As mentioned earlier, we have the gender preference data. I asked for a report, and, well, ask and ye shall receive.
It should be noted that this data could be misleading; it is only representative of people who have elected to self-identify. However, I think it may be a useful point for extrapolation.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Gender preference Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 23:18:44 +0100 From: DaB. WP@daniel.baur4.info Reply-To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hello, Am Mittwoch 09 Februar 2011, 22:38:20 schrieb Brandon Harris:
Is it possible to get a single aggregate report, just so that we have a little data to work with on the gender gap list?
sure. I asked the toolserver-database:
en.wikipedia: Male: 233312 Femaile: 46973 All user: 13959842
de.wikipedia: Male: 35726 Female: 4800 All user: 1167708
fr.wikipedia: Male: 18556 Female: 3054 All user: 998668
commons: Male: 27980 Female: 5070 All user: 1464442
Say if you need more data.
Sincerly, DaB.
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.orgwrote:
As mentioned earlier, we have the gender preference data. I askedfor a report, and, well, ask and ye shall receive.
It should be noted that this data could be misleading; it is onlyrepresentative of people who have elected to self-identify. However, I think it may be a useful point for extrapolation.
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is actually doing the best! :P. Any
chance we could have that broken into percentages?
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is actually doing the best! :P. Any chance we could have that broken into percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle. Also, oddly, a lot of Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd things with the survey from which the 13% is derived is how many Russians participated. Maybe the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973 women; women are 16.76% de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men; 4800 women; women are 11.84% fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men; 3054 women; women are 14.13% commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men; 5070 women; women are 15.34% sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men; 414 women; women are 19.90% ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750 women; women are 22.78% pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men; 2999 women; women are 19.85% nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men; 1781 women; women are 16.56%
I posted on my blog the table. See http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_w...
Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in Russian is translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess if the user set male in the preferences as gender) and User_female: (if female in the preferences).
Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as well? In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User: is rendered? With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
P.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is actually doing the best! :P. Any chance we could have that broken into percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle. Also, oddly, a lot of Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd things with the survey from which the 13% is derived is how many Russians participated. Maybe the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973 women; women are 16.76% de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men; 4800 women; women are 11.84% fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men; 3054 women; women are 14.13% commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men; 5070 women; women are 15.34% sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men; 414 women; women are 19.90% ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750 women; women are 22.78% pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men; 2999 women; women are 19.85% nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men; 1781 women; women are 16.56%
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Please, please, please be careful here. The data offered here answer the question "How many editors self-identify on Wikipedia as female?" not the question "How many females edit Wikipedia?" There's a very important difference, and these numbers should not be generalized beyond the small percentage of editors who give their gender in "preferences" on Wikipedia. In other words, of the 280,285 people (2% of all editors) who identify their gender, 16% self-identify as female. It is very probable that women who self-identify as women (and who are interested enough to say so in "preferences") differ in important ways from women editors as a whole. To use that number as a proxy for "How many of the 13+million editors are female?" would be a serious mistake. The survey with over 100,000 responses, which was purported to be anonymous (although I know of at least one woman who refused to give her gender even on that survey because she didn't trust the assurance of anonymity) is a much more valid estimate of female participation. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better.
The only thing these numbers tell *me* is that editors on Wikipedia, male and female, aren't terribly interested in identifying themselves by gender. I wouldn't draw any conclusion, even tentative, from it beyond that, or use this as a number to (shudder) "extrapolate from." If you're going to extrapolate, you need something solid to extrapolate from.
Woonpton
On 2/11/11, paolo massa paolo@gnuband.org wrote:
I posted on my blog the table. See http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_w...
Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in Russian is translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess if the user set male in the preferences as gender) and User_female: (if female in the preferences).
Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as well? In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User: is rendered? With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
P.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is actually doing the best! :P. Any chance we could have that broken into percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle. Also, oddly, a lot of Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd things with the survey from which the 13% is derived is how many Russians participated. Maybe the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973 women; women are 16.76% de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men; 4800 women; women are 11.84% fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men; 3054 women; women are 14.13% commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men; 5070 women; women are 15.34% sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men; 414 women; women are 19.90% ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750 women; women are 22.78% pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men; 2999 women; women are 19.85% nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men; 1781 women; women are 16.56%
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
--
Paolo Massa Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org Blog: http://gnuband.org
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
We're crossing streams a bit between this list and wikitech-l.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote on wikitech-l:
One thing that could be interesting is to trace the career of users: When they register, how frequent they edit, if the frequency varies over time, and if these patterns differ between men and women and the gender-anonymous.
User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next Signpost.
Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't distribute): http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png
The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than the previous row). So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits, then 4-7 edits, etc. The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits (and less than 5,000,000). It's based on essentially the 250,000 most recent users who have edited or created an account.
So the takeaways are:
a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.
b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who make 1000 or more edits.
Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort that. Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than other women to *not* declare gender. But at first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.
-Sage
Sage Ross, I think you've missed my point. My point was that the number of editors identifying as female is an entirely different piece of data than the number of females editing Wikipedia, and one should not be used as a surrogate for the other. That is as true for this most recent data as for the data I was cautioning about earlier; it's based on self-identification and should not be taken as an estimate of women editing Wikipedia.
