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
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 -------
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
1) 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 -------
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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 -------
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
Hi Jonathan Cardy and all, (see below for some software issues)
I agree with your argument, WereSpielChequers/ Jonathan Cardy, and I would like to hear more details about
many pieces of evidence
since these, I am told, usually form a good basis for hypotheses that might be used in qualitative studies. It seems to me that my attempt at starting thought experiment I quote a few lines from here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2015- February/004188.html might have produced similar data; or might be restarted in a different setting, maybe
btw, my apologies, and thank you for your clarification. Actually, I did not intend to quote the statement in any personal attribution kind of way, but for a reversal experiment of the wording. I was assembling a few bits and pieces from different parts of different threads, and this was my way of making sure people would find the context again if they chose to; next time, I will try to look for a different method of presenting material for any language games.
re "the Wikipedia community" I'd say that since it constitutes itself in adhoc teams, every user is a member, even if only for one edit or just by adding a fe pages to a watchlist after registration -- irrespective of the number of accounts the person behind a login name might be using to join the game board Wikipedia. From my point of view, there simply is a large variety in how people use any of the functions (or a combination of them) that the software of the platform offers -- and any and all use cases contribute to what makes the Wikipedia community. I do not have any romantic inclinations here. If it is an open system it is an open system for all use cases and their inventors, be they acting adhoc way or in a kind of more systematic gaming - - that one might have to regard as systemic after all.
so if mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies, my question would be: does anyone have any insights as to the chances of changing the software to make Wikipedia a less welcoming place to users behaving like bullies? or would most experts currently say that mediawiki software does not have anything to do with it ;-) ?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:52:10 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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 -------
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
------- End of Original Message -------
On the question of whether "mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies" ...
Like many technologies, we can use them for good or bad. A car can carry a sick person to a hospital in time to save their life. A car can run down and kill a person. Etc. But we do know that we can design cars to make them safer, both for their occupants (roll cages, seat belts, etc) and for other road users (e.g. banning the use of bull bars), but if I really want to kill myself or others, I can still do so with a car, I just have to try a bit harder.
In the same vein, MediaWiki can be used in different ways. A User Talk page can be used to leave a Barnstar or call the person a "cunt" (to pick a recent topical example). Thanks to the user contribution page, I can easily find and revert every change you make. Now, maybe they were all bad edits (e.g. unsourced allegations about a living person) that were justified. Or maybe I am just harassing you or taking retribution for something you did or said to me or about me. What if I could not see your user contribution page? Would that make it harder for me to harass you?
At the moment, a couple of clicks reverts an edit. What if we substituted a long form, where you had to click a box to select a primary policy under which you were reverting the edit, and then select a drop-down for a specific aspect of that policy, and then fill in a text box with 100 words explaining your concerns? I think it's fair to say that there would be less reverting, but whether that is for better or worse is hard to say until you try it.
What if we got rid of User Talk pages and only had article Talk pages? Would our interactions change?
Interestingly, it's as easy to thank someone for an edit as to revert an edit (not using any tools), yet the number of thanks are incredibly low. How low ... take a look at the stats for January:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:F%C3%A6/sandbox&old... 49050523
(and woo hoo I made the top-10 on something in Wikipedia!)
Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with Facebook LIKEs? Why don't we let the Wikipedia readers click on a Thank-you button if they like an article, which delivers some kind of warm fuzzy message to its top contributors or recent contributors or all contributors or adds to their "good karma" score or something? I note that Facebook took away their old "thumbs down" button (was that an example of redesigning an interface to make it harder to be nasty to someone?)
But it would seem that, with A/B testing, we can measure how changing the interface of MediaWiki changes behaviour quantitatively (it may be harder to assess how it changes it qualitatively).
But maybe we can even do some kind of qualitative assessment of the change. Aaron and others (apologies if I am not giving credit where it is due) have developed a tool to make reasonable machine assessments of article quality. Could we develop some kind of metric of "sentiment" in user interaction and see if that is changing under A/B testing? It may even be that letting user's see their own "sentiment" score may cause self-correcting behaviour. Maybe we don't realise we are becoming older and grumpier.
