn't for the following reasons:
- I am not sure that my motivations are that different from that of men.
- I am not sure how much of my motivation has to do with my gender and
how much of it has to do with my personality or past experiences.
- I was afraid that someone would take my reasons and turn them into some
broader stereotype about women, like what happened with most women editors being wiki gnomes.
- I could have responded with information about women editors based on
personal experience and stats from the Poynter, but didn't want to detract from the current conversation about how to get more female involvement in the WMF projects.
I don't mind that there are men on the list. Personally, I believe that men can be feminists and work against sexism. I do think that they have something to offer. For example, there's the National Organization for Men Against Sexism which is very active in Boston and does talks in conjunction with NOW and they work together on events to discuss how to eliminate sexism.
I just wish to be asked things directly, instead of having people make assumptions about my experience as a woman with wikis. It's great that the men on this list know women who edit and are in discussion with them, but I'd rather hear directly from those women if at all possible.
I was encouraged to join this list by folks on #wiki in freenode and I do think I could help. I wish there was a list of things I could do to help (which was actually one of my barriers to entry for Wikipedia, not being able to figure out the roles I could take on right away). For example, half of the female admins that we know the gender for on wikiHow are female, and I'm sure some of them would be happy to talk about why they are involved with wikiHow as opposed to Wikipedia (where many of them have accounts) if they were asked. I also have some theories about why wikiHow has more women (NOTE: nobody involved in the wikiHow project ever intentionally designed the site so that there would be more women, it just happened that way). I may be able to help with this and with the efforts going on in NYC.
Lastly, I had a question about Fred's statement about rules. If following rules isn't that important in the beginning, how come I have only gotten feedback once about what I've done wrong with date formatting and never gotten a message about what I've done right on Wikipedia? I've made at least 150 edits, so one of them must have been good, right? Instead I get a message about date formatting (which someone else could probably fix easily) and told to look at the MoS (which assumes that I know that it stands for Manual of Style). It seems to me that there may be a disconnect here.
Yes, we're definitely running on one cylinder with respect to positive feedback. If the Metaverse Mod Squad http://www.metaversemodsquad.com/ were hired to evaluate and improve our operation (actually possible, but I have no idea what the terms would be) I'm pretty sure that would be one of the first of many things they would advise and organize.
There is a lot of resistance to some simple game-like reward system, points even like you get on Yahoo Answers. No one has ever taken such suggestions seriously. I remember when I was playing on Northern Lights, a game, another player would chat and occasionally give me a cookie. And you can do that on Wikipedia, a barnstar or a whole cheesecake, see Wikipedia:Awards Of course, there, on Northern Lights, there was a real time chat system inside the game. We might or might not benefit from that.
I think further development of our anemic reward system is something we could do.
The great userbox row relates to this somehow as it was a sort of social media devise which made user pages into a sort of defining portrait of the editor, see Wikipedia:Userbox policy poll
These: Wikipedia:Userboxes/Politics#Feminist_movement may be interesting, btw.
Fred