I disagree strongly with the statement "At first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors." Maybe at a layman's first glance, that's the case, but a statistician glancing at these numbers doesn't see that at all. What I see is the conflation of two different kinds of data. You cannot conclude, even tentatively, from these data whether the numbers relating to editors who self-identify by gender has anything to do with female participation among Wikipedia editors as a whole. As I said before, it's entirely possible, even probable, that editors who take the trouble to self-identify by gender are different in other important ways from those who don't, so it could be very misleading to generalize from one population to the other.
Also, the suggestion even with a caveat, that at first glance these data seem to show that "the gender gap is larger among very active editors" is not a valid suggestion and does not accurately reflect the data. As far as the data can tell us, the explanation that women who know Wikipedia well are less likely to self-identify by gender, is as likely as the explanation that fewer women are likely to be active editors. Which one of these explanations is a more likely reflection of reality simply can't be determined from these data.
By the way, some of the percentages are wrong. The male "percentage of total" column is right for part of the column and then veers off; it appears that from some point on, the percentage was determined by dividing the number of self-identified males within an edit-count category by the number of non-self-identifying editors. For example, the number in the 65535 row identified as 66% (of editors in that edit category identifying as male) should actually be 39%; the number in the 32767 row identified as 52% should actually be 33%, and so forth. Some of the percentages for women are also wrong; the number identified as 4% in the 65535 row should be 2% for example. I didn't have time to go through and calculate every one, but those are some representative inaccurate numbers.
What I see that's interesting in these numbers is something different than others are seeing; while very few females self-identify as female, actually the percentage of more active editors identifying as female is twice the percentage of less active editors identifying as female (1% up to 4,000 edits, 2-3% above that). But these 1-3% of females identifying as female and editing Wikipedia aren't, or shouldn't be, the subjects of interest to this discussion. The more useful question is, what part of the great bulk of Wikipedians who don't self-identify by gender are female? You don't know the answer to that question; you can't estimate the answer to that question using these data that answer a different question. You need more data about female participation, before you charge off generating strategies. You need to know what the problem is before you can develop strategies that have any meaningful chance of solving the problem.
Woonpton
On 2/11/11, Sage Ross sross@wikimedia.org wrote:
We're crossing streams a bit between this list and wikitech-l.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote on wikitech-l:
One thing that could be interesting is to trace the career of users: When they register, how frequent they edit, if the frequency varies over time, and if these patterns differ between men and women and the gender-anonymous.
User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next Signpost.
Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't distribute): http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png
The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than the previous row). So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits, then 4-7 edits, etc. The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits (and less than 5,000,000). It's based on essentially the 250,000 most recent users who have edited or created an account.
So the takeaways are:
a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.
b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who make 1000 or more edits.
Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort that. Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than other women to *not* declare gender. But at first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.
-Sage
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Correction: I wrote:
"But these 1-3% of females identifying as female and editing Wikipedia aren't..."
What I meant was "But these 1-3% of Wikipedia editors identifying as female aren't..."
Also, I'm not sure I emphasized my main point strongly enough. The rightmost column in the table, which seems to be considered the most meaningful/useful, could be quite misleading. It is labeled "females as a percentage of males" which is a bizarre statistic to start with; a more obvious and meaningful statistic would be females as a percentage of editors who self-identify by gender. In this particular case it doesn't make much difference, since most editors who self-identify by gender are male, so the two statistics come out pretty close-- a few percentage points apart in the lower edit count categories but identical in the higher edit count categories. But if the category "self-identified by gender" hadn't been so heavily male-skewed, it might have made a big difference.
At any rate, the main point is that either way, the statistic can *only* be generalized to the small group of editors who self-identiify by gender, not to the population of Wikipedia editors as a whole, and that point can't be identified enough.
Woonpton
On 2/11/11, Ism Woonpton woonpton@gmail.com wrote:
Sage Ross, I think you've missed my point. My point was that the number of editors identifying as female is an entirely different piece of data than the number of females editing Wikipedia, and one should not be used as a surrogate for the other. That is as true for this most recent data as for the data I was cautioning about earlier; it's based on self-identification and should not be taken as an estimate of women editing Wikipedia.
I disagree strongly with the statement "At first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors." Maybe at a layman's first glance, that's the case, but a statistician glancing at these numbers doesn't see that at all. What I see is the conflation of two different kinds of data. You cannot conclude, even tentatively, from these data whether the numbers relating to editors who self-identify by gender has anything to do with female participation among Wikipedia editors as a whole. As I said before, it's entirely possible, even probable, that editors who take the trouble to self-identify by gender are different in other important ways from those who don't, so it could be very misleading to generalize from one population to the other.
Also, the suggestion even with a caveat, that at first glance these data seem to show that "the gender gap is larger among very active editors" is not a valid suggestion and does not accurately reflect the data. As far as the data can tell us, the explanation that women who know Wikipedia well are less likely to self-identify by gender, is as likely as the explanation that fewer women are likely to be active editors. Which one of these explanations is a more likely reflection of reality simply can't be determined from these data.
By the way, some of the percentages are wrong. The male "percentage of total" column is right for part of the column and then veers off; it appears that from some point on, the percentage was determined by dividing the number of self-identified males within an edit-count category by the number of non-self-identifying editors. For example, the number in the 65535 row identified as 66% (of editors in that edit category identifying as male) should actually be 39%; the number in the 32767 row identified as 52% should actually be 33%, and so forth. Some of the percentages for women are also wrong; the number identified as 4% in the 65535 row should be 2% for example. I didn't have time to go through and calculate every one, but those are some representative inaccurate numbers.
