On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:41 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" well, and how does one recognize low quality and how come it is so low? and "quality" by whose epistemological aims and standards?
"causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps)" which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here?
Jane's response was helpful and similar to mine.
Based on existing surveys, there are demographic and social categories of people who are underrepresented among current editors. I don't have specifics off the top of my head, but if you look at WMF survey results for US editors and compare the findings to US census data (for example), you can get an idea of some categories. Women are underrepresented to an extreme degree, but they are not the only population that does not seem to edit en:WP. I am less knowledgeable about other WPs, but I suspect there are other inequalities and gaps on other wikis.
where would these gaps be situated in terms of areas of participation?
See above.
and, again, in which language version(s)?
See above.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:38 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Speaking of which, the WMF doesn't have resources to appropriately process the 2012 survey data, so results aren't available yet. Did you consider offering them to take care of it, at least for the gendergap number? You would then be able to publish an update.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#L...
As before, my understanding is that the method by which respondents were selected to participate in the survey does not meet standard methods of survey sampling (see this chunk https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#When.2C_and_how_often_will_the_survey_be_conducted.3F of the description of the survey). As a result, I do not trust the results of the 2012 survey to generate precise estimates of the gender gap or other demographic details about participation. I've spoken to some very receptive folks at the foundation about this and I hope that they/we will be able to improve it in the future. I'm eager to help improve the survey data collection procedures. Unfortunately, I do not have the capacity to analyze the current survey data in greater depth.
The thing that allowed Mako and I to do the study that we published in PLOSONE was the fact that (1) the old UNU-Merit & WMF survey sought to include readers as well as editors; *and* (2) at the exact same time Pew carried out a survey in which they asked a nearly identical question about readership. We used the overlapping results about WP readership from both surveys to generate a correction for the data about editorship. Without similar data on readership and similar data from a representative sample of some reference population (in the case of the pew survey, US adults), we cannot perform the same correction. As a result, I do not feel comfortable estimating how biased (or unbiased) the 2012 survey results may be.
a
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Claudial, I responded to your questions in the text - hope it's readable. Jane
____WereSpielChequers wrote: "the community is more abrasive towards women"
I think he is simply referring to earlier discussions where the conclusion was "the community can be perceived to be abrasive" and this conclusion, in yet other discussions led to this conclusion, which should be rephrased as "the community is more often perceived as abrasive by women than by men"
____Kerry wrote: "But I would agree that if an organisation sets a target (25% women in this particular case) and then does not put in place a means of measuring the progress against that target, one has to question the point of establishing a target."
___Claudia (responding to Kerry): I think one has to question the point of not putting in place a means of measuring the progress... and also ask why, if the issue is a high priority (allegedly, one might add, in speeches at meetings, in interviews with the press...) this organisation does not fund any top level research... - or does it?
I think here you are forgetting about the "holy shit graph" which shows a reduction in the number of active editors over time. This is much more of a direct threat to the Wikiverse than the gendergap, which, as has been stated before, is only one of many serious gaps in knowledge coverage. Oddly, I think it is one of the easiest of all "participatory gaps" to measure, but we seem to constantly get stranded in objections to ways that previous editor surveys have been held, leading to the strange situation of never actually being able to run even one editor survey twice. Since we have not yet been able to establish any trend at all, we are only comparing apples to oranges.
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" __Claudia (responding to Aaron): ...how does one recognize low quality..? Hmm. I just looked and I couldn't find the criticism of the various editor surveys. Is this stashed somewhere on meta? Or do we need to sift through reams of emails until we find all the various objections? Objections galore, as I recall.
