Hi all -
I'm at Wikimania currently, at one of the tracks related to women and wikis, at a talk titled 'Women on wikiHow,' given by Krystle Chung, a community manager for wikiHow. I figured there would be some interest on this topic on this list among those not here, so here's a kind of lame bullet-pointed summary, paraphrasing the presenter in the first person:
:Wikipedia has gotten a lot of publicity over the gendergap; wikiHow doesn't appear to have a (very huge) gender gap - what differences resulted in this? ::We (wikiHow) didn't ever aim to have a balanced gender ratio - what is it about us that resulted in a more balanced gender ratio?
:About wikiHow: started in 2005 by Jack Herrick, technically a for-profit org, we consider ourselves a non-profit. 141,000 how-to articles, 16,000 main namespace edits a month, about 1,000 new articles a week. 300 editors with >5 edits in the past week, 50-70 contributors who made their tenth edit in the past week, 65 active editors with over 500 total edits (10+ in the past week,) 75 editors with more than 100 edits in the past month. (We haven't done intense official surveys of contributors before, because we have a very small staff.)
::I looked in to our gender ratio by looking at several groups of editors for a three week period - very active editors, top 50 editors, new editors, top 20 over-all authors, etc. 274 looked at in total, I sent them all a survey asking about gender and age. I excluded any editors under 15 because we don't track very young editors. We also asked if they edited anonymously, what their preferred activities were, etc.
::Of 274 surveys sent out, 126 people answered, 56% of respondents were female. (We reached out via individualized talk page message because our community is traditionally guarded about personal info.) We think survey roughly reflects reality, but doubt you could draw statistically significant conclusions from it. ::52% are 15 or younger, 24% are 16-25, females outnumber males among editors 25 and younger. The older the contributor, the more likely to be male. (presenter is now displaying a graph showing ratio of gender and age groups - ridiculously pretty correlation between age and gender.) ::No apparent difference in preferred editing activities and gender. Longest standing and most active editors are more male than female; new editors are substantially more female than male.
:Potential reasons why our gender ratio is balanced: ::we have an unusually friendly culture compared to other communities ::we have very low barriers to entry (no need for wikisyntax on wikiHow) ::the nature of our content ::our small community size
:Friendly culture ::Established early on by our founder - he reached out to all new editors directly and individually for a long time. Also, very even staff gender ratio. (kevinnote: WMF also has a much more balanced staff gender ratio than the wikimedia movement as a whole does) ::Very minimal policy and templates. Coaching templates require community approval, we got rid of welcome templates because we thought they sucked (people were putting a lot of 'dont do this' warnings in them - plus they were getting colorful and made us seem like myspace...) ::community as a whole has very good "soft skills" - how you say things is as important in our community as what you say, we get rid of argumentative trolls even if they are raising good points
:Low barriers to entry ::newbie friendly tools like spell checker, intro image adder, and quality guardian (a tool kind of like recent changes patrol, but friendlier. takes multiple 'bad edit' votes to remove an edit) ::anons are welcomed upon first edit ::'patrol coach' - our recent change patrollers are randomly tested with already flagged changes, if they get them right they get a congratulations, if they get them wrong they get a friendly message asking them to improve and their last fifty patrols are undone
:nature of content ::We're okay with multiple ways to skin a cat, no need to argue about one right answer
:small community size ::we're under dunbar's number ::we don't have as much of an issue with exclusivity (but we're starting to develop wikipedia-like problems; we can learn a lot from wikipedia here)
:Ideas on Wikipedia ::I'm not familiar with Wikipedia policies, but I feel that Jack (founder's) leadership established a pattern of mutual respect ::MOAR TEAHOUSE! (teahouse has ~78% women) ::Act more like Wikipedians actually do in real life?
Q&A session: Questioner: it seems like you have a big gender drop off as activity/total edit count builds - do you think gender is serving as a proxy for other demographic factors like technical expertise? Krystle: We've not done any other surveys; we'll look at in the future, reaching out more actively to people who stop editing. I agree that it could be reflective of differing skillsets or areas of interest or other other factors than gender. Audience member: I can help answer I think, I'm one of those older-women-on-wikiHow. I think a lot of it is lack of tech expertise and feelings of nervousness with contributing. One reason I've stuck around is just that friendly community has helped me overcome my technophobic little-old-ladyness. I'm still surprised I've been here for five and a half years and 17k edits, two hundred articles, ten million pageviews. I wouldn't be here today if other users hadn't walked aside me early on.
Sorry for any typos or misstatements in this email; I'm taking live notes and sending this out right after, rather than holding off and proofing/revising it fully first. I may bork up some of the finer points of the talk slightly; if you're here, feel free to correct me. All first person statements in the bulleted points are from the perspective of the presenter - any notes I've added are marked as kevinnotes.
---- User:Kevin Gorman
Just as an interesting note on the community engagement front: Krystle is amazing. I once wrote a featured article for WikiHow. [1] I was later contacted by email by Krystle who asked if I would be happy to get a gift from WikiHow. A few weeks later, a WikiHow-branded USB stick and a card arrived.
Next time I'm in the mood for writing an instruction guide, WikiHow has my undying loyalty. It's a great community and I know a few female editors who are extremely comfortable at WikiHow but find Wikipedia intimidating. They are a pretty good litmus test for efforts like the Teahouse and other editor engagement projects.
[1] http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Philosophy-Paper
Next time I'm in the mood for writing an instruction guide, WikiHow has my undying loyalty. It's a great community and I know a few female >editors who are extremely comfortable at WikiHow but find Wikipedia intimidating. They are a pretty good litmus test for efforts like the >Teahouse and other editor engagement projects.
At the early Thursday afternoon session that was originally supposed to be Oliver Keyes' (User:Ironholds) "Eternal December" presentation but was changed into a panel with him and several other editors discussing our issues with new editors, the one which turned into one of the most productive discussions all of us remember attending at Wikimania 2012, Oliver asked if anyone in the room had edited Wikipedia but turned away. One woman whose badge identified her as a WikiHow user raised her hand and said that she had gone over to WikiHow after her two earlier attempts at editing Wikipedia ran smack into some "complete jerks" as she put it.
I noticed, in fact, that a lot of the attendees from WikiHow were female, including those two 13ish girls who hung out together all the time (one of whom was knitting—yes, knitting!—during the aforementioned panel (Now there's someone who we should get into editing Wikipedia at some point ...)
Seriously, I wonder if at least one thing we could do would be to allow xlinks to a WikiHow article if it's featured. One common undercurrent in a lot of discussions of our gender gap is that women seem to be more likely than men to be looking for how-to online (I did indeed search YouTube for all the tightlining tutorials noted by the one questioner at Jimbo's speech, and there are indeed a lot). That might have something to do with the above observation.
Daniel Case