What I see that's interesting in these numbers is something different than others are seeing; while very few females self-identify as female, actually the percentage of more active editors identifying as female is twice the percentage of less active editors identifying as female (1% up to 4,000 edits, 2-3% above that). But these 1-3% of females identifying as female and editing Wikipedia aren't, or shouldn't be, the subjects of interest to this discussion. The more useful question is, what part of the great bulk of Wikipedians who don't self-identify by gender are female? You don't know the answer to that question; you can't estimate the answer to that question using these data that answer a different question. You need more data about female participation, before you charge off generating strategies. You need to know what the problem is before you can develop strategies that have any meaningful chance of solving the problem.
Woonpton
On 2/11/11, Sage Ross sross@wikimedia.org wrote:
We're crossing streams a bit between this list and wikitech-l.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote on wikitech-l:
One thing that could be interesting is to trace the career of users: When they register, how frequent they edit, if the frequency varies over time, and if these patterns differ between men and women and the gender-anonymous.
User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next Signpost.
Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't distribute): http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png
The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than the previous row). So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits, then 4-7 edits, etc. The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits (and less than 5,000,000). It's based on essentially the 250,000 most recent users who have edited or created an account.
So the takeaways are:
a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.
b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who make 1000 or more edits.
Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort that. Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than other women to *not* declare gender. But at first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.
-Sage
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
The more useful question is, what part of the great bulk of Wikipedians who don't self-identify by gender are female?
I second this.
I'd be willing to bet from anecdotal evidence and experience that the greater portion of editors who don't indicate a gender in preferences (I'm one, actually, as it turns out) are female. Women are more likely to have unpublished or unlisted phone numbers, and when they are listed, I know quite a few who use initial pairs rather than a first name.
On Wikipedia, I have also known more female editors than male who have put in username-change requests, specifically from a real or partially real name to something less gender-specific.
Daniel Case
I think the likelihood is fairly high that more active women are more likely not to identify their gender. For what it's worth, I didn't hide my gender as diligently for the first year or so that I actively edited and I think I may have asked someone to use female pronouns at one point. It's only after high profile cases of women being harassed on the internet (Kathy Sierra) and after noticing that my neutral user name seemed to garner more respect than posts I make in other parts of the net, where I use a female pseudonym, that I decided to actively suppress my gender. If I weren't a particularly active editor, it wouldn't be a big deal for me. I'm so invested in Wikipedia that gender based harassment or even the decreased perception of my capability would be disruptive to me if I chose to identify myself on-wiki.
Nepenthe
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Sage Ross sross@wikimedia.org wrote:
We're crossing streams a bit between this list and wikitech-l.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote on wikitech-l:
One thing that could be interesting is to trace the career of users: When they register, how frequent they edit, if the frequency varies over time, and if these patterns differ between men and women and the gender-anonymous.
User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next Signpost.
Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't distribute): http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png
The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than the previous row). So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits, then 4-7 edits, etc. The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits (and less than 5,000,000). It's based on essentially the 250,000 most recent users who have edited or created an account.
So the takeaways are:
a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.
b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who make 1000 or more edits.
Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort that. Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than other women to *not* declare gender. But at first glance, it would seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.
-Sage
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
IDEA - start WIKIPROJECT in all languages called: Womens Cafe (or something sociable and helpful sounding) as an outreach, education and support network
There are several feminism wikiprojects fr:Projet:Femmes - pl:Wikiprojekt:Gender Studies - sv:Wikipedia:Projekt kvinnor - es:Wikiproyecto:Feminismo - En. Wikiproject:Feminism There also is a proposal for WomensHistory. However, many women are not interested in editing on womens topics and/or want more general education and support. (And some of course steer away from the word feminism, though this project hopefully would complement, not compete with any wikiprojects feminism.) Men of course would be allowed to help and learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and trolling behavior.
Each project could link to some of the helpful things other projects do:
*Quick help box like http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism
*List of relevant articles about women in wikipedia, including some gender gap ones, so they can understand context.
*An articles issues page to list articles that whose subject women might be more interested in, where women can ask for help on where to go when having problems in articles, or even can list articles where women feel they are being hassled and would like uninvolved editors' (especially womens') opinion.
*Links to training videos that show women how to edit on wikipedia and quickly deal with issues.
*Other relevant links, material, pages, resources, etc.
I don't want to start one in En. WIkipedia, but would certainly join and help out.
"Men of course would be allowed to help and learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and trolling behavior." How nice of you to tolerate our barbarianism.
Again, this comes down to "do we want to divide the community"? If it's behavioural issues within the community, the behaviour of the community has to change. Dissecting it will only cause greater problems further down the line.
I want to again take this opportunity to emphasise that *we don't know why so few women edit compared to men*. Is there any chance we could gather some statistically reliable data first, and come up with ideas on how to fix the (currently baseless) presuppositions later?
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:49 PM, carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
IDEA - start WIKIPROJECT in all languages called: Womens Cafe (or something sociable and helpful sounding) as an outreach, education and support network
There are several feminism wikiprojects fr:Projet:Femmes - pl:Wikiprojekt:Gender Studies - sv:Wikipedia:Projekt kvinnor - es:Wikiproyecto:Feminismo - En. Wikiproject:Feminism There also is a proposal for WomensHistory. However, many women are not interested in editing on womens topics and/or want more general education and support. (And some of course steer away from the word feminism, though this project hopefully would complement, not compete with any wikiprojects feminism.) Men of course would be allowed to help and learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and trolling behavior.
Each project could link to some of the helpful things other projects do:
*Quick help box like http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism
*List of relevant articles about women in wikipedia, including some gender gap ones, so they can understand context.
*An articles issues page to list articles that whose subject women might be more interested in, where women can ask for help on where to go when having problems in articles, or even can list articles where women feel they are being hassled and would like uninvolved editors' (especially womens') opinion.
*Links to training videos that show women how to edit on wikipedia and quickly deal with issues.
*Other relevant links, material, pages, resources, etc.
I don't want to start one in En. WIkipedia, but would certainly join and help out.
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On 2/14/2011 6:00 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
"Men of course would be allowed to help and learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and trolling behavior." How nice of you to tolerate our barbarianism.
I believe that is a misrepresentation of what I said and what I meant.
Again, this comes down to "do we want to divide the community"? If it's behavioural issues within the community, the behaviour of the community has to change. Dissecting it will only cause greater problems further down the line.
It's a resource, not a division. It's an idea, not a demand. This is a brain storm. Feel free to come up with a better idea to help attract and keep women editors.
Portal - which I notice was just mentioned - is another good idea. I haven't had quite enough experience with both to have a strong opinion on whether one or the other would better.
I want to again take this opportunity to emphasise that /we don't know why so few women edit compared to men/. Is there any chance we could gather some statistically reliable data first, and come up with ideas on how to fix the (currently baseless) presuppositions later?
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results As I mentioned earlier today this shows that comments about removal of material, also were made by women in the NY Times debate and on this list. Obviously it's a feature of Wikipedia all newbies have to learn to deal with, but coming up with strategies to keep it from being a major reason for leaving would be a big help for men and women, who may take such rejection more personally, depending on how it is done.
And women in lots of off wiki articles and/or on this list have expressed that dealing with locker room or bar brawling attitudes and even hostility also is an important reasons women leave.
I don't think we need a four year long study to figure out a few of the major issues, while ignoring the experience, ideas and solutions of women who joined this list to share them.
Thanks.
Carol in dc
The former contributors study - and this is my fundamental problem with the brainstorming here - did not take the gender of the participant into account. There is no reason to assume this applies explicitly or more strongly to women. The appropriate response is either:
1. To take the former contributors' concerns into account and brainstorm ways to fix them that apply regardless of gender, as the survey did. 2. To find out if there is actually a distinction between the concerns of female ex-editors and male ex-editors and then brainstorm from the results.
Your idea of a dedicated portal for women deals with neither of these problems. It will either have the same social standards as the rest of Wikipedia, or it won't. If it does have the same standards, it's useless and unnecessary, because the participants could do just as well on the rest of the project. If it doesn't, it's useless, unnecessary and unfounded, because you've yet to demonstrate any evidence stronger than "somebody said" that there are gender-specific problems here. Further than that, it's simply preparing these new editors to be metaphorically dropped in it from a great height when they run into the rest of the community for the first time.
I appreciate the concerns of the female contributors here and at various comment threads on blogs around the world. If my time in the political world taught me anything, however, it's that such places are *not* breeding grounds for reliable data. You tend to attract either people who are highly enthusiastic and fine with the project, or people who are highly pissed off by it. Making broad assumptions and actions based on the second- or third-hand evidence of a few people who fall into those categories is inefficient. I'm not talking about a four-year survey; what I was proposing, and what garnered some support (and no opposition) before vanishing from the face of the earth, was a repeat of Howie's survey with a gender drop-box. This would not take long, and would allow us to see a) whether some work the WMF has already put in has had any discernible effect, b) more accurately what the proportion of men to women is on WMF projects and c) if there is any discernible difference in the concerns reported by self-identified women and self-identified men. From that we can see what needs to be done.
I'm fully supportive of opening up Wikipedia to more users, addressing their concerns, and making women a particular focus due to their underrepresentation, which may lead to systematic bias and an absence of NPOV. But until you can actually demonstrate reliable evidence that there * are* different concerns for men and different concerns for women, applying different standards seems to be a complete waste of time.
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 2:03 AM, carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
On 2/14/2011 6:00 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
"Men of course would be allowed to help and learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and trolling behavior." How nice of you to tolerate our barbarianism.
I believe that is a misrepresentation of what I said and what I meant.
Again, this comes down to "do we want to divide the community"? If it's behavioural issues within the community, the behaviour of the community has to change. Dissecting it will only cause greater problems further down the line.
It's a resource, not a division. It's an idea, not a demand. This is a brain storm. Feel free to come up with a better idea to help attract and keep women editors.
Portal - which I notice was just mentioned - is another good idea. I haven't had quite enough experience with both to have a strong opinion on whether one or the other would better.
I want to again take this opportunity to emphasise that *we don't know why so few women edit compared to men*. Is there any chance we could gather some statistically reliable data first, and come up with ideas on how to fix the (currently baseless) presuppositions later?
