I am interested in IRC but there are already too many things on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_increasing_female_editors to suggest for an about an hour long meeting, so if you want to talk about solutions on IRC, please pick your top solution ideas you want to talk about.
My top two on that list are:
1. Girl Scouts partnership, US and internationally
2. Improve articles on birth control in the Simple English Wikipedia
Here are two new ideas that may not be on the proposals list yet:
3. Angela Santomero -- http://angelasclues.com/ -- has access to PBS public service announcement production facilities and she might be willing to support ads that encourage girls to try editing.
4. I'd also like to understand more about how people feel about plagiarism guidance to teachers. I've not put it on the list yet, but with the recently announced statistic that 30% of prolific editors started out vandalizing, I'm not sure we can rule out student plagiarists as a potential gender balanced source of new editors the Foundation could recruit by issuing formal guidance to teachers. Such guidance might look like, "...Foundation recommends that students caught plagiarizing from Wikimedia sites be assigned to improve (the plagiarized) articles on the site (no matter how slightly) so that they might become familiar with improving wiki articles."
Best regards, James Salsman
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 17:18, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
... I've not put it on the list yet, but with the recently announced statistic that 30% of prolific editors started out vandalizing ...
James, that stat about 30 percent is astonishing. Do you have a link?
Sarah
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
James, that stat about 30 percent is astonishing. Do you have a link?
Sarah
Hey Sarah,
I forget if we put it on Meta in our research documentation yet, but that number came out of the summer research work that I'm a part of, so I will clarify the exact nature of it for you...
We looked at the top English editors as defined by the "List of Wikipedians by number of edits". Out of the top 1,000, we searched through their first contributions to see how many were reverted for vandalism. We did this using a regex from an earlier paper,[1] and which works by searching revision comments for the various edit summaries that suggest a reversion of vandalism (like "rvv" or the automated ones). It's not perfect but the error rate is known to be pretty minimal.
Out of that group of top 1,000 by edit count and excluding bots, 30% began by making edits that the community reverted for vandalism at that time (so take into account changing standards of course).
That's just one rough measurement, but I think it communicates something important when thinking about how to treat new Wikipedians: we all start as clueless newbies, and some of us even start as outright vandals.