___Claudia: which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here? Off the top of my head, some of these would be
- lack of geographical editor coverage such as active editors in rural
areas or even in whole states such as Wyoming or South Dakota and the whole "Global South participation problem" (the Global South participation problem is even helped along inadvertently by the new read-only "Wikipedia-zero" effect); 2) lack of topical expertise on subjects that technically don't lend themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as auditory fields (musical production) or visual fields (how to paint, how to make movies, how to choreograph motion) 3) lack of topical expertise on subjects that legally don't lend themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as articles about artworks under copyright that cannot be illustrated in an article; 4) lack of topical editor coverage on subjects previously shut out - there is still unwillingness by a whole group to re-enter the Wikiverse after being banned (earlier shut-outs such as blocking whole institution-wide ip ranges for vandalism or whole areas of expertise such as groups of writers for their COI editing, carry with them a history of anti-Wikipedia sentiment that lasts a long time in various enclaves)
___Claudia: and, again, in which language version(s)? That's easy - the languages that we can technically support but don't yet have Wikipedias for and the languages for which we don't even have the fonts to display them.
best, Claudia
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 7:41 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi WereSpielChequers, Kerry, Aaron and all,
____WereSpielChequers wrote: "the community is more abrasive towards women"
this may be stats expert discourse, but let me show you how the question itself has a gendered slant. imagine what would happen - also in your research design - if it read: "the community is less abrasive towards men" - how does this compare to the first question re who are "the community"?
and again, re phasing ten years in 2011 and four years on, which language version(s) are hypotheses based on?
____Kerry wrote: "But I would agree that if an organisation sets a target (25% women in this particular case) and then does not put in place a means of measuring the progress against that target, one has to question the point of establishing a target."
I think one has to question the point of not putting in place a means of measuring the progress... and also ask why, if the issue is a high priority (allegedly, one might add, in speeches at meetings, in interviews with the press...) this organisation does not fund any top level research... - or does it?
____Aaron wrote: "higher quality survey data" well, and how does one recognize low quality and how come it is so low? and "quality" by whose epistemological aims and standards?
"causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps)" which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here? where would these gaps be situated in terms of areas of participation? and, again, in which language version(s)?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:aaron shaw aaronshaw@northwestern.edu To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Mon, 16 Feb 2015 20:50:17 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
Hi all!
Thanks, Jeremy & Dariusz for following up.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 5:58 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
As far as I recall, they did a follow-up on this topic, and maybe a publication coming up?
Sadly, no follow ups at the moment.
If we want to have a more precise sense of the demographics of participants the biggest need in this space is simply higher quality survey data. My paper with Mako has a lot of detail about why the 2008 editor survey (and all subsequent editor surveys, to my knowledge) has some profound limitations.
The identification and estimation of the effects of particular causes and mechanisms that drive the gender gap (and related participation gaps) presents an even tougher challenge for researchers and is an area of active inquiry.
all the best, Aaron
------- End of Original Message -------
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On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:23 AM, aaron shaw aaronshaw@northwestern.edu wrote:
...
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:38 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Speaking of which, the WMF doesn't have resources to appropriately process the 2012 survey data, so results aren't available yet. Did you consider offering them to take care of it, at least for the gendergap number? You would then be able to publish an update.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#L...
As before, my understanding is that the method by which respondents were selected to participate in the survey does not meet standard methods of survey sampling (see this chunk https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#When.2C_and_how_often_will_the_survey_be_conducted.3F of the description of the survey). As a result, I do not trust the results of the 2012 survey to generate precise estimates of the gender gap or other demographic details about participation.
To clarify, as this has since led to misunderstandings elsewhere: The 2012 editor survey used the same sampling method with the same limitations as the April 2011 and November/December 2011 editor surveys. (By design, as one of the main objectives was to gain comparable data and identify trends.) And the 2008 UNU-MERIT survey that forms the basis of Aaron's and Mako's paper essentially used the same method too - with the exception of the aspects (1) and (2) Aaron described below, namely that it sampled both readers and editors, and that there happened to be a comparable survey, conducted by Pew around the same time, that could be assumed not to exhibit the same type of participation bias.
Thanks to Aaron's and Mako's paper, the limitations of this method and the fact that it likely leads to an underestimation of the female ratio among Wikipedia editors are now better understood. But I'm not aware of research that has used a fundamentally more reliable method to investigate Wikipedia's gender gap; so for now such web-based volunteer surveys continue to inform our awareness of the topic.
After Aaron's and Mako's research became available, I read the 2011 paper which their correction method is based on (Valliant and Dever, "Estimating propensity adjustments for volunteer web surveys"), and Aaron and I have talked several times about the possibility of finding a weaker form of that method that - by extrapolating some of the 2008 information - could be applied to the 2012 survey despite the lack of comparison data (i.e. (1) & (2)). But as he said below, we are not aware of a good option for doing that.