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results As I mentioned earlier today this shows that comments about removal of material, also were made by women in the NY Times debate and on this list. Obviously it's a feature of Wikipedia all newbies have to learn to deal with, but coming up with strategies to keep it from being a major reason for leaving would be a big help for men and women, who may take such rejection more personally, depending on how it is done.
And women in lots of off wiki articles and/or on this list have expressed that dealing with locker room or bar brawling attitudes and even hostility also is an important reasons women leave.
I don't think we need a four year long study to figure out a few of the major issues, while ignoring the experience, ideas and solutions of women who joined this list to share them.
Thanks.
Carol in dc
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
--- On Tue, 15/2/11, carolmooredc@verizon.net carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote: It's a resource, not a division. It's an idea, not a demand. This is a brain storm. Feel free to come up with a better idea to help attract and keep women editors. My sense is that a place for women to get together among themselves might be helpful, atleast for some women. It's nothing to do with splitting the community. It's simply a reflection of real-life behaviour. Women will meet for coffee to have a natter. It'sa way of community building. If it works in real life, why shouldn't it work for Wikipedia? Andreas
IDEA - start WIKIPROJECT in all languages called: Womens Cafe (or something sociable and helpful sounding) as an outreach, education and support network
Along this line, may I direct the list's attention to perhaps an even better way, using an underutilized aspect of Wikipedia, that might be a useful place to bring new female editors into the community: A portal.
We have a whole portal namespace, portals devoted to many, many topics (including portals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Portal)), a time portal, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Time) and featured portals. One of those latter is, in fact, the feminism portal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Feminism).
Most of these mimic the main page, with a topic-area focus. I suppose a user could, if desired, bookmark a preferred portal in their browser (although I think most of us like to check in to the main page because everyone else does).
But, I ask, do they necessarily have to? Could we design a portal or portals for outreach purposes? What would a portal meant to be a welcome center for new editors, or women editors, look like? Could we find different ways of doing a portal that would incorporate the things we're talking about here?
Daniel Case
The newly developing Women's History WikiProject on enWP has plans for a related portal at some point as well.
Aleta
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case < dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
IDEA - start WIKIPROJECT in all languages called: Womens Cafe (or something sociable and helpful sounding) as an outreach, education and support network
Along this line, may I direct the list's attention to perhaps an even better way, using an underutilized aspect of Wikipedia, that might be a useful place to bring new female editors into the community: A portal.
We have a whole portal namespace, portals devoted to many, many topics (including portals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Portal)), a time portal, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Time) and featured portals. One of those latter is, in fact, the feminism portal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Feminism).
Most of these mimic the main page, with a topic-area focus. I suppose a user could, if desired, bookmark a preferred portal in their browser (although I think most of us like to check in to the main page because everyone else does).
But, I ask, do they necessarily have to? Could we design a portal or portals for outreach purposes? What would a portal meant to be a welcome center for new editors, or women editors, look like? Could we find different ways of doing a portal that would incorporate the things we're talking about here?
Daniel Case
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
One thing we can all do is send letters of encouragement to women to join wikipedia. I don't know if there is a form letter already used that we can merge ideas like the below into. This is includes and expands on points I sent out to a couple of political women friends and womens lists - about 150 women total - as a personal encouragement. Underwhelming two responses so far: "good idea" and "I'm too busy." So I know that the letter needs work! Maybe we could have a couple versions linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
Revised draft version:
Wikipedia has set as it's goal increasing the number of editors from under 15% to 25% over the next few years. See the New York Times and other articles and other relevant Women and Wikipedia links here. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
I've been editing a lot the last few years. It is fun for amateur policy wonks and has taught me a lot about good referencing and how easily ones own biases can twist the material one is dealing with. And it's a great motivator to learn more about a topic you are interest in - you go in and improve an article on a topic of interest with better information from better sources.
And it's fun to get challenged, whether you are proven wrong, proven right, or work with others to come up together with a collaborative solution. Talk page discussions and debates are a great way to learn about Wikipedia editing policies.
It can take a few months to get up to speed on all the policies to enable you to edit effectively, i.e., making edits that will stick while deleting unsourced and biased material.
Also, since Wikipedia is still mostly a 20 something man's world, it may be best to use a gender neutral name and not advertise on your user page you are a female, at least until you get the hang of editing it. At least avoid using use your whole real name to avoid possible harassment on and off Wikipedia.*
But if you have favorite topics that you'd like to see better covered, have time on your hands (as some of us semi- and retired women do), and want to have some great fun, do try Wikipedia.
(*CM Note: this point is actually said explicitly in User name policy, but few people get to it before they choose a user name)
Carol, I think this is a great idea :-)
I think we (anyone here) should create a page on meta (linked to from here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap) where we put your draft text, and point to good basic resources to support people getting started in editing. (There are some very good resources here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf/Wikipedia and elsewhere on the outreach wiki.)
That would equip people to use your base text, plus any links that seem useful to them, to do outreach to any group they like. I really believe that individual outreach: people reaching out to their own networks, is a good tactic for us. Because the people who are one degree of separation from the people here are by definition good candidates to become editors.
