Again, to bring this back to some research question, why do female newbie editors get
reverted more?
Possible research question. Where (topic space) are the reverts happening and what types
of reason given? Is there any sign that male/female are affected differently? To what
extent does level of editing experience affect this?
One research side-question. Should we just be comparing male vs female or should we look
at the unknowns? I know some people think that we have more women than we think but that
they choose not to self-identify as such on Wikipedia. If we compared various statistics
for no-gender editors with that of self-identifying male and female editors, does it give
us any insight on what the likely gender composition of the no-gender group are. For
example, if among self-identifying editors we known there is a 90-10 gender split, then if
the no-gendered are also 90-10 split, then statistics about the non-gendered editors
should show corresponding averages (male stat * 90 + female stat * 10). If they do not,
then can we use a range to statistics to back calculate the likely gender split of the
non-gendered group? Has anyone ever done this?
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Kerry Raymond [mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, 28 September 2018 10:05 AM
To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!
Pine
This paper has some good studies about gender and new editors and reverting
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shilad_Sen/publication/221367798_WPClu…
It shows that both male and female newbies are equally likely to drop out after being
reverted for good-faith edits, BUT that female newbies are more likely to be reverted than
male newbies, leading to a greater proportion of them dropping out.
It also shows that male and female editors tend to be attracted to different types of
topic. "There is a greater concentration of females in the People and Arts areas,
while males focus more on Geography and Science." (see Table 1 in the paper). And
their engagement with History seems lower.
So why are newbie women reverted more? This paper does not investigate that. But I think
it has to be either than they are reverted because they are women (i.e. conscious
discrimination) or because women's edits are less acceptable in some way.
I have *hypothesised* that newbie women may get reverted more because women show higher
interest in People but not in History suggesting women are more likely to be editing
articles about living people than about dead people. BLP policy is stricter on
verification compared with dead people topics, or with topics in male-attracting topics
like Geography and Science, so women are perhaps doing more BLP edits as newbies and more
likely to be reverted because they fail to provide a citation or their citation comes from
a source which may not be considered reliable (e.g. celebrity magazine).
If this could be established as at least a part of the problem, maybe there might be
targeted solutions to address the problem. E.g. maybe newbies should not be allowed to
edit articles which are BLP or have a high revert history (suggesting it's dangerous
territory for some reason, e.g. real-world controversy, "ownership") and are
deflected to the Talk page to suggest edits (as with a protected article or semi-protected
article). Currently we auto-confirm user accounts at 10 edits or 4 days (from memory). But
these thresholds are based on the likelihood of vandalism (early good-faith behaviour is a
good predictor of future good faith behaviour). But, having trained people, I know that
the auto-confirmation threshold should not be used as "beyond newbie" indicator;
they are newbies for many more edits.
How many edits do you need to stop being a newbie? I don't know, but as I know myself
with over 100k edits, if I edit an article outside my normal interests, I am far more
likely to be reverted than in my regular topic area, so we can all be newbies in
unfamiliar topic spaces. There is a lot of convention, pre-existing consensus and other
"norms" in topic spaces that the "newbie to this topic" doesn't
know. All editors in this situation may back off, but the established editor has a comfort
zone (normal topic space) to return to, the total newbie does not.
Kerry