Personally, I don't think it's worth having a discussion here about the merits of deleting these images. There's no chance in hell they are going to be deleted from Commons. What I'm more interested in is the locker-room nature of the discussions and how/if this can be addressed, as I think that is actually more likely to dissuade female contributors than the images themselves. Ryan Kaldari On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 7/23/2014 5:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: As long as they aren't in articles (or at least those most women are likely to end up at), it's not likely most women will see them and be dissuaded by that aspect of editing. Constantly reminding women they exist through this list or the Gender Gap Task Force probably would be more of a turn off. On the other hand, having a separate list which will, among other things, post notices of all such AfDs for those likely to want to AfD them might help get rid of some of the worse ones. And it might raise the consciousness of at least a few guys as to just how tacky they are. (I might join it for a while, but there's only so much one can take!) Another idea is to start "Stupid sexist Wikicommons upload of the week (or day)" page or -more likely - off wiki blog and make sure Wikicommons people all know about it. At least it would be evidence some in the wiki community are fed up with it and make it generally easy to AfD the most gratuitous images. Make it a facebook page with text making it clear LIKE means you think it's stupid and should be the "Stupid sexist upload of the Day/Week" - or whatever it might be called... Who knows, it might make a lot more women interested in Wikimedia projects (or not?) Finally, let's try to post only things from the past year. Who knows, maybe all those guys' consciousnesses have been raised 3% since we all started talking about these issues and media have started covering it and we might actually have improved things a bit since that 2011 posting :-) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Radio_but… CM

Past experience is that such systems are inevitably used to facilitate censorship. On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 8:51 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." -- Desiderius Erasmus

I presume that uploaders only upload images they are personally comfortable with, so it is almost axiomatic that it would be others who would probably add such classifications, just as occurs with movies. I have no idea how IMDB make it work, but they do and they are using volunteers too. I note that IMDB use a 1-to-10 scale for the classifications. Maybe they just let people vote and the result is the average. But, whether or not my proposal can work, I think we have to use this list to put forward ideas with a view to rolling out some kind of trial/pilot/experiment. The gender gap is of long standing and is unlikely to spontaneously disappear by just talking about it. Kerry _____ From: Carol Moore dc [mailto:carolmooredc@verizon.net] Sent: Friday, 25 July 2014 6:34 AM To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com; Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation of women within Wikimedia projects. Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Sexualized environment on Commons While this can work in some situations, in a Wiki run by volunteers you rely on people to accurately self-classify their work, which many would not. Or you rely on other volunteers changing the rating. Whether up or down, it probably will lead to a big debate. This dozens or even hundreds of debates a day, which would be quite time consuming. Too many people already try to AfD photos for phony reasons. ("I don't like that person; I don't believe you took the picture!" being one I encountered myself.) On 7/23/2014 9:51 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote: I agree that offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder. And while there may be all manner of very niche groups who find strange things offensiveness, maybe some people object to seeing refrigerators or reading about cakes, nonetheless we know that there are a lot of widespread categories of offensiveness that generate the bulk of discussions about the inclusion of items on Wikipedia or Commons. What we could do is to have to some system of classification (like the movies) for articles, images, and/or categories indicating that they are potentially offensive for various reasons. Perhaps along similar lines to the "content advisories" in IMDB, e.g. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295297/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg People could then put in their profiles that all classifications are acceptable or them or that these are the classifications they don't want to see (e.g. Sex and Nudity, Gore and Violence, Profanity, etc - obviously our classifications might not be identical to IMDB as we are dealing with different kinds of content but you get the idea). When that person searches Wikipedia or Commons, then those articles, images and categories that they would find offensive are not returned. When a person reads an article containing an offensive-to-them categorised image, it is simply not displayed or some image saying "Suppressed at your request (Sex and Nudity)". We could possibly bundle such these finer classifications into common collections, e.g. Inappropriate for Children, Suitable for Muslims, or whatever, so for many people it's a simple tick-one-box. For anonymous users or users who have not explicitly set their preferences, rendering of an article or image could first ask "This article/image has been tagged as potentially offensive for SuchAndSuch reason, click OK to confirm you want to view it". If they are a logged-in user, it could also offer a link to set their preferences for future use. I note that movies are often made with variants for different countries. Sometimes that's simply a matter of being dubbed into another language but it can also include the deletion (or replacement) of certain scenes or language that would be offensive in those countries. So it is not as if we are reinventing the wheel here, just customising it to Wikipedia. Kerry