Kerry, older and grumpier (some times)
thank you, Kerry, any other opinions on techno-(non)-determinism and on how mediawiki software has "an influence on" Wikipedia community climate?
What if alot of bullying is undertaken by users who prefer to act undercover with multiple accounts but a mediawiki registration page encourages you to simply create a new account?
anyway, two comments
Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with Facebook LIKEs?
mainstream research, I guess, would point at gender ratios (counting just two genders, however)
yet, thanking someone in a chatty environment may be a different matter to thanking someone in a "serious" knowledge-oriented project (whose social network aspects are often renounced)
It may even be that letting user's see their own "sentiment" score may
cause self-correcting behaviour.
my guess is that self-correcting one's behaviour is precisely not what users who tend to bully others come to Wikipedia for ;-)
what makes people stay might rather be ample proofs of how much fun it is not only for oneself but also for others to bully or "correct" others it might this proof of how much fun prolonged disputes can be that makes people stay who happily keep gaming in this environment...
so I guess we should look more into how the culture of "correction" (mainly directed towards others...) is given too large a playing field among community members of the English version of Wikipedia (am I right in guessing that the majority of users still has a background in protestant/evangelical training and maybe world view?)
also, looking into dispute culture vs. discussion culture -- relative to respective cultural habits and perceptions of how these work and if they are distinguishable at all -- might yield interesting outcomes, has anyone studied this for the community climate on English language Wikipedia?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:"Kerry Raymond" kerry.raymond@gmail.com To:"'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Thu, 19 Feb 2015 09:04:02 +1000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On the question of whether "mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies" ...
Like many technologies, we can use them for good or bad. A car can carry a sick person to a hospital in time to save their life. A car can run down and kill a person. Etc. But we do know that we can design cars to make them safer, both for their occupants (roll cages, seat belts, etc) and for other road users (e.g. banning the use of bull bars), but if I really want to kill myself or others, I can still do so with a car, I just have to try a bit harder.
In the same vein, MediaWiki can be used in different ways. A User Talk page can be used to leave a Barnstar or call the person a "cunt" (to pick a recent topical example). Thanks to the user contribution page, I can easily find and revert every change you make. Now, maybe they were all bad edits (e.g. unsourced allegations about a living person) that were justified. Or maybe I am just harassing you or taking retribution for something you did or said to me or about me. What if I could not see your user contribution page? Would that make it harder for me to harass you?
At the moment, a couple of clicks reverts an edit. What if we substituted a long form, where you had to click a box to select a primary policy under which you were reverting the edit, and then select a drop-down for a specific aspect of that policy, and then fill in a text box with 100 words explaining your concerns? I think it's fair to say that there would be less reverting, but whether that is for better or worse is hard to say until you try it.
What if we got rid of User Talk pages and only had article Talk pages? Would our interactions change?
Interestingly, it's as easy to thank someone for an edit as to revert an edit (not using any tools), yet the number of thanks are incredibly low. How low ... take a look at the stats for January:
title=User:F%C3%A6/sandbox&oldid=1
49050523
(and woo hoo I made the top-10 on something in Wikipedia!)
Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with Facebook LIKEs? Why don't we let the Wikipedia readers click on a Thank-you button if they like an article, which delivers some kind of warm fuzzy message to its top contributors or recent contributors or all contributors or adds to their "good karma" score or something? I note that Facebook took away their old "thumbs down" button (was that an example of redesigning an interface to make it harder to be nasty to someone?)
But it would seem that, with A/B testing, we can measure how changing the interface of MediaWiki changes behaviour quantitatively (it may be harder to assess how it changes it qualitatively).
But maybe we can even do some kind of qualitative assessment of the change. Aaron and others (apologies if I am not giving credit where it is due) have developed a tool to make reasonable machine assessments of article quality. Could we develop some kind of metric of "sentiment" in user interaction and see if that is changing under A/B testing? It may even be that letting user's see their own "sentiment" score may cause self- correcting behaviour. Maybe we don't realise we are becoming older and grumpier.