I have myself been nudging some other people in the Foundation who were preparing or considering more specialized user surveys to look at the option of constructing them in a way that enables the use of Aaron's and Mako's method, but it has to be said that the requirement to include a reader sample (i.e. (1)) can come at a cost, and that the equivalent of that Pew survey ((2)) might not be available in many of the countries that one is interested in.
I've spoken to some very receptive folks at the foundation about this and I hope that they/we will be able to improve it in the future. I'm eager to help improve the survey data collection procedures. Unfortunately, I do not have the capacity to analyze the current survey data in greater depth.
The thing that allowed Mako and I to do the study that we published in PLOSONE was the fact that (1) the old UNU-Merit & WMF survey sought to include readers as well as editors; *and* (2) at the exact same time Pew carried out a survey in which they asked a nearly identical question about readership. We used the overlapping results about WP readership from both surveys to generate a correction for the data about editorship. Without similar data on readership and similar data from a representative sample of some reference population (in the case of the pew survey, US adults), we cannot perform the same correction. As a result, I do not feel comfortable estimating how biased (or unbiased) the 2012 survey results may be.
a
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Michael Restivo marestivo@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia Signpost had a discussion of this question, including data on English Wikipedians' gender by edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_a...
Yes, but as I wrote in that Signpost article, that data relied on the gender editors state in their user preferences and "this information is optional and the majority of accounts do not state it". There a good reasons to assume that the differing incentives distort that data even more than the anonymous responses to banner-advertised surveys. For example, the user has to be comfortable with stating their gender in public, and in several languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender female users have to set that user preference if they want the word "user" next to their nick show up in female instead of male grammatical gender form (e.g. "Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer" in German) - male users do not have that incentive.
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yes, but as I wrote in that Signpost article, that data relied on the gender editors state in their user preferences and "this information is optional and the majority of accounts do not state it". There a good reasons to assume that the differing incentives distort that data even more than the anonymous responses to banner-advertised surveys. For example, the user has to be comfortable with stating their gender in public, and in several languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender female users have to set that user preference if they want the word "user" next to their nick show up in female instead of male grammatical gender form (e.g. "Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer" in German) - male users do not have that incentive.
One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men as well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender preferences.
-Frances
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men as well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual, with the default gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in effect on Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
-Mark
-- Mark J. Nelson http://www.kmjn.org
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual, with the default gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in effect on Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong--is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender expression online or indeed expression in general is the same as it is in real space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are trying to prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not have a gender bias directly if the structure does not impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real life and online. Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life, it has got somewhat better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia and its discussions about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really have a gender gap?" "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam Katz Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender expression online or indeed expression in general is the same as it is in real space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are trying to prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not have a gender bias directly if the structure does not impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- 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
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real life and online. Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life, it has got somewhat better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia and its discussions about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really have a gender gap?" "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam Katz Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender expression online or indeed expression in general is the same as it is in real space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are trying to prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not have a gender bias directly if the structure does not impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
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Sam, as I don't think I understand what you are asking, perhaps you could ask your question again maybe with an example distinguishing between written/oral/online/wiki.
Sent from my iPad
On 7 Mar 2015, at 8:57 am, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real life and online. Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life, it has got somewhat better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia and its discussions about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really have a gender gap?" "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam Katz Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender expression online or indeed expression in general is the same as it is in real space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are trying to prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not have a gender bias directly if the structure does not impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote: Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown': http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
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yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably more important than how the attacked user might identify (or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining surveys and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they "are" - just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less safe if they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in hegemonic positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than 20%" - posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done away with, I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's perspective, who are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real
life and online.
Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life,
it has got somewhat
better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia
and its discussions
about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really
have a gender gap?"
"Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender
expression
online or indeed expression in general is the same as it
is in real
space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as
well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown':
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
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It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably more important than how the attacked user might identify (or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining surveys and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they "are" - just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less safe if they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in hegemonic positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than 20%" - posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done away with, I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's perspective, who are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real
life and online.
Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life,
it has got somewhat
better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia
and its discussions
about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really
have a gender gap?"
"Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender
expression
online or indeed expression in general is the same as it
is in real
space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes:
> One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
> defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
> default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
as > well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
preferences.
That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
gender set to 'unknown':
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
Wikimedia's own wikis, though.
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
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I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a ton harder" to deal with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably more important than how the attacked user might identify (or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining surveys and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they "are" - just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less safe if they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in hegemonic positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than 20%" - posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done away with, I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's perspective, who are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real
life and online.
Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life,
it has got somewhat
better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia
and its discussions
about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really
have a gender gap?"
"Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender
expression
online or indeed expression in general is the same as it
is in real
space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: > > > One change that could address the latter incentive is
to change the
> > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical
gender is not the
> > default for new users. It could be randomly assigned,
and then some men
> as > > well as some women would have the incentive to set
their gender
> preferences. > > That's how it currently works, according to the manual,
with the default
> gender set to 'unknown': >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in
effect on
> Wikimedia's own wikis, though. >
I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- is that an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't need to change his gender in preferences in order to be described accurately where a female user would need to set her gender in order to be described as "Usuaria". Hence, different incentives, and ones that could be addressed with different default behavior for an "unknown" user.
-Frances
------- End of Original Message -------
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does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a ton harder" to deal with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research- l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably more important than how the attacked user might identify (or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining surveys and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they "are" - just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less safe if they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in hegemonic positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than 20%" - posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done away with, I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's perspective, who are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely in real
life and online.
Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real life,
it has got somewhat
better over the years. But getting involved in Wikipedia
and its discussions
about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we really
have a gender gap?"
"Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that gender
expression
online or indeed expression in general is the same as it
is in real
space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
Hi Frances,
your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language where personal nouns are gendered will always display the masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
new dummy account.
you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and especially so because community majority has not seen to changing that space into gender friendly space for all, it seems.
so this adds another item of disharmony to my cautious note on gender stats
best, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > mjn@anadrome.org wrote: > > > > > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: > > > > > One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the > > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the > > > default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men > > as > > > well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender > > preferences. > > > > That's how it currently works, according to the manual, with the default > > gender set to 'unknown': > >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> > > > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or what's in effect on > > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > > > > I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- > is that an "unknown" user in a language where > personal nouns are gendered will always display > the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't > need to change his gender in preferences in order > to be described accurately where a female user > would need to set her gender in order to be > described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > incentives, and ones that could be addressed with > different default behavior for an "unknown" user. > > -Frances ------- End of Original Message -------
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when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Do you say that as a man or as a woman?
As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
life and online.
Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
it has got somewhat
better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
and its discussions
about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
have a gender gap?"
"Does it matter if we have a gender gap?"
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
hey,
I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
expression
online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
is in real
space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
> Hi Frances, > > your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
> personal nouns are gendered will always display the > masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
> new dummy account. > > you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
> space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. > > so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
> on gender stats > > best, > Claudia > ---------- Original Message ----------- > From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org > To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities > wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 > Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson >> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: >> >> > >> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: >> > >> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
> to change the >> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
> gender is not the >> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
> and then some men >> > as >> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
> their gender >> > preferences. >> > >> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
> with the default >> > gender set to 'unknown': >> >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
>> > >> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
> effect on >> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. >> > >> >> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My >> understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- >> is that an "unknown" user in a language where >> personal nouns are gendered will always display >> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of >> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't >> need to change his gender in preferences in order >> to be described accurately where a female user >> would need to set her gender in order to be >> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different >> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with >> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. >> >> -Frances > ------- End of Original Message ------- > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase bias? My guess based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
To those following: I think this is a valid question I am raising. The question of whether written communication has a different way of relating than oral, in the context of a wiki, which by definition is collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous editing, is a valid question.
Anonymity and pen names were first used often times by women.
I will also note that in terms of interface biases, Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) that use photos of their users as adornments, to show what users have posted do worse than wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and courage ("be bold in editing") among their users.
Clarifying what the question is in this thread is a good first step towards answering it. If I was confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is an important discussion to have.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? > > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
life and online.
> Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc.
> > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
it has got somewhat
> better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
and its discussions
> about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
have a gender gap?"