Well, I am unsurprised that it has been considered before, as it's the obvious solution. Sad that the Board lacked the will to see it through. But it doesn't mean that it could not or should not be raised again. Social justice issues rarely succeed on their first attempt. If we took that attitude, women still wouldn't have the vote. The group we should be most concerned about is younger children. With many children increasingly having smartphones, it is far harder for parents to supervise the content they are viewing (unlike a desktop that can be positioned where the parent can keep an eye on things). At the same time, WMF is putting increasing effort into the mobile platforms and the WMF metrics show consistent uptrends in mobile access. The two trends suggest that Wikipedia and Commons are now a lot more likely to be accessed by children in an unsupervised context. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: shimgray(a)gmail.com [mailto:shimgray@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray Sent: Saturday, 26 July 2014 4:08 AM To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com; Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation of women within Wikimedia projects. Subject: Re: [Spam] Re: [Gendergap] Sexualized environment on Commons Hi Kerry, Sad as it is to be the bearer of dispiriting news... A proposal more or less similar to this was made by the Board in 2011 (some kind of image filtering on a user-selected basis) - http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content The debate about whether (and/or how) to implement it was pretty vicious, pretty angry, and went on for the best part of a year. A September 2011 community poll gave interestingly mixed results - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-09-05/News_a nd_notes and the development of any software was suspended pending further discussion. In mid-2012, the Board then formally rescinded the "develop a filter system" request - http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:_Personal_Image_Hiding_Featur e - and it has more or less been dead in the water since then. There's been no significant attempt to revive it, but I think this is in part because the wounds are still fresh - I think were it to be reopened now you'd get much the same result, a lot of heat which eventually stalls. It's worth noting that a very small-scale version of this is in use for some wikis - it's been pointed out that some sexual topics on Arabic Wikipedia have a "click to expand" field which conceals an image - but this is pretty rare and done on a page-by-page, not image-by-image, basis; it also has no user-level customisability. Andrew. On 24 July 2014 02:51, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote: the to our searches preferences, to that wrote: thought want https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_portrayals_of_computer_tech nology I participate I've sure a women? them relevant delete the art? other ) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Radio_butt on_and_female_nude.jpg farther -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

The new hovercards (which I otherwise love) have created another problem, in that lead images show up when your cursor hovers over a wikilink. You would have to be reading an article where potentially offensive images are in linked pages, so this won't be a problem across the board. But it's easy to find yourself hovering over a link without intending to, so if you're in an article that contains such links, you can suddenly have images of genitalia on your screen without having clicked on the links that contain them. Sarah On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:

