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: 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

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.

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(a)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(a)aronsson.se> wrote on wikitech-l: 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(a)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. _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)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 _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)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

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

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.

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

From: Ism Woonpton <woonpton(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" <gendergap(a)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

On 2/11/11, paolo massa <paolo(a)gnuband.org> wrote: Russian is if the user set (if female in the well? is rendered? wrote: actually doing the best! :P. percentages? Also, oddly, a lot of things with the survey Russians participated. Maybe women; women are 16.76%  4800 women; women are 11.84%  3054 women; women are 14.13%  5070 women; women are 15.34% 414 women; women are 19.90% women; women are 22.78%  2999 women; women are 19.85%  1781 women; women are 16.56% _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap