Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia” Corbett, who has a milelong track record of incivility, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor,” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language. The other editor was Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia biography of her; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.elementx.se Skriv som ett proffs - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg
@aliasHannibal - på Twitter
"Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till världens samlade kunskap. Det är vårt mål."
Jimmy Wales
An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject.
I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump.
Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today?
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson < l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carolmooredc, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=624229392” Corbett, who has a milelong track record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility_enforcement/Evidence of incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive855#Personal_attacks_and_incivility_by_Eric_Corbett, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett *,*” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=625749585,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett_prohibited. The other editor was Sitush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Sitush&diff=624275036&oldid=624267508” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore *biography* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore of her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest https://www.mail-archive.com/gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org/msg04083.html.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.*elementx*.se http://www.elementx.se *Skriv som ett proffs http://www.elementx.se/skriv-som-ett-proffs/* - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg http://elementx.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=ab2080465c6cd11b5b253f940&id=8a2b974a62
@aliasHannibal http://twitter.com/AliasHannibal - på Twitter
"*Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till **världens samlade kunskap* http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida*. Det är vårt mål.*" Jimmy Wales
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
empty simplistic theorizing need to do multi-factor analysis of input factors. edtitathons are gathering data, but sample size is small don't really have good data on percentage participation
my experience is that "female-related content" is improving, but gap remains as the toxic culture trumps everything else. i.e. low correlation
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject.
I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump.
Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today?
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson < l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carolmooredc, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=624229392” Corbett, who has a milelong track record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility_enforcement/Evidence of incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive855#Personal_attacks_and_incivility_by_Eric_Corbett, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett *,*” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=625749585,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett_prohibited. The other editor was Sitush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Sitush&diff=624275036&oldid=624267508” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore *biography* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore of her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest https://www.mail-archive.com/gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org/msg04083.html.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.*elementx*.se http://www.elementx.se *Skriv som ett proffs http://www.elementx.se/skriv-som-ett-proffs/* - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg http://elementx.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=ab2080465c6cd11b5b253f940&id=8a2b974a62
@aliasHannibal http://twitter.com/AliasHannibal - på Twitter
"*Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till **världens samlade kunskap* http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida*. Det är vårt mål.*" Jimmy Wales
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
I'm not keen on the phrase "female-related content", I posted this transcript of an exchange I had with an editor https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2015-April/005670.html in April.
When I dared to suggest that women could be interested in topics other than the ones he suggested - "fashion, cookery, domestic affairs and childrearing" - he responded with this:
"...the purpose of the task force was to increase the participation of women of all sorts, not just radical feminists like you apparently are."
and later:
"... your comments seem to wilfully denigate the possibility that women could be interested in topics of "traditional" interest to women."
Regarding English Wikipedia, it is worth remembering that the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their official language, and that Canada has both English and French, so English Wikipedia isn't an homogenous block.
My experience of well moderated websites in the UK (with their servers in the UK, and therefore subject to UK law), is that people are simply not allowed to speak that way here either. As far as I'm aware Jeremy Waldron (from New Zealand), is one of the few to take on America's first amendment in his book "The Harm in Hate Speech". http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2223860
Marie
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 07:57:48 -0400 From: slowking4@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Slate on Wikipedia and the gendergap
empty simplistic theorizingneed to do multi-factor analysis of input factors.edtitathons are gathering data, but sample size is smalldon't really have good data on percentage participation my experience is that "female-related content" is improving, but gap remains as the toxic culture trumps everything else. i.e. low correlation
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote: An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject. I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump. Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today? On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com wrote:
Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia” Corbett, who has a milelong track record of incivility, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor,” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language. The other editor was Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia biography of her; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.elementx.se Skriv som ett proffs - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg
@aliasHannibal - på Twitter
"Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till världens samlade kunskap. Det är vårt mål."
Jimmy Wales
_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
_______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
The main thing is figuring out how to measure something, and then proceed to measure that something with a reasonable frequency, like once a year or once every two years. Only then can we determine whether we are making progress at all. We also have to be careful not to confuse our own "Wikiverse Gendergap" with the already established systemic gender bias in academia. You can't expect Wikipedia to forge new pathways for women, Wikipedia should just reflect society at large, due to the acceptance of "reliable sources" produced by society at large. We aren't ever going to become radically feminist, but I think in some sense, all of us are feminists or we wouldn't be subscribed to this list. Though I would personally agree about subjects such as "fashion, cookery, domestic affairs and childrearing", these are really hard to measure, so I think we are much more focussed if we just stick to virtual "weenie counts" in any list. So whatever the list is, count the proportion of men-women, and then the proportion of blue to red links for men and women.
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I'm not keen on the phrase "female-related content", I posted this transcript of an exchange I had with an editor https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2015-April/005670.html in April.
When I dared to suggest that women could be interested in topics other than the ones he suggested - "fashion, cookery, domestic affairs and childrearing" - he responded with this:
"...the purpose of the task force was to increase the participation of
women of all sorts, not just radical feminists like you apparently are." and later:
"... your comments seem to wilfully denigate the possibility that women
could be interested in topics of "traditional" interest to women."
