Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would spend a little time here :-)
Hi!
Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a mod.
People have rightfully pointed out that our $5 barrier to entry is an intentional growth-limiter and also more of a spam-defender. While our user numbers are up in the 100K range, we have about 20K active members and maybe a thousand or two active in any given day. This is small by Wikipedia terms, very very small. That said our M/F ratio is more like 60/40 m/f.
I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones. Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because we're a small site with a small mod team.
I'm also an editor at Wikipedia, username: jessamyn, usually working on small projects like the Vermont town pages, new article creation and a little vandalism undo-ing. I've also been on welcoming committees in the past. Most recently I participated in a very long and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time [to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just more of a "why bother" situation.
Anyhow, I'll go introduce myself in the introduction thread tomorrow, just wanted to say hi, I'm around. Someone called me from the New York Times today to talk about the issue [why me? I have no idea, honestly] and there's a small piece that is up now with my comments and a few other people's. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this topic might do some PR work and make some comments if commenting is allowed. I had about 400 words and a few hours to make my point, sorry if it doesn't resonate for people.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikip...
Thanks for inviting me in to talk about this.
Jessamyn West _____________ librarian.net
On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:30 PM, jessamyn c. west jessamyn@gmail.com wrote:
Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would spend a little time here :-)
Hi!
Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a mod.
Hi Jessamyn! Fancy seeing you here :) Very nice to have you.
I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones. Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because we're a small site with a small mod team.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the specific techniques the MeFi mods have used in visible norm-setting, and how much help you get from community members "self-policing"; has this changed over time? Do you have specific policies or is it all cultural?
Most recently I participated in a very long
and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time [to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just more of a "why bother" situation.
This sucks. But I'm also curious if you'd ever had to deal with [for yourself or others] similar situations at MeFi, and if so how? (so many questions, sorry!) I know the community dynamics over there are quite different from Wikipedia's, and I've always gotten the impression that people at MeFi are really supportive of their fellow community members.
cheers, Phoebe
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 6:30 AM, jessamyn c. west jessamyn@gmail.com wrote:
People have rightfully pointed out that our $5 barrier to entry is an intentional growth-limiter and also more of a spam-defender. While our user numbers are up in the 100K range, we have about 20K active members and maybe a thousand or two active in any given day. This is small by Wikipedia terms, very very small. That said our M/F ratio is more like 60/40 m/f.
Actually, 20% of active editors is like... wow! You might want to compare with the stats on active and very active editors on Wikipedia here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ (scroll down the page to get to the relevant charts).
20k active editors is by no means very very small, especially by Wikipedia standards. :)
Delphine
On 2 February 2011 21:30, jessamyn c. west jessamyn@gmail.com wrote:
Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would spend a little time here :-)
Hi!
Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a mod.
Jessamyn, welcome: thanks for coming here. I "know" you from Metafilter: you are great there. And I also liked your piece for the Times :-)
our M/F ratio is more like 60/40 m/f.
I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones. Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because we're a small site with a small mod team.
So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature.
((( Kind of like the Less Wrong community too. Essentially --- part of what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls “the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd.” Not everyone at Wikimedia is all those things, but I'd say we skew towards them. )))
So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to women.
What's tough though is that the conversation on Metafilter happens in one place (or I guess several places: Ask Metafilter, Metafilter, Metatalk, etc.) -- whereas on the Wikimedia projects there is no single gathering point for discussion: discussion takes place on a multitude of talk pages and user pages and other places such as IRC, mailing lists, etc. Which means the task of influencing discussion is less easy.
And our spaces themselves, to an extent, grow out of a gendered place. For example, someone said earlier in this thread that IRC might be a good tool for offering coaching/guidance/support to new people... I liked the impulse behind the suggestion, but I actually think IRC is unlikely to provide solutions for us. Because IRC itself is so heavily gendered: it's a tool used by "people like us" (see technophile/Silicon-Valley-programmer etc., above), and it's a tool NOT used by the people we want to attract. I remember reading a critique of IRC on one of the geek women type blogs/spaces, where someone said she tends to stay out of IRC chat rooms, because they are rife with boys making sex jokes. Wikimedia's IRC chat rooms, in my experience, are much less like that than non-Wikimedia chat rooms, but still: the line of argument resonated for me. I'd be really surprised if IRC usage in general didn't skew heavily male.
I think it would be helpful for us to hone in a little more directly on what the actual problem is, so we can develop solutions targeted to exactly what we want to achieve. We need a kind of 'theory of the problem.'
Something like this:
We want women to contribute to Wikipedia because we want Wikipedia to contain the sum of all human knowledge, not just the stuff that men know. Currently some women contribute to Wikipedia, which is terrific, but we want more. We're agnostic on what they contribute: women on Wikipedia should write about whatever interests them, be it Barbie dolls or feminist authors or nanotechnology. And we don't particularly want to make assumptions about what might or might not interest women: it's not necessary, and it can trigger lots of angry excited conversation about gender differences, which is a distraction from the actual recruitment itself.
Why don't women contribute? Partly it's because, for many reasons that there's no point articulating because they're outside our control, women tend to be less tech-centric than men, and they tend to see technology as less "fun." This means that the hurdle of learning wiki syntax is a higher barricade for (many) women, than it is for (many) men. We're addressing that barricade --slowly, painfully-- through our usability efforts. It is also true that women tend to have less free time than men, and they tend to spend their free time less in solitary pursuits. (And interestingly, anecdotally we hear that women experience Wikipedia as a solitary experience rather than a communal one, which is counter-intuitive and problematic.)
