On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 7:57 PM Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I agree there are some systemic factors that may
prevent us achieving
50-50 male-female participation (or in these enlightened non-binary times
49-49-2). Studies continue to show that wives still spend more hours at
domestic tasks than their husbands, even when both are in full-time
employment, and clearly less free time is less time for Wikipedia. But
still men now do more housework than they once did. (My husband would argue
that I have never let housework take priority over Wikipedia, but maybe I'm
not typical!). Similarly, we have not yet seen pay rates for women reach
parity with men but they are moving closer. A gender balance of 90-10 that
might once have been the norm in many occupations is now unusual. Wikipedia
is a child of the 21st century; one might expect it to more closely reflect
the societal norms of this century not the 19th century.
Women use wikis like Confluence in workplaces without apparent difficulty.
But I note that modern for-profit wikis have visual editing and tools that
import/export from Word as normal modes of contribution.
I agree entirely with you about outreach and off-wiki activities. I said
when there was the big push to "solve the women problem" by such events
that it wouldn't make the difference because the problem is on-wiki. The
majority of people who attend my training class and come to the events I
support are women. It's not women can't do it. It's not that they don't
want to do. As you say, it's just that it's such an unpleasant environment
to do it in and that's what women don't like. For that matter, a lot of men
don't like it either.
What shall we write on Wikipedia's tombstone? "Wikipedia: an encyclopedia
written by the most unpleasant people"?
Can one create cultural change? Yes, I've seen it done in organisations.
You tell people what the new rules are, you illustrate with examples of
acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. You offer a voluntary redundancy
program for those who don't wish to stay and you make clear it that those
who wish to stay and continue to engage in the unacceptable behaviours will
be "managed out" through performance reviews. You run surveys that measure
your culture throughout the whole process. Interestingly the cultural
change almost always involved being less critical, more collaborative, less
micromanaged, more goal-oriented, more self-starting, many of which I would
say apply here (except perhaps for being more self-starting, I don't think
that's our problem).
En.WP can change but WMF will have to take a stand and state what the new
culture is going to be. En.WP will not change of its own accord; we have
years of evidence to demonstrate that.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan
Sent: Friday, 21 September 2018 10:44 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!
(Re: Jonathan's 'Chilling Effect' theory and Kerry's call for
experiments
to increase gender diversity)
Kerry: In a magic world, where I could experiment with anything I wanted
to without having to get permission from communities, I would experiment
with enforceable codes of conduct that covered a wider range of harassing
and hostile behavior, coupled with robust & confidential incident reporting
and review tools. But that's not really an 'experiment', that's a whole
new
social/software system.
I actually think we're beyond 'experiments' when it comes to increasing
gender diversity. There are too many systemic factors working against
increasing non-male participation. In order to do that you would need to
increase newcomer retention dramatically, and we can barely move the needle
there on EnWiki, for both social and technical reasons. But one
non-technical intervention might be carefully revising and re-scope
policies like WP:NOTSOCIAL that are often used to arbitrarily and
aggressively shut down modes of communication, self-expression, and
collaboration that don't fit so-and-so's idea of what it means to be
Wikipedian.
Initiatives that start off wiki, like women-oriented edit-a-thons and
outreach campaigns, are vitally important and could certainly be supported
better in terms of maintaining a sense of community among participants once
the event is over and they find they're now stuck alone in hostile
wiki-territory. But I'm not sure what the best strategy is there, and these
kind of initiatives are not large-scale enough to make a large overall
impact on active editor numbers on their own, though they set important
precedents, create infrastructure, change the conversation, and do lead to
new editors.
The Community Health
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_health_initiative>
team just hired a new researcher who has lots of experience in the online
harassment space. I don't feel comfortable announcing their name yet, since
they hasn't officially started, but I'll make sure they subscribe to this
list, and will point out this thread.
Jonathan: This study <https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145265> is the
one I cite. There's a more recent--paywalled!--follow up <
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-015-0573-y> (expansion?)
that I haven't read yet, but which may provide new insights. And this short
but powerful enthnographic study <
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702514>gt;. And this lab study <
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216306781> on
the gendered perceptions of feedback and anonymity. And the--ancient, by
now--former contributors survey <
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results>gt;,
which IIRC shows that conflict fatigue is a significant reason people
leave. And of course there's a mountain of credible evidence at this point
that antisocial behaviors drive away newcomers, irrespective of gender.