> "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" > > Kerry > > -----Original Message----- > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz
> Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
stats Re: Fwd:
> [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > > hey, > > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
expression
> online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
is in real
> space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are
trying to
> prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that
indeed it may not
> have a gender bias directly if the structure does not
impose it.
> > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
>> Hi Frances, >> >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
>> personal nouns are gendered will always display the >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it
from a
>> new dummy account. >> >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
>> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
>> space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. >> >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
>> on gender stats >> >> best, >> Claudia >> ---------- Original Message ----------- >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
>> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers >> >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: >>> >>> > >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: >>> > >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
>> to change the >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
>> gender is not the >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
>> and then some men >>> > as >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
>> their gender >>> > preferences. >>> > >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
>> with the default >>> > gender set to 'unknown': >>> >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
>>> > >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
>> effect on >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. >>> > >>> >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't >>> need to change his gender in preferences in order >>> to be described accurately where a female user >>> would need to set her gender in order to be >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different >>> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with >>> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. >>> >>> -Frances >> ------- 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
> > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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Sam,
So, gender display online != gender display offline, but knowing gender online == knowing gender offline? That's not how frames work.
Does knowing someone's gender increase bias? Probably. Because it's a biased and gendered environment we've found ourselves with. Does not knowing someone's gender remove bias? Not in the slightest - because area effect microaggressions are a thing, and a community built by one demographic has processes and standards optimised /for/ that demographic and /away/ from a lot of others.
This idea - that women were the first to adopt pen names and so it's possible to avoid microaggressions and bias if you simply stay anonymous - is discriminatory in and of itself (if we have an environment where women have to hide who they are to contribute, the problem is the environment. Do not put the burden and responsibility of avoiding the discrimination on the people suffering from it). Moreover, people won't actually avoid the gender bias, just the extremes of it, because structures still exert their own bias.
And, yes, structures /might/ not impose gender bias. But our structures /do/, implicitly and explicitly, in a million ways. When we have male pronouns as the default, when we have a system that is totally ignorant of the differences in sociological conditioning between different demographics (we have adversarial dispute resolution procedures and a clinical inability to control aggressive users. How do you think that meshes with Western, at least, gender essentialism?), we have a structure imposing gender bias.
And that's the structure that we have, and arguing that there might be a universe in which this doesn't happen is not a useful argument to make. It's akin to dealing with an inferno in an apartment building by showing up and pointing out that, /strictly speaking/, buildings don't /have/ to be on fire. It's, you know, true, and that's nice, but it's not particularly applicable when our building quite clearly /is/ on fire.
So let's get back to brainstorming on how we improve the data we have in this field, and our understanding of the dynamics and biases and makeup of the community, and away from "there could be a community somewhere where these problems are moot", please.
On 7 March 2015 at 16:05, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase bias? My guess based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
> To those following: > I think this is a valid question I am raising. The > question of whether written communication has a > different way of relating than oral, in the > context of a wiki, which by definition is > collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous > editing, is a valid question. > > Anonymity and pen names were first used often > times by women. > > I will also note that in terms of interface biases, > Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) > that use photos of their users as adornments, to > show what users have posted do worse than > wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and > courage ("be bold in editing") among their users. > > Clarifying what the question is in this thread is > a good first step towards answering it. If I was > confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is > an important discussion to have. > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond > kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: > > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? > > > > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
life and online. > > Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc. > > > > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
it has got somewhat > > better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
and its discussions > > about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
have a gender gap?" > > "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" > > > > Kerry > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org > >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz > > Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
stats Re: Fwd: > > [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > > > > hey, > > > > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
expression > > online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
is in real > > space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are trying to > > prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not > > have a gender bias directly if the structure does not impose it. > > > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote: > >> Hi Frances, > >> > >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
> >> personal nouns are gendered will always display the > >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it from a > >> new dummy account. > >> > >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
> >> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
> >> space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. > >> > >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
> >> on gender stats > >> > >> best, > >> Claudia > >> ---------- Original Message ----------- > >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org > >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities > >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 > >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> >> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> > >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: > >>> > >>> > > >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: > >>> > > >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
> >> to change the > >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
> >> gender is not the > >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
> >> and then some men > >>> > as > >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
> >> their gender > >>> > preferences. > >>> > > >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
> >> with the default > >>> > gender set to 'unknown': > >>> >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> >>> > > >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
> >> effect on > >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > >>> > > >>> > >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- > >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where > >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display > >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't > >>> need to change his gender in preferences in order > >>> to be described accurately where a female user > >>> would need to set her gender in order to be > >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > >>> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with > >>> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. > >>> > >>> -Frances > >> ------- 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
> > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 -------
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It is our job to improve wikipedia.
I hope we do that.
Frames I assume you mean linguistic frames.
I think in order to record or track gender pronouns on wikipedia you have to have a compelling reason to do it, not a compelling reason not to. There is no reason to identify users -- we agree on that that's why we allow anonymous submissions. I think any personal identifier is a really bad idea -- ask the EFF if you don't believe me.
I've made my case. It should in theory not be pushed aside by some academic ivory tower spiel. But I'll refer my case somewhere else... I think for the trans community this is pretty important, as well as for people posting from other countries where 'bias' means death.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sam,
So, gender display online != gender display offline, but knowing gender online == knowing gender offline? That's not how frames work.
Does knowing someone's gender increase bias? Probably. Because it's a biased and gendered environment we've found ourselves with. Does not knowing someone's gender remove bias? Not in the slightest - because area effect microaggressions are a thing, and a community built by one demographic has processes and standards optimised /for/ that demographic and /away/ from a lot of others.
This idea - that women were the first to adopt pen names and so it's possible to avoid microaggressions and bias if you simply stay anonymous - is discriminatory in and of itself (if we have an environment where women have to hide who they are to contribute, the problem is the environment. Do not put the burden and responsibility of avoiding the discrimination on the people suffering from it). Moreover, people won't actually avoid the gender bias, just the extremes of it, because structures still exert their own bias.
And, yes, structures /might/ not impose gender bias. But our structures /do/, implicitly and explicitly, in a million ways. When we have male pronouns as the default, when we have a system that is totally ignorant of the differences in sociological conditioning between different demographics (we have adversarial dispute resolution procedures and a clinical inability to control aggressive users. How do you think that meshes with Western, at least, gender essentialism?), we have a structure imposing gender bias.
And that's the structure that we have, and arguing that there might be a universe in which this doesn't happen is not a useful argument to make. It's akin to dealing with an inferno in an apartment building by showing up and pointing out that, /strictly speaking/, buildings don't /have/ to be on fire. It's, you know, true, and that's nice, but it's not particularly applicable when our building quite clearly /is/ on fire.
So let's get back to brainstorming on how we improve the data we have in this field, and our understanding of the dynamics and biases and makeup of the community, and away from "there could be a community somewhere where these problems are moot", please.
On 7 March 2015 at 16:05, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase bias? My guess based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote: > yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting > > in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
> important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
> > and again, this might be one of the reasons why people > identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
> and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
> just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., > heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
> they say anything about their gender/s or sexual > identity/identities... how come? > > sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
> positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a > minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
> posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
> I guess > > as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
> are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid > identities, maybe? > > best, Claudia > > ---------- Original Message ----------- > From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com > To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
> and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 > Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender > stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> To those following: >> I think this is a valid question I am raising. The >> question of whether written communication has a >> different way of relating than oral, in the >> context of a wiki, which by definition is >> collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous >> editing, is a valid question. >> >> Anonymity and pen names were first used often >> times by women. >> >> I will also note that in terms of interface biases, >> Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) >> that use photos of their users as adornments, to >> show what users have posted do worse than >> wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and >> courage ("be bold in editing") among their users. >> >> Clarifying what the question is in this thread is >> a good first step towards answering it. If I was >> confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is >> an important discussion to have. >> >> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond >> kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: >> > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? >> > >> > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
> life and online. >> > Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
> to "Dr Sir" etc. >> > >> > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
> it has got somewhat >> > better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
> and its discussions >> > about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
> have a gender gap?" >> > "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" >> > >> > Kerry >> > >> > -----Original Message----- >> > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org >> >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Sam Katz >> > Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM >> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities >> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> stats Re: Fwd: >> > [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers >> > >> > hey, >> > >> > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
> expression >> > online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
