On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:41 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" well, and how does one recognize low quality and how come it is so low? and "quality" by whose epistemological aims and standards?
"causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps)" which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here?
Jane's response was helpful and similar to mine.
Based on existing surveys, there are demographic and social categories of people who are underrepresented among current editors. I don't have specifics off the top of my head, but if you look at WMF survey results for US editors and compare the findings to US census data (for example), you can get an idea of some categories. Women are underrepresented to an extreme degree, but they are not the only population that does not seem to edit en:WP. I am less knowledgeable about other WPs, but I suspect there are other inequalities and gaps on other wikis.
where would these gaps be situated in terms of areas of participation?
See above.
and, again, in which language version(s)?
See above.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:38 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Speaking of which, the WMF doesn't have resources to appropriately process the 2012 survey data, so results aren't available yet. Did you consider offering them to take care of it, at least for the gendergap number? You would then be able to publish an update.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#L...
As before, my understanding is that the method by which respondents were selected to participate in the survey does not meet standard methods of survey sampling (see this chunk https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#When.2C_and_how_often_will_the_survey_be_conducted.3F of the description of the survey). As a result, I do not trust the results of the 2012 survey to generate precise estimates of the gender gap or other demographic details about participation. I've spoken to some very receptive folks at the foundation about this and I hope that they/we will be able to improve it in the future. I'm eager to help improve the survey data collection procedures. Unfortunately, I do not have the capacity to analyze the current survey data in greater depth.
The thing that allowed Mako and I to do the study that we published in PLOSONE was the fact that (1) the old UNU-Merit & WMF survey sought to include readers as well as editors; *and* (2) at the exact same time Pew carried out a survey in which they asked a nearly identical question about readership. We used the overlapping results about WP readership from both surveys to generate a correction for the data about editorship. Without similar data on readership and similar data from a representative sample of some reference population (in the case of the pew survey, US adults), we cannot perform the same correction. As a result, I do not feel comfortable estimating how biased (or unbiased) the 2012 survey results may be.
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On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Claudial, I responded to your questions in the text - hope it's readable. Jane
____WereSpielChequers wrote: "the community is more abrasive towards women"
I think he is simply referring to earlier discussions where the conclusion was "the community can be perceived to be abrasive" and this conclusion, in yet other discussions led to this conclusion, which should be rephrased as "the community is more often perceived as abrasive by women than by men"
____Kerry wrote: "But I would agree that if an organisation sets a target (25% women in this particular case) and then does not put in place a means of measuring the progress against that target, one has to question the point of establishing a target."
___Claudia (responding to Kerry): I think one has to question the point of not putting in place a means of measuring the progress... and also ask why, if the issue is a high priority (allegedly, one might add, in speeches at meetings, in interviews with the press...) this organisation does not fund any top level research... - or does it?
I think here you are forgetting about the "holy shit graph" which shows a reduction in the number of active editors over time. This is much more of a direct threat to the Wikiverse than the gendergap, which, as has been stated before, is only one of many serious gaps in knowledge coverage. Oddly, I think it is one of the easiest of all "participatory gaps" to measure, but we seem to constantly get stranded in objections to ways that previous editor surveys have been held, leading to the strange situation of never actually being able to run even one editor survey twice. Since we have not yet been able to establish any trend at all, we are only comparing apples to oranges.
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" __Claudia (responding to Aaron): ...how does one recognize low quality..? Hmm. I just looked and I couldn't find the criticism of the various editor surveys. Is this stashed somewhere on meta? Or do we need to sift through reams of emails until we find all the various objections? Objections galore, as I recall.
___Claudia: which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here? Off the top of my head, some of these would be
- lack of geographical editor coverage such as active editors in rural
areas or even in whole states such as Wyoming or South Dakota and the whole "Global South participation problem" (the Global South participation problem is even helped along inadvertently by the new read-only "Wikipedia-zero" effect); 2) lack of topical expertise on subjects that technically don't lend themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as auditory fields (musical production) or visual fields (how to paint, how to make movies, how to choreograph motion) 3) lack of topical expertise on subjects that legally don't lend themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as articles about artworks under copyright that cannot be illustrated in an article; 4) lack of topical editor coverage on subjects previously shut out - there is still unwillingness by a whole group to re-enter the Wikiverse after being banned (earlier shut-outs such as blocking whole institution-wide ip ranges for vandalism or whole areas of expertise such as groups of writers for their COI editing, carry with them a history of anti-Wikipedia sentiment that lasts a long time in various enclaves)
___Claudia: and, again, in which language version(s)? That's easy - the languages that we can technically support but don't yet have Wikipedias for and the languages for which we don't even have the fonts to display them.
best, Claudia
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 7:41 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi WereSpielChequers, Kerry, Aaron and all,
____WereSpielChequers wrote: "the community is more abrasive towards women"
this may be stats expert discourse, but let me show you how the question itself has a gendered slant. imagine what would happen - also in your research design - if it read: "the community is less abrasive towards men" - how does this compare to the first question re who are "the community"?
and again, re phasing ten years in 2011 and four years on, which language version(s) are hypotheses based on?
____Kerry wrote: "But I would agree that if an organisation sets a target (25% women in this particular case) and then does not put in place a means of measuring the progress against that target, one has to question the point of establishing a target."
I think one has to question the point of not putting in place a means of measuring the progress... and also ask why, if the issue is a high priority (allegedly, one might add, in speeches at meetings, in interviews with the press...) this organisation does not fund any top level research... - or does it?
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" well, and how does one recognize low quality and how come it is so low? and "quality" by whose epistemological aims and standards?
"causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps)" which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here? where would these gaps be situated in terms of areas of participation? and, again, in which language version(s)?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:aaron shaw aaronshaw@northwestern.edu To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Mon, 16 Feb 2015 20:50:17 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
Hi all!
Thanks, Jeremy & Dariusz for following up.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 5:58 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
As far as I recall, they did a follow-up on this topic, and maybe a publication coming up?
Sadly, no follow ups at the moment.
If we want to have a more precise sense of the demographics of participants the biggest need in this space is simply higher quality survey data. My paper with Mako has a lot of detail about why the 2008 editor survey (and all subsequent editor surveys, to my knowledge) has some profound limitations.
The identification and estimation of the effects of particular causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps) presents an even tougher challenge for researchers and is an area of active inquiry.
all the best, Aaron
------- End of Original Message -------
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