Regarding English Wikipedia, it is worth remembering that the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their official language, and that Canada has both English and French, so English Wikipedia isn't an homogenous block.
My experience of well moderated websites in the UK (with their servers in the UK, and therefore subject to UK law), is that people are simply not allowed to speak that way here either. As far as I'm aware Jeremy Waldron (from New Zealand), is one of the few to take on America's first amendment in his book "The Harm in Hate Speech". http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2223860
Marie
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 07:57:48 -0400 From: slowking4@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Slate on Wikipedia and the gendergap
empty simplistic theorizing need to do multi-factor analysis of input factors. edtitathons are gathering data, but sample size is small don't really have good data on percentage participation
my experience is that "female-related content" is improving, but gap remains as the toxic culture trumps everything else. i.e. low correlation
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject.
I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump.
Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today?
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson < l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carolmooredc, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=624229392” Corbett, who has a milelong track record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility_enforcement/Evidence of incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive855#Personal_attacks_and_incivility_by_Eric_Corbett, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett *,*” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=625749585,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett_prohibited. The other editor was Sitush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Sitush&diff=624275036&oldid=624267508” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore *biography* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore of her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest https://www.mail-archive.com/gendergap%40lists.wikimedia.org/msg04083.html.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.*elementx*.se http://www.elementx.se *Skriv som ett proffs http://www.elementx.se/skriv-som-ett-proffs/* - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg http://elementx.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=ab2080465c6cd11b5b253f940&id=8a2b974a62
@aliasHannibal http://twitter.com/AliasHannibal - på Twitter
"*Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till **världens samlade kunskap* http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida*. Det är vårt mål.*" Jimmy Wales
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
_______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Side note: The US First Amendment applies only to government regulation of speech, and an NGO project like Wikipedia has the total ability to determine its own civility and hate speech standards, if we will only enforce them.
Thanks, Pharos
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Marie Earley eiryel@hotmail.com wrote:
I'm not keen on the phrase "female-related content", I posted this transcript of an exchange I had with an editor https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2015-April/005670.html in April.
When I dared to suggest that women could be interested in topics other than the ones he suggested - "fashion, cookery, domestic affairs and childrearing" - he responded with this:
"...the purpose of the task force was to increase the participation of
women of all sorts, not just radical feminists like you apparently are." and later:
"... your comments seem to wilfully denigate the possibility that women
could be interested in topics of "traditional" interest to women."
Regarding English Wikipedia, it is worth remembering that the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand all have English as their official language, and that Canada has both English and French, so English Wikipedia isn't an homogenous block.
My experience of well moderated websites in the UK (with their servers in the UK, and therefore subject to UK law), is that people are simply not allowed to speak that way here either. As far as I'm aware Jeremy Waldron (from New Zealand), is one of the few to take on America's first amendment in his book "The Harm in Hate Speech". http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2223860
Marie
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 07:57:48 -0400 From: slowking4@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Slate on Wikipedia and the gendergap
empty simplistic theorizing need to do multi-factor analysis of input factors. edtitathons are gathering data, but sample size is small don't really have good data on percentage participation
my experience is that "female-related content" is improving, but gap remains as the toxic culture trumps everything else. i.e. low correlation
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting set of questions, Lennart! Let me first explain why I am looking for reliable sources on the Gendergap. I have been involved with efforts to reduce the Gendergap in the Netherlands since 2011. Our big news today is that we have nearly doubled female participation from 6% (measured in 2013) to 11% according to our latest survey results from this year. One of the problems I have in discussions regarding the Gendergap is the whole chicken-and-egg theory about whether women don't participate because of a lack of female-related content, or whether we lack female-related content because we have so few female participants. It would be nice to have an article in the Dutch Wikipedia on the Gendergap to answer these questions without repeating myself constantly, but I see that so far since publication of that article on the English Wikipedia on 30 April 2014 (called "Gender Bias on Wikipedia" in order to differentiate it from the "Gender Pay Gap"), only the Turkish Wikipedia has managed to create an article in their wiki on the same subject.
I would really like to make an article in the Dutch Wikipedia about this, and in this context we would rely on Dutch "reliable sources" but what they have published so far is quite thin and only refers to the English Wikipedia, which is not helpful. Slate is not recognized as a reliable source by the Dutch Wikipedia, and this article, though interesting, does not touch on the participation gap in the Netherlands or indeed why it even matters. The Slate article is focused on an edit-war which is not really relevant to the larger community because as you say, though the language on talk pages in nlwiki can be very condescending or negative, it's generally not profane like this one. I do think from conversations I have had and research done by Aaron Halfaker and others, that the problem stems from the strange need to throw links to help pages at newbies rather than talk to them normally in language they can understand. Some of the very worst articles in the Wikiverse are help pages, which are probably bad because they are not indexed by Google and have too few eyes looking at them. That said, the help pages need a better "between the lines" analysis for the AfD queue, so that Dutch abbreviations like "Vrouw-baan" on the Dutch AfD list are interpreted correctly to mean "This editor is probably a woman promoting her own business and COI policy applies here" rather than what it sounds like "all women who work should have their articles be deleted on eye contact". I have also noticed that articles about women tend to be nominated much more often for deletion than articles by men. Ditto the books they write, the movies they make, and any notable news items they are the subject of. I think women give up quicker because they are less tech-savvy at finding their way around the various bits of behind-the-scenes discussion areas. Often they can't even find their way to the discussion at the AfD queue or the Village pump.