Kerry, older and grumpier (some times)
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki- research-l
------- End of Original Message -------
I agree if a person enjoys bullying, they are unlikely to self-correct. But an "interaction sentiment tool" makes it easier for the community to spot these people, and look more closely into what they are doing. Then try to get them to change, and <rinse and repeat> until such time as they ban them.
My comment about self-correcting behaviour is about people who don't intend to be a bully but behave abrasively without realising it. We have a lot of battle-weary editors out there who have just seen one too many vandalism, one too many blatant self-promotional article, etc and they become inclined to just shoot down "yet another" with increasing reluctance to check out the merits of the specific case, or to be terse and unhelpful in a Talk message etc. We've probably all had those moments of finding some new user's contribution that needs so much work to improve and thought "I'm just too busy, I don't have time to educate yet another one who probably won't stick around anyway, I'll just delete it and move on". I believe that most of our community does not intend to be a "bully" but may not be aware that is how they might seem to others at times. Letting people be aware that their interaction style is exhibiting higher than average "negative sentiment" *is* likely to change the behaviour of that group.
Obviously if we were to put such a tool out there, I'd suggest adding some general advice about what you might do if your score is "pretty negative", e.g.
* think about the choice of words you use, don't use words like ..., instead use ...
* are you terse or just point to a policy without being specific about your concerns
* could you have suggested a solution rather than just pointing out a problem?
* is it time for a wiki-break to recharge your batteries?
The sentiment score is likely to be generated from assessment of a number of elements of the observed interactions, so, for an individual looking at their score, it might be possible to make specific suggestions based on specific component scores, e.g. pointing out specific "abrasive" words being used regularly and suggesting alternatives.
Here's a suggestion for something a lot simpler than the "international sentiment tool". Just produce some word clouds for:
* a user's edit summaries
* a user's edits on article Talk pages
* a user's edits on other people's User Talk pages
* a user's edits on their own User Talk page
What does that show us about people?
Kerry
Hi Kerry,
I think that such a tool, if ever, should be used only if everyone who agrees with implementing it has had their own behaviour analysed publicly... btw, one reason why the "thank you" function is not used widely on Wikipedia might be that their logs are made public, even if for the entries some information is scraped. I consider screened does not usually have the effect of trust enhancement, so this would be an interesting issue to look into for the measures you suggest. my position is that with any kind of surveillance, alleged benefits never balance the losses, for individual and social freedom, for a culture of mutual trust, for sharing freely what would otherwise risk to be self-censored, not least for civil society's antimilitarist activism, etc. ...
my cautious note on gender stats (that seem to talk about facts re the enWP community) is in part motivated by similar thoughts as yours, Kerry, pinpointing behaviour and drawing conclusions; because: talking about any numbers in a short line of no more that 10 words will never allow for any transparency about the assumptions underlying the measuring and counting exercise, but it is precisely these that *create* the data in the first place, and I guess that the concept-creating exercise that I read in your mail therefore would have to be made public, too, in as easy words as you do here, and not in any discourse that is inaccessible for too many of those (like myself) who would be affected by an implementation
I guess that while goodwill is nice (to read about), research in my understanding should start from reflections about one's own perspective and not from any claims about "what is out there" -- but rather: "what do I see to be the case out there" and also: why do I perceive this to be my perception -- yes, it is no less complicated that this, and I am not the first one to argue in this vein
anyway, here again, Lorde's insight that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house might serve as a cautious note about any claim published and quoted in/from mainstream research
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:"Kerry Raymond" kerry.raymond@gmail.com To:"'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 20 Feb 2015 11:18:15 +1000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
I agree if a person enjoys bullying, they are unlikely to self-correct. But an "interaction sentiment tool" makes it easier for the community to spot these people, and look more closely into what they are doing. Then try to get them to change, and <rinse and repeat> until such time as they ban them.
My comment about self-correcting behaviour is about people who don't intend to be a bully but behave abrasively without realising it. We have a lot of battle-weary editors out there who have just seen one too many vandalism, one too many blatant self-promotional article, etc and they become inclined to just shoot down "yet another" with increasing reluctance to check out the merits of the specific case, or to be terse and unhelpful in a Talk message etc. We've probably all had those moments of finding some new user's contribution that needs so much work to improve and thought "I'm just too busy, I don't have time to educate yet another one who probably won't stick around anyway, I'll just delete it and move on". I believe that most of our community does not intend to be a "bully" but may not be aware that is how they might seem to others at times. Letting people be aware that their interaction style is exhibiting higher than average "negative sentiment" *is* likely to change the behaviour of that group.
Obviously if we were to put such a tool out there, I'd suggest adding some general advice about what you might do if your score is "pretty negative", e.g.
- think about the choice of words you use, don't
use words like ..., instead use ...
- are you terse or just point to a policy without
being specific about your concerns
- could you have suggested a solution rather than
just pointing out a problem?
- is it time for a wiki-break to recharge your batteries?
The sentiment score is likely to be generated from assessment of a number of elements of the observed interactions, so, for an individual looking at their score, it might be possible to make specific suggestions based on specific component scores, e.g. pointing out specific "abrasive" words being used regularly and suggesting alternatives.
Here's a suggestion for something a lot simpler than the "international sentiment tool". Just produce some word clouds for:
a user's edit summariesa user's edits on article Talk pagesa user's edits on other people's UserTalk pages
a user's edits on their own User Talk pageWhat does that show us about people?
Kerry
------- End of Original Message -------
Claudia
Our behaviour on Wikipedia is public (for better or worse). But a tool that analyses it can of course be limited to allow users to see only the analysis of their own behaviour and show them where they sit on a graph relative to unidentified others. However, based on past discussions of privacy and analysis tools, I suspect others will argue that if the data is public, why shouldn't the analysis also be public?
But, Claudia, I am not sure of the end point of this conversation which seems to be wandering all over the place. Are we trying to come up with one or more research questions in relation to the gender gap? If so, that needs some constraining in terms of the time and resources available? What can be done in 10 years with $10M and the full cooperation of WMF is very different to what can be done over the weekend with no budget using existing public data? Is the goal to put in a PEG grant?
Kerry
Dear Claudia,
As I understand it the evidence for the Gendergap being real includes:
Usernames chosen by people creating accounts Survey responses Gender choices in user preferences Attendees at events Subject preferences among editors In languages where you can't make talk page comments without disclosing your gender, the gender people disclose Discussions amongst editors by email and other online methods Applications for reference resources.
Some of these are more independent of each other than others, the last two are personal experience rather than anything statistically valid. But it is interesting when personal experience is in accord with research.
The only exceptions that I am aware of are where we deliberately target women such as through gender gap events, and I've heard that campus ambassadors are more gender balanced.
I don't dispute that there is a gender gap in the community, that the gender gap is greater amongst established editors than among newbies. As for other genders and whether we have put too much weight on the male/female ratio, it is a big glaring difference and when the debate about gender gap started several years ago now other ratios such as straight v gay didnt seem out of kilter. Since then there has been at least one mistake by ARBCOM and I suspect that the community isn't as Gay tolerant as I thought it was a few years back, so if someone is looking for a research topic it would be useful to know if the community's ratio of gay to straight members is changing over time.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 18 Feb 2015, at 11:23, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Jonathan Cardy and all, (see below for some software issues)
I agree with your argument, WereSpielChequers/ Jonathan Cardy, and I would like to hear more details about
many pieces of evidence
since these, I am told, usually form a good basis for hypotheses that might be used in qualitative studies. It seems to me that my attempt at starting thought experiment I quote a few lines from here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2015- February/004188.html might have produced similar data; or might be restarted in a different setting, maybe
btw, my apologies, and thank you for your clarification. Actually, I did not intend to quote the statement in any personal attribution kind of way, but for a reversal experiment of the wording. I was assembling a few bits and pieces from different parts of different threads, and this was my way of making sure people would find the context again if they chose to; next time, I will try to look for a different method of presenting material for any language games.
re "the Wikipedia community" I'd say that since it constitutes itself in adhoc teams, every user is a member, even if only for one edit or just by adding a fe pages to a watchlist after registration -- irrespective of the number of accounts the person behind a login name might be using to join the game board Wikipedia. From my point of view, there simply is a large variety in how people use any of the functions (or a combination of them) that the software of the platform offers -- and any and all use cases contribute to what makes the Wikipedia community. I do not have any romantic inclinations here. If it is an open system it is an open system for all use cases and their inventors, be they acting adhoc way or in a kind of more systematic gaming -
- that one might have to regard as systemic after all.
so if mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies, my question would be: does anyone have any insights as to the chances of changing the software to make Wikipedia a less welcoming place to users behaving like bullies? or would most experts currently say that mediawiki software does not have anything to do with it ;-) ?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:52:10 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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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Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
this is interesting for me, thank you very much, Jonathan Cardy
a few thoughts:
But it is interesting when personal experience is in accord with research.
for me it usually turns out to be much more challenging when personal experience is NOT in accord with research ;-)
Subject preferences among editors
which hypotheses lies behind this assumption of relevance: that boys prefer to write about boys? ;-) and non-boys, too?
if yes, where do we get to on such a basis? and is this really the place we want research to be in (that regularly claims to be objective in any way)?
Applications for reference resources
hm, quantity and/or topic-wise?
if someone is looking for a research topic it would be useful to know if the community's ratio of gay to straight members is changing over time.
ah, in which culture? why only gay to straight if, e.g., bisexuality and intersex* arae likely to be considered even bigger taboos? and anyway, which shades of "gay" and "straight"?
generally speaking, I would claim that any identity which can at times remain invisible is probably based on a culture of remaining unidentifiable and 'invisible'. so here we can profitably restart a debate on the question if researchers who have no personal experience in terms of a culture that has for centuries been based on hiding successfully to anyone except the likeminded/bodied should receive any payment for studying a minority culture they do not belong to themselves...
coming to I think of it, maybe it wold help us do away with binaries if anyone could look into the culture of expressing -- or not expressing any -- "identity"
maybe we should ask queer theory specialists how they would advise Wikimedians to do studies for which any identitarian glasses need to be taken off in the first place,
to boot, I really think we should open a discussion on bias in research questions (and then continue with a debate on bias in research design, maybe, or the other way round)
btw, I agree with this idea:
"The Master's Tools Wil Never Dismantle the Master's House." (Audre Lorde, 1979)
so where would anyone go from here for statistical or any for other (non)gender-related research re the portion of the Wikipedia community that is active on enWP?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:16:42 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
Dear Claudia,
As I understand it the evidence for the Gendergap being real includes:
Usernames chosen by people creating accounts Survey responses Gender choices in user preferences Attendees at events Subject preferences among editors In languages where you can't make talk page comments without disclosing your gender, the gender people disclose Discussions amongst editors by email and other online methods Applications for reference resources.
Some of these are more independent of each other than others, the last two are personal experience rather than anything statistically valid. But it is interesting when personal experience is in accord with research.
The only exceptions that I am aware of are where we deliberately target women such as through gender gap events, and I've heard that campus ambassadors are more gender balanced.
I don't dispute that there is a gender gap in the community, that the gender gap is greater amongst established editors than among newbies. As for other genders and whether we have put too much weight on the male/female ratio, it is a big glaring difference and when the debate about gender gap started several years ago now other ratios such as straight v gay didnt seem out of kilter. Since then there has been at least one mistake by ARBCOM and I suspect that the community isn't as Gay tolerant as I thought it was a few years back, so if someone is looking for a research topic it would be useful to know if the community's ratio of gay to straight members is changing over time.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 18 Feb 2015, at 11:23, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Jonathan Cardy and all, (see below for some software issues)
I agree with your argument, WereSpielChequers/ Jonathan Cardy, and I
would
like to hear more details about
many pieces of evidence
since these, I am told, usually form a good basis for hypotheses that
might
be used in qualitative studies. It seems to me that my attempt at
starting
thought experiment I quote a few lines from here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2015- February/004188.html might have produced similar data; or might be restarted in a different setting, maybe
btw, my apologies, and thank you for your clarification. Actually, I did not intend to quote the statement in any personal attribution kind of way,
but for
a reversal experiment of the wording. I was assembling a few bits and pieces from different parts of different threads, and this was my way of making sure people would find the
context
again if they chose to; next time, I will try to look for a different method
of
presenting material for any language games.