What's interesting to me about this discussion, and Gender Gap generally, is the discrepancy between what is perceived as being driving women editors away (and if you really want to see a classic example then the 'drop the sticks' closed section of this discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Arc… ) and the things that I have actually found difficult on Wikipedia. These are my bullet points about my first few months of joining Wikipedia. 1. Was reading something on WP and, out of curiousity, clicked on the other tabs 'edit' 'history' and 'discussion' just to see what they were about. 2. Realized they were discussions about editing WP and decided to look further & considered editing WP myself. 3. One tab open with daunting looking amounts of code that I could make absolutely nothing of, and another tab open next to it with a thing called 'Sandbox'. 4. Almost gave up there and then due to the mistaken idea that I if I wanted to write an article then I would have nothing but a completely blank canvass and have to write all the code from scratch by myself. 5. Came back to it the next day thinking, "That can't be it.", created an account and started making small edits, single lines with a citation, obvious copy edit errors and asked for help on noticeboards when I was stuck. 6. I had some stuff seized on, deleted as 'unimportant' or tagged for 'not enough refs', 'orphan', as well as some curt / abrasive comments but nice and helpful ones too. I should say something more about this - Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum, either online or in the world, if nasty comments are the reason that women don't edit Wikipedia then they wouldn't use social media either - but they do. Did I think that my edits were being treated disproportionately to male editors? Yes, but I am female and the off-line world that I inhabit is also sexist - so what else is new?. 7. So what did have me tearing my hair out early on? I would say that it was what I would call 'the washing machine effect'. I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I had had a quick-start guide that explained Help:XXXX, Template:XXXX, WP:XXXX. I would click 'Help' and be taken to the help homepage, search 'X', be taken to Help:'X', click on 'Y' - and here was the bit I didn't realize - when I clicked on 'Y' I was also, by default, leaving 'Help'. I regarded clicking the Help button as walking into the the lobby of Hotel Help, I would go through 2-3 links and then think, "Wait a minute, this is just ordinary Wikipedia, and this is just a definition of [word]. When did I leave Help?" Back button, back button, back button. "Okay, start over..." I would go around, and around like this for ages, either stumbling across what I was looking for, finding another way of doing what I wanted to do, or ask at the Teahouse (not New Users House? Why?). 8. I only ever visited the Commons when I need a picture for something, used the search engine to see if the Commons had what I wanted and then went back to Wikipedia. I didn't stick around to read the conversations so I didn't even know much about that side of it until I joined Gender Gap. 1. A culture of irresponsible behaviour stems from bad people. A culture of responsible behaviour stems from good people. The way to really make a difference is to crowd out the bad with the good so they bad get bored and go and find a new place to play. An increased number of sexist images will then be deleted by the improved culture of the community. 2. The greatest form of outreach is Wikipedia itself. When I was a student what was valuable to me was a way of accessing resources on topics. I recently went through Amartya Sen's page and fixed the bibliography / referencing including author / editor links. This is what his bibliography looked like before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#… and this is it now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#Bibliography The same with the referencing section, before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#… and after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#References Similar clean ups / new articles on other academics from the world of feminist economics / political science / political psychology / sociology / care work / human development etc. will increasingly gain Wikipedia a reputation amongst students and scholars as a useful reference tool and recruiting new editors from that pool of visitors would change the culture. A similar thing needs to happen with articles like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies 3. I recently added the biography of the political theorist Jane Bennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_(political_theorist). I had in draft for a long time, I took her bibliography from her CV and worked through it item by item. As I did this I checked to see if any co-authors had biographies so I could author-link them. Michael J. Shapiro was one, I went through his bibliography and cleaned it up, the co-authors of his books include James Der Derian, Hayward Alker, David Campbell (academic) - I added author-links on Shapiro's bio but all three of them need their bibliographies sorting out in a similar way and their pages need checking for infoboxes, authority control boxes and LCCN ref no. in authority control boxes. 4. Where dates of birth are known on biographies they should be added to WP's calender, I've added Jane Bennett's, 31 July 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_July#Births 5. When you first 'land' on Wikipedia what are the key pages beyond the main page: 6. The 12 groupings are: General reference / Culture and the arts / Geography and places / Health and fitness / History and events / Mathematics and logic / Natural and physical sciences / People and self / Philosophy and thinking / Religion and belief systems / Society and social sciences / Technology and applied sciences A quick glance at the Outline for Philosophy and thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_and_think… shows 'Ethics' with 'Sexual ethics' singled out for special mention - why? Under Indexes for Society and social sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Indexes#Society_and_social_sc… we have an index for BDSM but red links for Social Policy, Political Science and Development Studies. 7. There are no Portals of the following names: Pro-life portal / Pro-choice portal / Abortion debates portal / Same-sex marriage debates portal... so why is there an, equally contentious, 'Pornography portal', shouldn't it at least be a 'Pornography debates portal'? 8. For me issues like particular pictures making it onto the Commons only matter if they are put into articles or if they become featured / POTD. If there is a debate then fine, mention on Gender Gap and give a link, the same with other debates where a 'support' or 'oppose' may be needed. Taking on sexist editors and trying to find new systems of dealing with them and the images they want to put up is admirable, but there is an element of fiddling while Rome burns, for instance this is a video on how to edit Wikipedia - which new editors is this likely to attract? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvsVaTymzM Recruitment of better editors = better content = attracting better editors = crowding out the bad. Marie Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 21:59:59 -0700 From: peteforsyth(a)gmail.com To: gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] [Spam] Re: Sexualized environment on Commons On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 3:19 PM, Sarah <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: The new hovercards (which I otherwise love) have created another problem, in that lead images show up when your cursor hovers over a wikilink. Good point. In general, it would be good to have a more thorough process for exploring difficult-to-anticipate side effects before new features are broadly released -- something there's been a lot of discussion about lately. Back to Ryan's original topic -- the sometimes inappropriate nature of discussions on Commons -- I started a draft of an essay (which, at least theoretically, could eventually become a guideline if there is enough support for it). I think it might be a decent start, but it could use more input and fleshing out. Please take a look, and feel free to edit as you see fit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Peteforsyth/Provocative_behavior -Pete _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