Thanks, Sue
-- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
On 21 February 2011 21:32, carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
One thing we can all do is send letters of encouragement to women to join wikipedia. I don't know if there is a form letter already used that we can merge ideas like the below into. This is includes and expands on points I sent out to a couple of political women friends and womens lists - about 150 women total - as a personal encouragement. Underwhelming two responses so far: "good idea" and "I'm too busy." So I know that the letter needs work! Maybe we could have a couple versions linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
Revised draft version:
Wikipedia has set as it's goal increasing the number of editors from under 15% to 25% over the next few years. See the New York Times and other articles and other relevant Women and Wikipedia links here. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
I've been editing a lot the last few years. It is fun for amateur policy wonks and has taught me a lot about good referencing and how easily ones own biases can twist the material one is dealing with. And it's a great motivator to learn more about a topic you are interest in - you go in and improve an article on a topic of interest with better information from better sources.
And it's fun to get challenged, whether you are proven wrong, proven right, or work with others to come up together with a collaborative solution. Talk page discussions and debates are a great way to learn about Wikipedia editing policies.
It can take a few months to get up to speed on all the policies to enable you to edit effectively, i.e., making edits that will stick while deleting unsourced and biased material.
Also, since Wikipedia is still mostly a 20 something man's world, it may be best to use a gender neutral name and not advertise on your user page you are a female, at least until you get the hang of editing it. At least avoid using use your whole real name to avoid possible harassment on and off Wikipedia.*
But if you have favorite topics that you'd like to see better covered, have time on your hands (as some of us semi- and retired women do), and want to have some great fun, do try Wikipedia.
(*CM Note: this point is actually said explicitly in User name policy, but few people get to it before they choose a user name)
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:32 PM, carolmooredc@verizon.net wrote:
One thing we can all do is send letters of encouragement to women to join wikipedia. I don't know if there is a form letter already used that we can merge ideas like the below into. This is includes and expands on points I sent out to a couple of political women friends and womens lists - about 150 women total - as a personal encouragement. Underwhelming two responses so far: "good idea" and "I'm too busy." So I know that the letter needs work! Maybe we could have a couple versions linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
I like this idea; and I want to point to some possibly relevant research. The paper "Socialization tactics in Wikipedia and their effects" by Robert Kraut et. al.[1] [2] studies various efforts at welcoming newcomers.
In that research, the finding is that the most effective techniques are those that reflect an engagement with the content that the user has added; in other words, if your "welcome" message is a genuine response to what they did (for example, "Thank you for adding information about so-and-so's history with such-and-such; are you aware of these other similar articles that need expansion?") More generic welcome messages were generally ineffective at getting people to stick around.
It may be that a "call to action" message like you suggest is effective; I guess that's not something this group specifically studied. But for anybody taking this on, I'd suggest that you personalize each one a little, based on the contributor's recent edits, or the info they've put on their user page!
-Pete
[1] PDF file: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/connect/cscw_10/docs/p... [2] Abstract on web: http://acawiki.org/Socialization_tactics_in_Wikipedia_and_their_effects
Whoops. I just re-read Carol's message -- I had misunderstood at first. If this is an effort to recruit *brand new* contributors (as opposed to retaining those who have dabbled), the research I cited above doesn't really apply :)
But, I do think the findings of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative would be informative;[1] Carol, I'm not sure if you've had contact with this program or not.
But in general, it ties in with what Sue brought up: people brand new to Wikipedia often need a *lot* of support and advice before they start to get their legs. So directing them to educational resources, and establishing a "cafe" type space to ask questions and build a sense of community, would certainly be helpful in keeping with what we've learned from our outreach efforts.
And personalizing the message a little bit, tailoring it to the specific woman's interests by suggesting articles she may want to edit, couldn't hurt either!
-Pete (formerly Public Outreach Officer at WMF)
[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Pete Forsyth pete.public.email@gmail.comwrote:
But in general, it ties in with what Sue brought up: people brand new to Wikipedia often need a *lot* of support and advice before they start to get their legs. So directing them to educational resources, and establishing a "cafe" type space to ask questions and build a sense of community, would certainly be helpful in keeping with what we've learned from our outreach efforts.
Related to this, I'm helping organize and conduct a series of "wiki academies" aimed at the Australian, possibly New Zealand, sport community. The details can be found at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/UCNISS/Sport_Wiki_Academy . The content for the academy will really depend on who is there. How we approach university professors will be different than how we approach athletes.
Wikimedia Australia and UCNISS are working on helping fund these academies. (Details are being sorted out and only the first academy date and location are set.) We're hoping to really address the women's sport community as the articles in that area can be a little underwhelming when compared to the men's side. There are also some major women's sporting events going on this year, which Australia and New Zealand are both participating in. They include the netball world championships and the women's soccer World Cup. This can help create additional interest, give fans and organizations a reason to participate.
While the focus is on how sport organizations and athletes can use wikis in general, there will be a fair bit of discussion about how to use Wikipedia correctly to help work towards meeting institutional objectives, like increasing visibility as Wikipedia ranks so highly on Google searches. If there is interest, we'll see if we can't work it out between UCNISS and Wikimedia Australia to set up some form of Wikipedian in Residence program so that sport studies students can get academic credit, but that is a bit further down the road.
We'd love some help with this if you're local. If you might want to try something similar or have any advice on running these academies, please let me know either on list or off.
From: Pete Forsyth pete.public.email@gmail.com To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, February 22, 2011 5:49:29 PM Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Emails to friends, lists to encourage participation
Whoops. I just re-read Carol's message -- I had misunderstood at first. If this is an effort to recruit *brand new* contributors (as opposed to retaining those who have dabbled), the research I cited above doesn't really apply :)
But, I do think the findings of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative would be informative;[1] Carol, I'm not sure if you've had contact with this program or not.