re "the Wikipedia community" I'd say that since it constitutes itself in
adhoc
teams, every user is a member, even if only for one edit or just by adding
a fe
pages to a watchlist after registration -- irrespective of the number of accounts the person behind a login name might be using to join the
game
board Wikipedia. From my point of view, there simply is a large variety in how people use any of the functions (or a combination of them) that the software of the platform offers -- and any and all use cases contribute to
what
makes the Wikipedia community. I do not have any romantic inclinations here. If it is an open system it is an open system for all use cases and
their
inventors, be they acting adhoc way or in a kind of more systematic
gaming -
- that one might have to regard as systemic after all.
so if mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies, my question would
be:
does anyone have any insights as to the chances of changing the
software to
make Wikipedia a less welcoming place to users behaving like bullies? or would most experts currently say that mediawiki software does not
have
anything to do with it ;-) ?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:52:10 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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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Hi Jonathan Cardy, hi all,
I just found something that could enhance our exchange by naming a few more factors than usually discussed on this list:
"In practice, the opportunities for realizing novel, unusual, or less fashionable technological functions are often constrained by a variety of factors: rigid habits, lack of imagination, technical obstacles, vested interests, economic power relationships, social impediments, moral constraints, and the like." Hans Radder, "Critical Philosophy of Technology: The Basic Issues", in: Social Epistemology, Vol. 22, No. 1, January-March 2008, pp. 51-70, p. 59
* rigid habits * lack of imagination * technical obstacles * vested interests * economic power relationships * social impediments * moral constraints * and the like
so, in line with the hegemonic culture on this list, what novel, unusual, or less fashionable *technological functions* could be used to solve the power issues that seem to keep up the gender gap?
best, Claudia koltzenburg@w4w.net Meine GPG-Key-ID: DDD21523 - mehr dazu: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:16:42 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
Dear Claudia,
As I understand it the evidence for the Gendergap being real includes:
Usernames chosen by people creating accounts Survey responses Gender choices in user preferences Attendees at events Subject preferences among editors In languages where you can't make talk page comments without disclosing your gender, the gender people disclose Discussions amongst editors by email and other online methods Applications for reference resources.
Some of these are more independent of each other than others, the last two are personal experience rather than anything statistically valid. But it is interesting when personal experience is in accord with research.
The only exceptions that I am aware of are where we deliberately target women such as through gender gap events, and I've heard that campus ambassadors are more gender balanced.
I don't dispute that there is a gender gap in the community, that the gender gap is greater amongst established editors than among newbies. As for other genders and whether we have put too much weight on the male/female ratio, it is a big glaring difference and when the debate about gender gap started several years ago now other ratios such as straight v gay didnt seem out of kilter. Since then there has been at least one mistake by ARBCOM and I suspect that the community isn't as Gay tolerant as I thought it was a few years back, so if someone is looking for a research topic it would be useful to know if the community's ratio of gay to straight members is changing over time.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 18 Feb 2015, at 11:23, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Jonathan Cardy and all, (see below for some software issues)
I agree with your argument, WereSpielChequers/ Jonathan Cardy, and I
would
like to hear more details about
many pieces of evidence
since these, I am told, usually form a good basis for hypotheses that
might
be used in qualitative studies. It seems to me that my attempt at
starting
thought experiment I quote a few lines from here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2015- February/004188.html might have produced similar data; or might be restarted in a different setting, maybe
btw, my apologies, and thank you for your clarification. Actually, I did not intend to quote the statement in any personal attribution kind of way,
but for
a reversal experiment of the wording. I was assembling a few bits and pieces from different parts of different threads, and this was my way of making sure people would find the
context
again if they chose to; next time, I will try to look for a different method
of
presenting material for any language games.