Thanks Pine! ~ A. On Jul 30, 2014, at 3:27 PM, "Pine W" <wiki.pine@gmail.com<mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com>> wrote: Marie, Thanks very much for this overview of your early experience as an editor. Would you mind sending this email to the editor growth team so that they can look at your experience for ideas about what they can improve? Their email list is called "Editor Engagement" and you can find it on lists.wikimedia.org<http://lists.wikimedia.org>. I'm also pinging Mssemantics who may be interested in your experience for her research. Pine On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Marie Earley <eiryel@hotmail.com<mailto:eiryel@hotmail.com>> wrote: What's interesting to me about this discussion, and Gender Gap generally, is the discrepancy between what is perceived as being driving women editors away (and if you really want to see a classic example then the 'drop the sticks' closed section of this discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Arc… )<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive263#Topic_ban_proposal_for_Gibson_Flying_V> and the things that I have actually found difficult on Wikipedia. These are my bullet points about my first few months of joining Wikipedia. 1. Was reading something on WP and, out of curiousity, clicked on the other tabs 'edit' 'history' and 'discussion' just to see what they were about. 2. Realized they were discussions about editing WP and decided to look further & considered editing WP myself. 3. One tab open with daunting looking amounts of code that I could make absolutely nothing of, and another tab open next to it with a thing called 'Sandbox'. 4. Almost gave up there and then due to the mistaken idea that I if I wanted to write an article then I would have nothing but a completely blank canvass and have to write all the code from scratch by myself. 5. Came back to it the next day thinking, "That can't be it.", created an account and started making small edits, single lines with a citation, obvious copy edit errors and asked for help on noticeboards when I was stuck. 6. I had some stuff seized on, deleted as 'unimportant' or tagged for 'not enough refs', 'orphan', as well as some curt / abrasive comments but nice and helpful ones too. I should say something more about this - Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum, either online or in the world, if nasty comments are the reason that women don't edit Wikipedia then they wouldn't use social media either - but they do. Did I think that my edits were being treated disproportionately to male editors? Yes, but I am female and the off-line world that I inhabit is also sexist - so what else is new?. 7. So what did have me tearing my hair out early on? I would say that it was what I would call 'the washing machine effect'. I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I had had a quick-start guide that explained Help:XXXX, Template:XXXX, WP:XXXX. I would click 'Help' and be taken to the help homepage, search 'X', be taken to Help:'X', click on 'Y' - and here was the bit I didn't realize - when I clicked on 'Y' I was also, by default, leaving 'Help'. I regarded clicking the Help button as walking into the the lobby of Hotel Help, I would go through 2-3 links and then think, "Wait a minute, this is just ordinary Wikipedia, and this is just a definition of [word]. When did I leave Help?" Back button, back button, back button. "Okay, start over..." I would go around, and around like this for ages, either stumbling across what I was looking for, finding another way of doing what I wanted to do, or ask at the Teahouse (not New Users House? Why?). 8. I only ever visited the Commons when I need a picture for something, used the search engine to see if the Commons had what I wanted and then went back to Wikipedia. I didn't stick around to read the conversations so I didn't even know much about that side of it until I joined Gender Gap. 1. A culture of irresponsible behaviour stems from bad people. A culture of responsible behaviour stems from good people. The way to really make a difference is to crowd out the bad with the good so they bad get bored and go and find a new place to play. An increased number of sexist images will then be deleted by the improved culture of the community. 2. The greatest form of outreach is Wikipedia itself. When I was a student what was valuable to me was a way of accessing resources on topics. I recently went through Amartya Sen's page and fixed the bibliography / referencing including author / editor links. This is what his bibliography looked like before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#… and this is it now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#Bibliography The same with the referencing section, before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#… and after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#References Similar clean ups / new articles on other academics from the world of feminist economics / political science / political psychology / sociology / care work / human development etc. will increasingly gain Wikipedia a reputation amongst students and scholars as a useful reference tool and recruiting new editors from that pool of visitors would change the culture. A similar thing needs to happen with articles like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies 3. I recently added the biography of the political theorist Jane Bennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_(political_theorist)<https://…st>. I had in draft for a long time, I took her bibliography from her CV and worked through it item by item. As I did this I checked to see if any co-authors had biographies so I could author-link them. Michael J. Shapiro was one, I went through his bibliography and cleaned it up, the co-authors of his books include James Der Derian, Hayward Alker, David Campbell (academic) - I added author-links on Shapiro's bio but all three of them need their bibliographies sorting out in a similar way and their pages need checking for infoboxes, authority control boxes and LCCN ref no. in authority control boxes. 4. Where dates of birth are known on biographies they should be added to WP's calender, I've added Jane Bennett's, 31 July 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_July#Births 5. When you first 'land' on Wikipedia what are the key pages beyond the main page: 6. The 12 groupings are: General reference / Culture and the arts / Geography and places / Health and fitness / History and events / Mathematics and logic / Natural and physical sciences / People and self / Philosophy and thinking / Religion and belief systems / Society and social sciences / Technology and applied sciences A quick glance at the Outline for Philosophy and thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_and_think… shows<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_… 'Ethics' with 'Sexual ethics' singled out for special mention - why? Under Indexes for Society and social sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Indexes#Society_and_social_sc… we have an index for BDSM but red links for Social Policy, Political Science and Development Studies. 7. There are no Portals of the following names: Pro-life portal / Pro-choice portal / Abortion debates portal / Same-sex marriage debates portal... so why is there an, equally contentious, 'Pornography portal', shouldn't it at least be a 'Pornography debates portal'? 8. For me issues like particular pictures making it onto the Commons only matter if they are put into articles or if they become featured / POTD. If there is a debate then fine, mention on Gender Gap and give a link, the same with other debates where a 'support' or 'oppose' may be needed. Taking on sexist editors and trying to find new systems of dealing with them and the images they want to put up is admirable, but there is an element of fiddling while Rome burns, for instance this is a video on how to edit Wikipedia - which new editors is this likely to attract? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvsVaTymzM Recruitment of better editors = better content = attracting better editors = crowding out the bad. Marie _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