Thanks for raising these questions,
- J
On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 3:21 AM, Jonathan Cardy <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com
wrote:
Thanks Pine,
In case I didn’t make it clear, I am very much of the camp that IP
editing is our lifeline, the way we recruit new members. If someone
isn’t happy with Citizendium et al as tests of that proposition then
feel free to propose tests. I am open to being proved wrong if someone
doesn’t mind wasting their time checking what seems obvious to me.
Just please if you do so make sure you test for the babies that I fear
would be thrown out with the bathwater, i.e the goodfaith newbies.
I am not short of promising lines of enquiry, and more productive uses
of my time. My choice for my time available for such things is which
promising lines of enquiry to follow, and banning IPs isn’t one if them.
One where we might have more agreement is over the default four
warnings and a block for vandalism. I think it bonkers that we block
edit warrers for a first offence but usually don’t block vandals till
a fifth offence. I know that the four warnings and a block approach
dates back to some of the earliest years on Wiki, but I am willing to
bet that it wasn’t very scientifically arrived at, and that a study of
the various behaviours that we treat this way would probably conclude
that we could reduce the number of warnings for vandals, whilst we
might want a longer dialogue with non neutral editors, copy pasters and
those who
add unsourced material.
Afterall, many of our editors started without
getting issues like
neutrality, and whilst the few former vandals who we have don’t
generally have a grudge that their early vandalism lead to a block,
the same isn't always true of others.
The other issue that could really use some research is on the chilling
effect theory. Here the community is divided, some honestly believe
that the high quality work of certain individuals justifies a certain
level of snark, even to the point of harassment. Others, including
myself, believe that tolerance of bad behaviour drives away some good
editors and fails to improve the behaviour of some who would comply
with stricter civility enforcement. It would be really useful to have
a study one could point to when that argument next recurs.
Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
________________________________
From: Wiki-research-l <wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on
behalf of Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 8:29:32 AM
To: Wiki Research-l
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia
survey are published!
I'm going to respond to Kerry and Jonathan in two parts of one email.
--
Hi Kerry, I did not say that transparency should be a free-for-all,
and it's important to keep in mind that transparency from my
perspective is intended to ensure due process for everyone involved.
That includes ensuring that people who are adjudicating cases are not
callously dismissing complaints, mistreating people who have been
victimized, neglecting evidence, or rushing to conclusions. I would
oppose, for example, people who are adjudicating a case deciding to
engage in questioning that is completely unnecessary for dealing with
the relevant allegations.
On a related issue, I don't trust WMF to adjudicate cases or involve
itself directly in deciding who gets to be on Wikimedia sites or
attend Wikimedia events; WMF is not the same thing as Wikimedia and I
remain deeply unhappy with some of WMF's choices over the years and
its lack of apology for those choices. I would be more trusting of a
somewhat less transparent process for adjudicating off-wiki problems
if it was led by people who are elected from the community, similar to
English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections. Arbcom is far from
perfect, but I have modestly more faith in Arbcom than I do in WMF. On
the other hand, arbitrators are volunteers, and over the years I have
seen more than one instance of arbitrators appearing to be stressed;
volunteers with high skill levels and good intentions are a precious
resource, and if one of the outcomes of WMF's strategy process is a
move toward having a global Arbitration Committee then one of the
difficult questions will be how to get an adequate supply of highly
skilled people with good intentions to volunteer. On a related note, I
prefer to avoid identity politics when deciding who should be on
arbitration committees; I feel that identity politics are often
poisonous and make it very difficult to have civil dialogue. How to
balance the virtue of diversity with the virtue of avoiding identity
politics is
an issue that I haven't worked out.
We're getting off of the topic of research and into more of a policy
discussion, so if you'd like to continue in this topic then I suggest
doing so on Wikimedia-l or on Meta.
--
Hi Jonathan, I'd be supportive of running small experiments about
blocking all IP editors on ENWP and mid-sized Wikipedias to see
whether that is a net positive. As you noted, the research would be
somewhat complicated when keeping in mind that the researchers would
want to check for positive and negative side effects, but I think that
it would be worth doing. Would you like to make a proposal in IdeaLab?
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>