re "the Wikipedia community" I'd say that since it constitutes itself in
adhoc
teams, every user is a member, even if only for one edit or just by adding
a fe
pages to a watchlist after registration -- irrespective of the number of accounts the person behind a login name might be using to join the
game
board Wikipedia. From my point of view, there simply is a large variety in how people use any of the functions (or a combination of them) that the software of the platform offers -- and any and all use cases contribute to
what
makes the Wikipedia community. I do not have any romantic inclinations here. If it is an open system it is an open system for all use cases and
their
inventors, be they acting adhoc way or in a kind of more systematic
gaming -
- that one might have to regard as systemic after all.
so if mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies, my question would
be:
does anyone have any insights as to the chances of changing the
software to
make Wikipedia a less welcoming place to users behaving like bullies? or would most experts currently say that mediawiki software does not
have
anything to do with it ;-) ?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:52:10 +0000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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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Re. challenging problematic ideologies that get wrapped up into technological decisions in Wikipedia, I've done some relevant work. See:
Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle: Designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In *Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp. 311-320). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-p...
See http://snuggle-en.wmflabs.org/ for the live system.
For upcoming projects, I'm excited about http://passingon.natematias.com/
-Aaron
I don't think it's necessarily a question of "is the community more abrasive towards women?". Apart from specific pockets of misogyny that seem to have been the catalyst for some of the recent ArbCom matters, I don't think it's likely to be the case in general. I expect the community is probably equally abrasive to men and women. The better question is "do women want to be in an abrasive environment?". I think the answer to that is "mostly not". Analysis of women's interactions usually shows a strong tendency towards consensus building. This is very different to the Bold-Revert-Discuss culture of Wikipedia. Women are much more like to Discuss-Discuss-Discuss.
Kerry
_____
From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Wednesday, 18 February 2015 6:52 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd:[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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
1) 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 -------
_______________________________________________ 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
thanks, Kerry,
yet, if Wikipedia community culture in the English language version is dominated by a large majority of male users, it seems likely that only this user group that could drive any change.
instead of asking: “do women want to be in an abrasive environment?”
we might therefore be better off asking: “do men want to be in an abrasive environment?”
or, “do the majority of Wikipedia Community members want to be in an abrasive environment?”
or “who among Wikipedia Community members wants to be in an abrasive environment to the extent that all is done to keep it up?”
or, maybe: “who wants Wikipedia to be an abrasive environment to the extent that to little is done to effectively put an end to the tendency that knowledgeable editors and peace-loving collegues are driven away?”
best, Claudia koltzenburg@w4w.net Meine GPG-Key-ID: DDD21523 - mehr dazu: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard
---------- Original Message ----------- From:"Kerry Raymond" kerry.raymond@gmail.com To:"'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:17:47 +1000 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
I don't think it's necessarily a question of "is the community more abrasive towards women?". Apart from specific pockets of misogyny that seem to have been the catalyst for some of the recent ArbCom matters, I don't think it's likely to be the case in general. I expect the community is probably equally abrasive to men and women. The better question is "do women want to be in an abrasive environment?". I think the answer to that is "mostly not". Analysis of women's interactions usually shows a strong tendency towards consensus building. This is very different to the Bold- Revert-Discuss culture of Wikipedia. Women are much more like to Discuss-Discuss-Discuss.
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Wednesday, 18 February 2015 6:52 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd:[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
My comment "It could even test the theory that the community is more abrasive towards women. We know that we are less successful at recruiting female editors than male ones, I'm not sure if we have tested whether we are more successful at retaining established male editors than female ones, and if so whether we are losing women because they are lured away or driven away." Seems to have been shortened to me saying that "the community is more abrasive towards women". Before people continue using that quotation and attributing it to me, may I point out that I regard it as an interesting theory worth researching, not as a proven statement. I don't doubt that we have a massively male skew in the community, I have seen too many pieces of evidence that all point that way to doubt that. I am also fairly sure that women, and I'd add gays are more likely to be attacked by trolls and others from outside what I regard as the wikipedia community than straight white men like myself. But I don't know if the community is more abrasive to women or in what way it is, and I would be interested to see more research done in that area.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 17 Feb 2015, at 08:00, 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);
- 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)
- 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;
- 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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aaron shaw, 17/02/2015 05:50:
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.
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...
Nemo
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