Nice idea in principle, but there are still two hurdles to be overcome 1. How do you get the cheatsheet to the new female editor? How do you spot new female editors? By what mechanism do you communicate with them? Can you assume they know about User Talk (my almost entirely unsuccessful attempts to communicate with new users in a friendly way to offer help suggests many don't see the message. 2. People don't read user manuals, cheatsheets, etc. Every new Wikipedia user already gets one of those "Welcome to Wikipedia" on their User Tal which points them to a morass of information (which is admittedly written in the language of the expert Wikipedian not the new user) and I think these days they are also offered the "onboarding experience" (or whatever precisely it is called) which aims to teach them to do basic editing. However, generally what people (men and women) really want is "the answer to the question I have here and now" to get them past the immediate barrier to achieving their mission (whatever it was that motivated them to click that Edit button), not a set of lessons nor a set of documentation. Part of the problem we have created for ourselves is that all the policies and processes and technologies have set the bar far too high for many new editors to get started on their own. :-( Kerry _____ From: gendergap-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Carol Moore dc Sent: Thursday, 31 July 2014 10:24 AM To: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participationof women within Wikimedia projects. Subject: Re: [Gendergap] [Spam] Re: Sexualized environment on Commons On 7/30/2014 5:51 AM, Marie Earley wrote: Help pages wise, I'm sure they'd love to see you at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Help I know I wasted a couple years learning the hard way because the Help pages didn't seem intuitive enough. However one trick we have to remember is to go to the search box and type WP:_____ whatever the topic of interest is. One often gets a search return that get one just where one wants to go. A "cheat sheet" of editing and conflict resolution tips for women would be a great addition to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias /Gender_gap_task_force Which is slowly but surely coming along. CM

