Brilliant! I was thinking of writing it up formally and sending it to the
relevant foundation people via a friend who can be trusted to weed out silly
ideas; would that be a good thing to do, or a waste of both my and their
time?
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 1:46 AM, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 16 February 2011 17:38, Oliver Keyes
<scire.facias(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Reading some of the links (I'd only seen the
NYT article and a few other
pages - thanks for providing all of it) I do see your point, but it does
seem like trying to resolve it internally would have been a better first
step (unless there was some attempt to do so that went completely over my
head. I have a habit of missing things like that and then putting my foot
in
it).
Don't worry, you haven't put your foot in it :-)
But the fact of the gender gap's been known internally for more than a
year, right, since the results of the UNU-Merit study were published.
It's been thoroughly discussed on e.g., the strategy wiki.
I think lots of individual community members have been working to help
fix the problem (for example, there are lots of wiki-projects, some of
them listed on our meta pages). My general view is that more action,
more awareness, more people helping, is good not bad :-)
We've got a lot of suggestions here, some of
them very good, but the
problem
is that we don't have any hard data on what
it is specifically that
attracts
men rather than women. I did suggest something to
get that data, but it
seems to have sunk into the archives like a stone. It seems like the
priority should be working out what the disease is rather than
frantically
scrambling to treat the symptoms.
I'm actually, in spare moments here and there, pulling together a blog
post that attempts to summarize what research exists, and what we can
learn from it. But I don't think your suggestion has gone unnoticed.
For example, I know that quite a few Wikimedia Foundation staff lurk
here, and some of them work in research. They also talk with other
researchers, inside the projects and outside. And Joseph Reagle is
here, and my understanding is that gender is the focus of his research
on Wikipedia, right now. I expect that the questions that have been
raised here are very likely to turn up in surveys and studies over the
next few months :-)
_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap