I teach librarianship and have a course," Knowledge Management and Wikipedia." Most of my students are women. We discuss the Gendergap and some students have made this a focus.
However, in reviewing the class results I found that men in the class were more active than women. Several of the men did 3x the work requested and were quite vocal about their enthusiasm--far more than the women tho the students did the same assignments...and I certainly made every effort to treat them equitably.
The only difference I could find was that the treatment by editors was received with more angst by women than men. The women expressed discouragement. The men expressed belligerence. I do think that a lot of the drop off of women is hasty deletion.
One especially disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright. Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women more than men.
--Kathleen
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Amanda Menking amenking@uw.edu wrote:
Hi All,
I recently received a Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) to continue research re: the gender gap. As a part of the IEG, I’ll be attending Wikimania in London this August, and I’d love to start scheduling interviews to take place during Wikimania.
You can review my IEG proposal here, and you can take a look at my project plan for the work I’ve been doing since January (16 interviews completed thus far; thanks to all who have helped) here.
My primary goal is to interview en.wikipedia editors who self-identify as women, but I’d also love to talk to editors who edit other languages and who do not self-identify as women. Please note: I want to collect a diverse range of stories and voices, so please consider!
You can reach me via amending@uw.edu or via Mssemantics on en.wikipedia and meta. I haven’t booked my travel arrangements yet, so my schedule for interviews is pretty flexible.
Best, Amanda/Mssemantics
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
One especially disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright. Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women more than men.
Do you know what admin it was? I'd love to hear their rationale and perhaps bring up some type of discussion on-wiki about them if their deletions were inappropriate.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
I've looked into this a bit. The page history is difficult to interpret, because it now shows non-contiguous edits as contiguous (a side effect of the attending administrator trying to delete versions that contained copyright violations and keep ones that didn't), but the upshot is that the content of the article that was being reverted was an extremely close paraphrasing of a 2009 book called *The Library: An Illustrated History *by Stuart Murray (it's available in Google Books in the US, but I can't figure out how to link directly to it). The article did cite this work as a source, but represented the Wikipedia text as the article author's own (it did not enclose any of the copied text in quotations, and even if it had, we're not permitted to wholesale-copy others' work). That's a pretty clear violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy (< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COPYVIO%3E), and it looks like people did try to explain that on the user's talk page but it just wasn't coming through clearly, for whatever reason. I do not think the onwiki portion of this situation had anything to do with the gender of the contributors.
All of that, however, is quite apart from Kathleen's point about how women can be more easily driven away by criticism and aggression. Almost all of us made mistakes as new editors (and continue to make mistakes as old editors!), and how those mistakes are responded to - and how we, in turn, interpret those responses - can very easily sway whether we stay or go.
-Fluffernutter
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Derric Atzrott <datzrott@alizeepathology.com
wrote:
One especially disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright. Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women more than men.
Do you know what admin it was? I'd love to hear their rationale and perhaps bring up some type of discussion on-wiki about them if their deletions were inappropriate.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Here is one piece of information that a different stduent added that went missing from the logs:
The National Library of Pakistan is establishing regional offices in four provincial capitals. Clauses to include electronic publications, as deposit material, are also being added to the Copyright Law. Muhammad Waris, Bhatti. 2014. "National Library of Pakistan as Legal Depository." Pakistan Library & Information Science Journal 45, no. 1: 18-23.
I have jsut added it again.
Let's see if it sticks. Any additions made from sources after 2010 were stricken AND disappeared from the history and logs.
I did not keep a record
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Katherine Casey fluffernutter.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
I've looked into this a bit. The page history is difficult to interpret, because it now shows non-contiguous edits as contiguous (a side effect of the attending administrator trying to delete versions that contained copyright violations and keep ones that didn't), but the upshot is that the content of the article that was being reverted was an extremely close paraphrasing of a 2009 book called The Library: An Illustrated History by Stuart Murray (it's available in Google Books in the US, but I can't figure out how to link directly to it). The article did cite this work as a source, but represented the Wikipedia text as the article author's own (it did not enclose any of the copied text in quotations, and even if it had, we're not permitted to wholesale-copy others' work). That's a pretty clear violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COPYVIO), and it looks like people did try to explain that on the user's talk page but it just wasn't coming through clearly, for whatever reason. I do not think the onwiki portion of this situation had anything to do with the gender of the contributors.
All of that, however, is quite apart from Kathleen's point about how women can be more easily driven away by criticism and aggression. Almost all of us made mistakes as new editors (and continue to make mistakes as old editors!), and how those mistakes are responded to - and how we, in turn, interpret those responses - can very easily sway whether we stay or go.
-Fluffernutter
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Derric Atzrott datzrott@alizeepathology.com wrote:
One especially disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright. Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women more than men.
Do you know what admin it was? I'd love to hear their rationale and perhaps bring up some type of discussion on-wiki about them if their deletions were inappropriate.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
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