But in general, it ties in with what Sue brought up: people brand new to Wikipedia often need a *lot* of support and advice before they start to get their legs. So directing them to educational resources, and establishing a "cafe" type space to ask questions and build a sense of community, would certainly be helpful in keeping with what we've learned from our outreach efforts.
And personalizing the message a little bit, tailoring it to the specific woman's interests by suggesting articles she may want to edit, couldn't hurt either! If you really want to ease new recruits into Wikipedia, you wouldn't send them straight to Wikipedia. Create the cafe space on Meta and use it as welcoming committee and a place to ask for general guidance without bringing in the turf-battle baggage. Plus since there are not a large number of women who understand the wikis, we would be better off consolidating ourselves there instead splitting up by language where perhaps our voices might be drowned out in a local forum.
Also try and start them off outside of the Wikipedia's where they can get a handle on the interface and mark-up without having a creative investment in the content they are working on. I would recommend proof-reading on Wikisource [1] for the most timid, as you only very occasionally have a completely ambiguous decision to make and if you do the first proofread it is guaranteed that another person will check all you work during validation. You could watchlist the pages see the validation happen and check the diff to see if any of your work was corrected or not. It is really a good introduction to wikis for those who want confirmation they are doing things right at first. I am sure Commons and other wikis have many gnomish tasks that will get new recruits used to how to work on wikis. Also send people to do peer reviews at the Wikipedias. They can give feedback on articles that interest them and begin getting used to the to interaction with people who are invested in the articles they worked on while nearly being guaranteed a positive interaction. Then they will feel more comfortable changing things in Wikipedia articles and better able to understand what is going on when their edits are challenged.
There is more to even Wikipedia the writing articles. I am personally a terrible writer and only make a great deal of work for people when significantly edit articles. I am rather good at peer reviews. I have an excellent understanding of text-based copyright issues. I am a decent mediator.
People need to be sent to work on their passions with their personal strengths, not just told in a blanket fashion to write some articles.
Birgitte SB
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/wiki/Wikisource:Proofread_of_the_...
Click on the work listed for the month (Ornithological biography, or an account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America, volume 1) and then pick one of the numbers highlighted in yellow on the target page.
On Feb 22, 2011, at 7:38 PM, Birgitte SB wrote:
People need to be sent to work on their passions with their personal strengths, not just told in a blanket fashion to write some articles.
Birgitte SB
This all sounds like a pretty sound approach to me. I like it.
Another worthwhile thing, if somebody is really entertaining the idea of taking on this work, would be to contact the Wikipedia Ambassadors group, which has formed in support of the Public Policy Initiative. This includes both experienced Wikipedians, and college students and librarians were initially new to Wikipedia, but put some effort into getting to know it in order to support students working on articles. The best place to contact them is probably through the talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors
Oh, and one other thing -- from what little evidence I have, Birgitte, I'd say you're a pretty good writer :)
-Pete
From: Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, February 22, 2011 10:47:23 PM Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Emails to friends, lists to encourage participation
On Feb 22, 2011, at 7:38 PM, Birgitte SB wrote:
People need to be sent to work on their passions with their personal strengths, not just told in a blanket fashion to write some articles.
Birgitte SB
This all sounds like a pretty sound approach to me. I like it.
Another worthwhile thing, if somebody is really entertaining the idea of taking on this work, would be to contact the Wikipedia Ambassadors group, which has formed in support of the Public Policy Initiative. This includes both experienced Wikipedians, and college students and librarians were initially new to Wikipedia, but put some effort into getting to know it in order to support students working on articles. The best place to contact them is probably through the talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors
Oh, and one other thing -- from what little evidence I have, Birgitte, I'd say you're a pretty good writer :)
-Pete Only with conversational writing. I don't know why there is a difference but there really is. It is a hard thing about Wikipedia that to really succeed at creating articles, you have to master both kinds of writing. One kind for the articles, and the other for the talk pages.
Birgitte SB
Birgitte SB
--- On Fri, 11/2/11, Ism Woonpton woonpton@gmail.com wrote:
From: Ism Woonpton woonpton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, 11 February, 2011, 16:18 Please, please, please be careful here. The data offered here answer the question "How many editors self-identify on Wikipedia as female?" not the question "How many females edit Wikipedia?" There's a very important difference, and these numbers should not be generalized beyond the small percentage of editors who give their gender in "preferences" on Wikipedia. In other words, of the 280,285 people (2% of all editors) who identify their gender, 16% self-identify as female. It is very probable that women who self-identify as women (and who are interested enough to say so in "preferences") differ in important ways from women editors as a whole. To use that number as a proxy for "How many of the 13+million editors are female?" would be a serious mistake. The survey with over 100,000 responses, which was purported to be anonymous (although I know of at least one woman who refused to give her gender even on that survey because she didn't trust the assurance of anonymity) is a much more valid estimate of female participation. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better.
The only thing these numbers tell *me* is that editors on Wikipedia, male and female, aren't terribly interested in identifying themselves by gender. I wouldn't draw any conclusion, even tentative, from it beyond that, or use this as a number to (shudder) "extrapolate from." If you're going to extrapolate, you need something solid to extrapolate from.
Woonpton
Spoken like a true statistician, and absolutely correct. :)
Andreas
On 2/11/11, paolo massa paolo@gnuband.org wrote:
I posted on my blog the table. See http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_w...
Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in
Russian is
translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess
if the user set
male in the preferences as gender) and User_female:
(if female in the
preferences).
Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as
well?
In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User:
is rendered?
With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
P.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes
wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is
actually doing the best! :P.
Any chance we could have that broken into
percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle.
Also, oddly, a lot of
Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd
things with the survey
from which the 13% is derived is how many
Russians participated. Maybe
the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973
women; women are 16.76%
de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men;
4800 women; women are 11.84%
fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men;
3054 women; women are 14.13%
commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men;
5070 women; women are 15.34%
sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men;
414 women; women are 19.90%
ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750
women; women are 22.78%
pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men;
2999 women; women are 19.85%
nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men;
1781 women; women are 16.56%
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
--
Paolo Massa Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org Blog: http://gnuband.org
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
It is very interesting to follow you in your careful interpretation of data. If the available data can provide interesting information, I suggest to take into account the Spanish Wikipedia (it is not on the given data). UNESCO made several studies on gendergap and determined that Latin America (and probably Spain) is the region with less gendergap at scientific level, followed by Europe-North America, Africa and finally Asia. Patricia
--- On Fri, 2/11/11, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com wrote:
From: Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, February 11, 2011, 2:23 PM
--- On Fri, 11/2/11, Ism Woonpton woonpton@gmail.com wrote:
From: Ism Woonpton woonpton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, 11 February, 2011, 16:18 Please, please, please be careful here. The data offered here answer the question "How many editors self-identify on Wikipedia as female?" not the question "How many females edit Wikipedia?" There's a very important difference, and these numbers should not be generalized beyond the small percentage of editors who give their gender in "preferences" on Wikipedia. In other words, of the 280,285 people (2% of all editors) who identify their gender, 16% self-identify as female. It is very probable that women who self-identify as women (and who are interested enough to say so in "preferences") differ in important ways from women editors as a whole. To use that number as a proxy for "How many of the 13+million editors are female?" would be a serious mistake. The survey with over 100,000 responses, which was purported to be anonymous (although I know of at least one woman who refused to give her gender even on that survey because she didn't trust the assurance of anonymity) is a much more valid estimate of female participation. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better.
The only thing these numbers tell *me* is that editors on Wikipedia, male and female, aren't terribly interested in identifying themselves by gender. I wouldn't draw any conclusion, even tentative, from it beyond that, or use this as a number to (shudder) "extrapolate from." If you're going to extrapolate, you need something solid to extrapolate from.
Woonpton
Spoken like a true statistician, and absolutely correct. :)
Andreas
On 2/11/11, paolo massa paolo@gnuband.org wrote:
I posted on my blog the table. See http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_w...
Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in
Russian is
translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess
if the user set
male in the preferences as gender) and User_female:
(if female in the
preferences).
Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as
well?
In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User:
is rendered?
With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
P.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2008@reagle.org wrote:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes
wrote:
So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is
actually doing the best! :P.
Any chance we could have that broken into
percentages?
My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle.
Also, oddly, a lot of
Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd
things with the survey
from which the 13% is derived is how many
Russians participated. Maybe
the really like to identify with WP?
en.wikipedia : 2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973
women; women are 16.76%
de.wikipedia : 3.47% declared: 35726 men;
4800 women; women are 11.84%
fr.wikipedia : 2.16% declared: 18556 men;
3054 women; women are 14.13%
commons : 2.26% declared: 27980 men;
5070 women; women are 15.34%
sr.wikipedia : 2.66% declared: 1666 men;
414 women; women are 19.90%
ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared: 80491 men; 23750
women; women are 22.78%
pl.wikipedia : 3.64% declared: 12106 men;
2999 women; women are 19.85%
nl.wikipedia : 2.92% declared: 8977 men;
1781 women; women are 16.56%
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
--
Paolo Massa Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org Blog: http://gnuband.org
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
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On Feb 9, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
As mentioned earlier, we have the gender preference data. I asked for a report, and, well, ask and ye shall receive.
It should be noted that this data could be misleading; it is only representative of people who have elected to self-identify. However, I think it may be a useful point for extrapolation.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Gender preference Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 23:18:44 +0100 From: DaB. WP@daniel.baur4.info Reply-To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hello, Am Mittwoch 09 Februar 2011, 22:38:20 schrieb Brandon Harris:
Is it possible to get a single aggregate report, just so that we have a little data to work with on the gender gap list?
sure. I asked the toolserver-database:
en.wikipedia: Male: 233312 Femaile: 46973 All user: 13959842
de.wikipedia: Male: 35726 Female: 4800 All user: 1167708
fr.wikipedia: Male: 18556 Female: 3054 All user: 998668
commons: Male: 27980 Female: 5070 All user: 1464442
Say if you need more data.
Sincerly, DaB.
-- Userpage: [[:w:de:User:DaB.]] — PGP: 2B255885
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More forwarded from Foundation-l:
sr.wikipedia: Male: 1666 Femaile: 414 All user: 78180
ru.wikipedia: Male: 80491 Femaile: 23750 All user: 620393
pl.wikipedia: Male: 12106 Femaile: 2999 All user: 414511
nl.wikipedia: Male: 8977 Femaile: 1781 All user: 368815
Steven Walling Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org