Outside the widely popular percentage of female editors on Wikipedia/WMF projects in general, and the percentage of Wikipedia biographical articles about females, is there anything else that has been used in literature / existing studies that you'd consider worth mentioning?
Thanks,
It would be interesting to compare attrition, "failure" and "success" attributes of self-identified males and females on a variety of metrics.
IMO there is quite a persistent misunderstandung in scholarship about Wikipedia that adminship is directly synonymous with "leadership", but you could still compare admin-related stats between self-identified male and female populations.
Pine On Nov 20, 2015 10:37 PM, "Piotr Konieczny" piokon@post.pl wrote:
Outside the widely popular percentage of female editors on Wikipedia/WMF projects in general, and the percentage of Wikipedia biographical articles about females, is there anything else that has been used in literature / existing studies that you'd consider worth mentioning?
Thanks,
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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Like being a police office, being an admin might not be synonymous with leadership, but it does come with the power to control others, so it is synonymous with authority. So it is an indicator worth including. You could extend those stats to steward, Board of Trustees, too. What about the staff of WMF? What are the ratios there? It’s not that any one indicator is necessarily significant. When it comes to gender balance, the more stats the better to confound the deniers.
The Clubhouse paper has some data on reversion of male/female edits and male/female survival rates (IIRC)
http://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf
although I think short-term survival rates of new editors is problematic because many new users don’t self-identify as male or female in the short timeframe that they are active. It probably takes a while for many new users to explore preferences and create user pages and worked how to self-identify in various ways (if they chose to do so).
Kerry
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Saturday, 21 November 2015 4:49 PM To: Wiki Research-l wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia gender gap/inequality indicators
It would be interesting to compare attrition, "failure" and "success" attributes of self-identified males and females on a variety of metrics.
IMO there is quite a persistent misunderstandung in scholarship about Wikipedia that adminship is directly synonymous with "leadership", but you could still compare admin-related stats between self-identified male and female populations.
Pine
On Nov 20, 2015 10:37 PM, "Piotr Konieczny" <piokon@post.pl mailto:piokon@post.pl > wrote:
Outside the widely popular percentage of female editors on Wikipedia/WMF projects in general, and the percentage of Wikipedia biographical articles about females, is there anything else that has been used in literature / existing studies that you'd consider worth mentioning?
Thanks,
Yes. I've been working on researching the gender gap on a different site, with a similar imbalance but is also considered an information knowledge site. In researching that, this stood out for me in Wikipedia research:
The issue of knowledge creation as it relates to perception of Internet self-efficacy can be seen when it comes to gender differences in Wikipedia contributions low-skilled Internet users. Here, Wikipedia’s well known and documented gender gap largely disappears (Hargittaia & Shaw, 2015) Another piece that has stood out: Efforts at trying to reduce English Wikipedia’s gender gap have largely been unsuccessful (Lannon, 2014; Lam, et al., 2011).
Hargittaia, E., & Shaw, A. (2015). Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia. *Information, Communication & Society, 18*(4), 424-442. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.957711
Lam, S. K., Uduwage, A., Dong, Z., Sen, S., Musicant, D. R., & Terveen, L. (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance. *WikiSym 2011.* Mountain View, CA: ACM.
Lannon, E. J. (2014). *Same gap, different experience: An Exploration of the Similarities and Differences Between the Gender Gap in the Indian Wikipedia Editor Community and the Gap in the General Editor Community.* University of Toronto at Scarborough, International Development Studies. Scarborough: University of Toronto at Scarborough.
From my own research: Men and women are equally likely to include links to
sources in their answers. One key difference in citing sources in answers is that men are much more likely to link to Wikipedia than women. Men link to Wikipedia around 20% of the time when they provide a link. This contrasts with women who link to Wikipedia only around 9.8% of the time. This stands in contrast to Wikipedia usage as readers, with Alexa data suggesting women read Wikipedia more than men. Women may read it, but they aren’t sourcing it on Quora. Instead, they tend to chose links that Wikipedia would classify as primary source.
There is also a whole potentially interesting discussion on the role of technological determinism and its impact on WMF solutions. I wrote the following for a paper but I've scrapped it as it didn't fit with the direction I am now going:
One of the major touchstones of the past five years online on the issue of unequal treatment of women and content about them has been English Wikipedia, and its gender gap with regards to participation and content of women. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, led by Sue Gardner made a major push to address this issue largely through attempts to simplify the editing experience. They perceived the major hurdle to female participation, and subsequent women writing about women, as technological and invested money in trying to improve this through simplifying the interface and creating spaces to teach women about the technology to remove the technological barrier. Their narrative to address the issue of women’s involvement on English Wikipedia fit into one of the earlier liberal feminist critiques of the Internet in that technology was inherently biased against women because of technological determinism. Their technology solutions found little success. As Sue Gardner transitioned out of her role as the Executive Director and new Executive Director Lila Tretikov came in, the Wikimedia Foundation moved away from an technological determinist approach to fixing the gender gap, minimized the importance of addressing the gender gap across projects, and diverted the few resources institutionally allocated for this towards community based cultural and technological approaches. For English Wikipedia, addressing the gender gap through technological determinism appeared to be a failed cause in that solutions to address this did not fundamentally work.
One of the largest collaborative knowledge sharing sites outside of Wikipedia is Quora, which has a gender gap that has been discussed by several technology news sites and internally on the project. One of the major differences between Quora and Wikipedia is that the issue of technological determinism, which is technology serving as an impediment to female participation, does not exist because of the simplicity of its interface.
Rather than accepting a narrative of technological determinism that views technology as intrinsically masculine and catering to male behaviours, technologies and social media should be critically examined “for how they reward or discourage patterns of behavior that adhere to predominant notions of gender.” (Marwick, 2013) This is “Because contemporary social media is embedded within daily life,” and “it draws from the same dynamics present in day-to-day interaction.” (Marwick, 2013) Still, technology remains “gender inauthentic” for women because of these cultural norms as women are asked to give up their personal definitions of feminine in order to participate (Faulkner, 2000b; Wajcman J. , TechnoFeminism, 2004; Turkle, 1988; Kitzinger, Haran, Chimba, & & Boyce, 2008).
On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 7:37 AM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Outside the widely popular percentage of female editors on Wikipedia/WMF projects in general, and the percentage of Wikipedia biographical articles about females, is there anything else that has been used in literature / existing studies that you'd consider worth mentioning?
Thanks,
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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