Why doesn't the Swedish Wikipedia have an article about the Gendergap? What is the Gendergap in Sweden today?
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson < l_guldbrandsson@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Slate recently published a, at least to my eyes, fairly well-balanced article about Wikipedia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_d...
The Gender Gap Task Force gets more than a shout-out:
"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carolmooredc, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.” Two of her chief antagonists in that group got comparative slaps on the wrist. One was the productive but notoriously hostile Eric “Fuck Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=624229392” Corbett, who has a milelong track record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Civility_enforcement/Evidence of incivility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive855#Personal_attacks_and_incivility_by_Eric_Corbett, had declared the task force a feminist “crusade ... to alienate every male editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett *,*” and called Moore “nothing but a pain in the arse https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=&diff=prev&oldid=625749585,” among less printable comments; he was handed a seemingly redundant “prohibition” on abusive language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Interactions_at_GGTF/Proposed_decision#Eric_Corbett_prohibited. The other editor was Sitush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sitush, who repeatedly criticized Moore for being “obsessed with an anti-male agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Sitush&diff=624275036&oldid=624267508” and then decided to research and write a Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore *biography* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore of her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Sitush/Carol_Moore; he walked away with a mere “warning.” With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap. (After the decision, several editors announced their intentions to resign in protest https://www.mail-archive.com/gendergap%40lists.wikimedia.org/msg04083.html.) Moreover, it’s reflective of the challenges Wikipedia faces as it attempts to retain and improve its content quality and editing force."
Also mentioned, the Chelsea Manning name controversy and the overall fall in editors.
What I miss here and in almost every article in English I've seen on these types of topics is that English Wikipedia is the only one mentioned. I grant that many readers only know English, but I for one, don't recognize the same bad language and anti-women behavior in my daily work on Swedish Wikipedia. We would simply not allow people to speak that way.
This leads me to wonder how those types of behaviors affect editors. We have a golden opportunity to A/B test this, because of all our language versions.
So, my question, stated another way, is: if the bad language and anti-women behavior on English Wikipedia deter editors, and maybe especially female editors, and we have other Wikipedias with less bad language and anti-women behavior (perhaps), do these language versions have a higher female-to-male ratio?
And stated a third way: how much do the bad language and anti-women behavior really influence the gendergap?
Best wishes,
Lennart Guldbrandsson
070 - 207 80 05 http://www.*elementx*.se http://www.elementx.se *Skriv som ett proffs http://www.elementx.se/skriv-som-ett-proffs/* - min senaste bok Få regelbundna skrivtips direkt till din inkorg http://elementx.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=ab2080465c6cd11b5b253f940&id=8a2b974a62
@aliasHannibal http://twitter.com/AliasHannibal - på Twitter
"*Tänk dig en värld där varje människa på den här planeten får fri tillgång till **världens samlade kunskap* http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida*. Det är vårt mål.*" Jimmy Wales
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
_______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On 6/22/2015 11:46 AM, Marie Earley wrote:
I'm not keen on the phrase "female-related content", I posted this transcript of an exchange I had with an editor https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2015-April/005670.html in April.
When I dared to suggest that women could be interested in topics other than the ones he suggested - "fashion, cookery, domestic affairs and childrearing" - he responded with this:
"...the purpose of the task force was to increase the participation
of women of all sorts, not just radical feminists like you apparently are." and later:
"... your comments seem to wilfully denigate the possibility that
women could be interested in topics of "traditional" interest to women."
First, remember the Slate article was published back in December right after I and another editor of unknowledged sex got kicked off for minor snippiness and the guys who were insulting and harassing us just got minor wrist slaps...
Marie's comments are spot on. If I only had edited on such womanly topics and not dared mostly to edit in male dominated areas like politics, economics, war/peace, etc. I wouldn't not have so many males pissed off at me and stalking and harassing me when I later started to edit about and speak out on gender gap issues.
Even though Lightbreather and I may have very different views on some economic/political/gender issues, we both were targeted by various individuals because we dared to be women asserting our views in areas where woman's input is considered a nuisance at best and a Wikicrime at worst.
And I'm glad the Arbitration Committee continues to keep editors' comments inside the editor's own section during Lightbreathers current "trial", which has greatly reduced the extreme harassment I was subjected to on the Arbitration talk pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Light...
I am glad that after I knew I definitely was getting kicked off I wrote the "manchester gangbangers" comment on the Arbitration talk page in response to a longtime harasser who insulted me for the third or fourth time on that page. And that's even though it is now portrayed as typical of things I wrote, which it was not.
I'm still trying to make time to fill in the blanks here: http://carolmoore.net/wikipedia/ Meanwhile I'm glad others are keeping up their good work.
CM