Twice during my short discussion about how to start a civility board, which turned into a long discussion about the word c*nt, an Admin gave the link to the Commons search results for that word, saying that showed that the "text" of the word isn't very offensive. WTF?! On Jul 30, 2014 7:55 PM, "Sarah Stierch" &lt;sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: cheat sheets are poorly designed or people are too busy... But I don't think surveys are being done about workshops and the guides they pass out (I believe in throwing people into the pool to learn how to swim). trolls who coincidentally also disagreed with my beliefs on commons...so I am particularly sensitive. Commons is a terrible and demoralizing place.

On 7/30/2014 11:39 PM, LB wrote: Actually I just searched for the first time and saw all photos were regarding "Courageous Cunts" and had a whole rant written on a talk page thinking it was some pervert thing. Then I looked at this political poster image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Courageous_Cunts.jpg which leads to this site http://courageouscunts.com/ Which says: This is a protest page! We're a group of girls that got quite angry about the growing propaganda to surgically "improve" the female genitalia. Don't get us wrong: we're not blaming any woman for her conscious, informed decision. If you really want labiaplasty, go ahead. It's the alliance between porn and the medical industry we're opposed to. It's about their campaign to sell us the perfect labia. Here we try to raise a voice against it! Also CC's are at: https://www.flickr.com/people/76200162@N06 And saw all the photos l looked at were upload by by user: courageousC*nts So I assume it is a woman or women who were real ticked off about this in 2012? Unless it is a guy who used this evidently real issue as an excuse to get his jollies taking photos of shaved women. All that shaving does make me a bit suspicious... Also I noticed there are all sorts of photos under both male and female genitalia which probably are excessive in number and/or in detail, but not an issue I'm have energy to do much about. CM

To briefly go back to what Sarah and Marie have said, I do find that in person hand-holding and social support are the most effective factors in getting women to stick around. I don't know how to translate that from the real-world environment I teach newbies in to the virtual environment of new users' talk pages. I'd love to brainstorm something in that vein, though. :) -Emily On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:40 PM, A. Mani &lt;a.mani.cms(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Getting women to stick around... I had a class of 25. About 20 women and 5 men. The women, especially Latina women, expressed much anxiety over various treatments--all over the map. Esp. comments and tone of talk pages.Lack of politeness and common courtesies. Today, a year later, only 2 (of 20) women are editing, but the men have become engaged contributors. Should we tell people at the outset that this is sort of an Outward Bound experience? Survival only of the thick skinned? I do believe this is too bad. As a teacher if I treated students the way Wikipedians treat new contributors, I would be sent for continuing education. Most people want to edit to contribute, not to be wrangled to the mat. Too many women who begin to edit are made to feel belittled, stupid and small. This is crazy. So much talent and good will is nattered away. --Kathleen. Kathleen de la Peña McCook Distinguished University Professor of Librarianship USF/SI: http://si.usf.edu/faculty/kmccook/ Academia.edu: https://usf.academia.edu/KathleendelaPe%C3%B1aMcCook Library Thing:: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/klmccook/allcollections On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 2:04 AM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 8/2/2014 1:37 AM, Keilana wrote: Lots of SKYPE mini- seminars!!! (Women only.)

On Aug 2, 2014 11:01 AM, "LtPowers" &lt;LtPowers_Wiki(a)rochester.rr.com&gt; wrote: communication while the editor walks through her first edit. [originally didn't realize who you were replying to… also haven't read the whole thread yet] That is technically feasible. Maybe would have new implications for privacy (including WMF privacy policy). Unless the realtime chats were publicly logged. (then same privacy as existing teahouse, etc) Essentially would be a more interactive version of teahouse? (i.e. shorter wait for a reply and you're paired with someone that's known to be available at that moment) would be a part of teahouse? How would you staff it? Shifts? Anyway, that does nothing for the case Kathleen describes. 25 people (20f:5m) in a class and everyone getting that introduction to all things wiki. Then 7 stay active for a year including all the men. (and only 2 of the 20 women) I'm leaning towards thinking we as a community should (for now) focus more on the retention gap than the recruitment gap. Then we're not recruiting people just to (mostly) lose them in a month or two. But would be interested to hear thoughts on that from someone with a more rigorous analysis. -Jeremy (jeremyb) P.S. http://www.onthemedia.org/story/31-race-swap-experiment/

IRC is almost embarrassingly old technology; Wikimedia Foundation projects are the only place I've seen it mentioned in the last five years or more. On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 7:29 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." -- Desiderius Erasmus

That's exactly my point, Pine. This kind of inside-baseball geekery is so much Choctaw to the ordinary new editor we are trying to recruit and retain, people more likely to be using Pinterest or Skype or Ravelry to communicate with peers and mentors. On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 8:54 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." -- Desiderius Erasmus

I think we are talking past each other. The issue I responded to was about live help, which we offer, is used extensively for English Wikipedia, and should be respected. Advertising the existing service to more editors is surely better than not doing so. If we are talking about longer-term alternative help systems then I agree that we should explore options like Pintrest which seem to be popular with less technical audiences. Pine On Aug 2, 2014 7:06 PM, "Sarah Stierch" &lt;sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

There are plenty of people using IRC, but many of them don't know it. There are chatroom/IRC hybrids, generally on forum sites. You embed the chat window in a web page, and anyone can join in. Those who want can use any IRC client to get to the same channel, but with more features. http://www.irchighway.net/ http://mibbit.com/ Janine Sarah Stierch wrote:

One of the sites I've found them on is more technical, but another is definitely not. The embedded version is very newbie friendly. Janine Pine W wrote:

Hi Janine, Of the links that you mentioned I was only able to get one of them to work, but I searched for friendlier IRC clients and I think I've found one. It's called Kiwi IRC. I'll ask the Freenode people what they think about changing their default web client to Kiwi. If they want to keep their current client it may still be possible for Wikimedia to change the default chat client used when people connect directly from English Wikipedia to #wikipedia-en-help. Pine On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 10:27 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Sarah Stierch &lt;sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It is also important to automate help. I have not seen much progress along those lines. 'Computing with words' is a mature subject. Best A. Mani A. Mani [Last_Name. First_Name Format] CU, ASL, AMS, ISRS, CLC, CMS HomePage: http://www.logicamani.in Blog: http://logicamani.blogspot.in/