Another point not touched on by other commenters is that even if ideal race / ethnicity question(s were developed for every country in the world, users from some countries commonly disguise their country due to censorship in that country, so we there would be a whole class of systematic errors where we asked users the wrong country's question(s).
cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 at 05:00, Isaac Johnson isaac@wikimedia.org wrote:
Adding another point from Rebecca Maung who helps run the annual Community Insights surveys https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Insights but isn't currently on this listserv so couldn't respond directly:
This year's Community Insights survey (reporting scheduled for early 2021) is the first that will ask Wikimedia contributors about race and ethnicity-- but only in certain geographies. Due to all the excellent points made in this thread, we have never asked a race or ethnicity question, but this year we decided to start asking locally relevant questions where we could. This year only editors in the US and Britain will see a question about race or ethnicity, tailored to their local contexts. In the coming years, we will expand the countries and geographies that see a question like this, prioritizing places where there is a larger editor presence and local laws and norms allow such questions. We have not yet discussed asking about religion in the Community Insights survey.
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 9:20 AM Isaac Johnson isaac@wikimedia.org wrote:
As pointed out by others, the highly contextualized nature of religion, race, and ethnicity between countries makes it very difficult to impossible to craft questions that are not overly reductive but still somewhat universal. Despite this challenge, understanding diversity in a way that captures these aspects is obviously quite important as they often figure very strongly into power and representation within history, media, etc.
In general, if you're looking for large-scale surveys of editors, the Meta category (Category:Editor surveys https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editor_surveys) is actually quite complete (same for readers https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Reader_surveys). In particular, I wrote what little I could find about these topics into this section of our recently published knowledge gaps taxonomy: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.12314.pdf#subsubsection.3.1.7
The April 2011 editor survey took the approach of just asking people how they felt they were different from others in the community -- this specific question is not one that I would advocate today (asking people to identify all the ways in which they may be "outsiders" is not particularly welcoming) but this is also probably the style of approach (asking people how well they feel represented within Wikipedia content or editor community) that you'd have to take to get information on ethnicity / race / religion without writing country-specific questions: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Editor_Survey_Report_-_A...
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 6:12 AM Stuart A. Yeates syeates@gmail.com wrote:
The ethnicity / race question is an incredibly hard question to compose in an internationalised way.
Pretty much every country in the world uses different terms and there are some very confusing cases where the same term is used in different countries to mean very different things (e,g, "Asian" in UK English vs New Zealand English). This is derived from varying legal definitions (for example blood quantum vs one-drop laws); the history of colonisation and waves of immigration to the country; along with cultural differences.
cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 at 21:55, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Su-Laine Brodsky, 21/09/20 08:19:
I’m wondering if any large-scale surveys have been done that ask
Wikipedia editors about their race, ethnicity, or religion?
What international standards exist to phrase such questions? Denominations commonly used in surveys in one country may be considered horrific or even illegal in others.
I see OECD considers it a difficult problem too:
- Current NSOs collection practices cluster around three broad
categories: 1) all OECD countries collect information on some diversity proxies such as country of birth (36 OECD members); 2) a small majority, mostly Eastern European countries, the United Kingdom and Ireland, gather additional information on race and ethnicity (16 OECD members); and 3) only a handful of countries in the Americas and Oceania collect data on indigenous identity (6 OECD members). Diversity statistics are collected from the perspective of either enumerating the size of the relevant populations (typically in the census) or of comparing well-being outcomes across different population groups.
- While privacy and human rights legislation sometimes prevents or
discourages the routine collection of diversity data, the need to improve data availability and quality is being recognised in most countries. Many countries are piloting the addition of new ethnic response options to more accurately reflect the make-up of their societies (e.g. Ireland, the United States), while Belgium is considering allowing collection of race and ethnicity data within the restrictions imposed by the national legal framework. Within the European Statistical System, the inclusion of more detailed migration information is also being considered: The Framework Regulation for Production of European Statistics on Persons and Households European foresees the incorporation of questions on the country of birth of the respondent’s parents in the Labour Force Surveys (from 2020), the European Health Interview Survey, the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the Household Budget Surveys and the Community surveys on ICT usage in households and by individuals. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights is pursuing its Roma and Travellers Survey to collect comparable data in six selected Member States in 2018 (FRA, 2018[77]).
https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=SDD/DO...
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
-- Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l