Once women learn wiki syntax, there are additional social/cultural barricades. To be clear, these barricades affect men too, but they seem to be disproportionately dissuading for women. The social/cultural barricade is essentially: women (tend to) dislike fighty cultures more than men. And the culture likely is experienced by (many) women as fightier than it is for men --- just as I believe for example Indian people experience Wikipedia as fightier than Americans do. Basically, underrepresented groups have a tougher time on Wikipedia than well-represented groups, because of our consensus decisionmaking model. (Witness for example the discussion about whether to name the Ganges article "Ganges" or "Ganga," in which Indian enWP editors are getting squelched by non-Indian enWP editors. Witness also Jessamyn's earlier "why bother" comment about drama and conflict, and the myriad other feedback we've gotten from women on describing --on Metafilter, Jezabel, and here-- their Wikipedia editing experiences as exhausting, draining, boring.)
So to the extent that that's a reasonable theory about what's happening, what do we do about it? Where can we focus our efforts, and how can we help women who want to contribute and would be good editors?
I have some ideas which I'll post later, and I would love to hear from everyone here. I'm rushing to a meeting right now, so I've written this super-fast and rough ...... but I'll be back later.
And again, thanks Jessamyn for joining us here. Your experience will I think be invaluable. Metafilter is the only place I know of that has successfully created a culture change like what we're aiming to do; it's impressive and I think we can learn from it :-)
Thanks, Sue
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature.
[snip]
So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to women.
Let me point out here that Mefi has one very large advantage that Wikimedia doesn't: it is able to operate, in cases like this, from the top down. The mods decided to nip the boyzone in the bud, and they have the acknowledged authority to do things like delete posts, give users warnings or times-out, and state definitively what behavior they will and won't accept. We lack that luxury on WMF projects; by design we HAVE no top-down authority. In theory, there could exist a consensus among administrators that boyzone behaviors X, Y, and Z are not acceptable, but even assuming the cats could be herded to that point (which I think we can all agree is extremely unlikely), and that they could agree on where exactly the line lies, those enforcing such a system would be subject to near-abusive levels of, er...vociferous disagreement. They'd be "cowboy admins", they'd be "the civility police", they'd be "the PC-police", and the whole thing would just get shouted down. "Informal leadership roles" will not allow anyone to do the sorts of things Mefi mods do.
In short, we work on a basis of coherence-through-chaos, which works well in the large but makes it nearly impossible to do anything similar to what Jessamyn & co are able to do on Metafilter.
-User:Fluffernutter
Top posting because I'm on my phone; sorry.
I think there's truth in what you say, Fluffernutter, but I think your conclusion is overly dark. Zack talks a lot about informal leadership in contexts like ours, based on his own experiences in labour organizing and political work. And what he says, which I believe is true for us, is that informal leadership can be really effective in decentralized movements.
I think I've seen that at Metafilter. It's true that the mods there have set a tone and demonstrated leadership 'from the top.' But I think that our equivalent of mods is informal community leaders: respected people who've earned trust, and are listened to. Many of those people are here on this list, and they have real power in our community. It's soft power (influence rather than authority) but that doesn't make it any less real, nor less effective.
I also see at Metafilter that the leadership of the mods has given encouragement to others in the community to speak up, and has resulted ultimately in empowerment of people to self-police and enact real lasting change. We can do that too, in my opinion :-)
Sent from my phone: please forgive any typos or terseness. On Feb 3, 2011 11:39 AM, "ChaoticFluffy" chaoticfluffy@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org
wrote:
So I would conclude that the lesson for Wikimedia in that, is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia: speaking super-loosely, both groups are very smart, kind of stubborn and a little fighty, pride themselves on being rational and not uncritically buying into received/conventional wisdom, and are iconoclastic by nature.
[snip]
So I find Jessamyn's story encouraging. And it seems to me that the people here might be able to take on informal leadership roles in helping moderate the community overall, to achieve better openness to women.
Let me point out here that Mefi has one very large advantage that
Wikimedia
doesn't: it is able to operate, in cases like this, from the top down. The mods decided to nip the boyzone in the bud, and they have the acknowledged authority to do things like delete posts, give users warnings or times-out, and state definitively what behavior they will and won't accept. We lack that luxury on WMF projects; by design we HAVE no top-down authority. In theory, there could exist a consensus among administrators that boyzone behaviors X, Y, and Z are not acceptable, but even assuming the cats could be herded to that point (which I think we can all agree is extremely unlikely), and that they could agree on where
exactly
the line lies, those enforcing such a system would be subject to near-abusive levels of, er...vociferous disagreement. They'd be "cowboy admins", they'd be "the civility police", they'd be "the PC-police", and
the
whole thing would just get shouted down. "Informal leadership roles" will not allow anyone to do the sorts of things Mefi mods do.
In short, we work on a basis of coherence-through-chaos, which works well
in
the large but makes it nearly impossible to do anything similar to what Jessamyn & co are able to do on Metafilter.
-User:Fluffernutter
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
I also see at Metafilter that the leadership of the mods has given encouragement to others in the community to speak up, and has resulted ultimately in empowerment of people to self-police and enact real lasting change. We can do that too, in my opinion :-)
We can and should encourage and support more informal leadership.
But our community is, I would guess, more distributed, with connections more tenuous, than decentralized political and labour organizing communities.
We often talk, and rightly so, about a core community that doesn't do enough to make Wikipedia welcoming and is too bitey. But something I see quite a bit of is newcomers or inexperienced experienced editors who stick to their own corners of the wiki *biting each other*. My guess is that discussions between relative newcomers are more likely to become toxic than ones between newcomers and experienced editors.
I think of the overall culture of a Wikipedia as an equilibrium between the mostly-agreed-on norms of the core community and the preconceptions newcomers show up with (which may vary from region to region on the wiki). Community leaders' influence extends only so far. But there are other pressure points as well, such as the account creation process and ensuing (lack of) welcoming and enculturation.
-Sage