> is in real >> > space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are > trying to >> > prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that > indeed it may not >> > have a gender bias directly if the structure does not > impose it. >> > >> > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net > wrote: >> >> Hi Frances, >> >> >> >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
>> >> personal nouns are gendered will always display the >> >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it > from a >> >> new dummy account. >> >> >> >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
>> >> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
>> >> space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. >> >> >> >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
>> >> on gender stats >> >> >> >> best, >> >> Claudia >> >> ---------- Original Message ----------- >> >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org >> >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities >> >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 >> >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
>> >> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers >> >> >> >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson >> >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: >> >>> >> >>> > >> >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: >> >>> > >> >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
>> >> to change the >> >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
>> >> gender is not the >> >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
>> >> and then some men >> >>> > as >> >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
>> >> their gender >> >>> > preferences. >> >>> > >> >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
>> >> with the default >> >>> > gender set to 'unknown': >> >>> > >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
>> >>> > >> >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
>> >> effect on >> >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. >> >>> > >> >>> >> >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My >> >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- >> >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where >> >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display >> >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of >> >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't >> >>> need to change his gender in preferences in order >> >>> to be described accurately where a female user >> >>> would need to set her gender in order to be >> >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different >> >>> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with >> >>> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. >> >>> >> >>> -Frances >> >> ------- 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
>> > >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > 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 ------- > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 -------
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 -------
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
-- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Nope - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28social_sciences%29 . The collection of contexts someone approaches a situation with.
I totally agree that forcing identification is verboten; this wasn't an ivory tower schpiel. It was the response of a long-term (10 years) Wikipedian, who also happens to be a researcher into how our projects work, to the argument that if people avoid identifying themselves as a member of a particular demography, everything will just be fine.
On 7 March 2015 at 23:02, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
It is our job to improve wikipedia.
I hope we do that.
Frames I assume you mean linguistic frames.
I think in order to record or track gender pronouns on wikipedia you have to have a compelling reason to do it, not a compelling reason not to. There is no reason to identify users -- we agree on that that's why we allow anonymous submissions. I think any personal identifier is a really bad idea -- ask the EFF if you don't believe me.
I've made my case. It should in theory not be pushed aside by some academic ivory tower spiel. But I'll refer my case somewhere else... I think for the trans community this is pretty important, as well as for people posting from other countries where 'bias' means death.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sam,
So, gender display online != gender display offline, but knowing gender online == knowing gender offline? That's not how frames work.
Does knowing someone's gender increase bias? Probably. Because it's a biased and gendered environment we've found ourselves with. Does not knowing someone's gender remove bias? Not in the slightest - because area effect microaggressions are a thing, and a community built by one demographic has processes and standards optimised /for/ that demographic and /away/ from a lot of others.
This idea - that women were the first to adopt pen names and so it's possible to avoid microaggressions and bias if you simply stay anonymous - is discriminatory in and of itself (if we have an environment where women have to hide who they are to contribute, the problem is the environment. Do not put the burden and responsibility of avoiding the discrimination on the people suffering from it). Moreover, people won't actually avoid the gender bias, just the extremes of it, because structures still exert their own bias.
And, yes, structures /might/ not impose gender bias. But our structures /do/, implicitly and explicitly, in a million ways. When we have male pronouns as the default, when we have a system that is totally ignorant of the differences in sociological conditioning between different demographics (we have adversarial dispute resolution procedures and a clinical inability to control aggressive users. How do you think that meshes with Western, at least, gender essentialism?), we have a structure imposing gender bias.
And that's the structure that we have, and arguing that there might be a universe in which this doesn't happen is not a useful argument to make. It's akin to dealing with an inferno in an apartment building by showing up and pointing out that, /strictly speaking/, buildings don't /have/ to be on fire. It's, you know, true, and that's nice, but it's not particularly applicable when our building quite clearly /is/ on fire.
So let's get back to brainstorming on how we improve the data we have in this field, and our understanding of the dynamics and biases and makeup of the community, and away from "there could be a community somewhere where these problems are moot", please.
On 7 March 2015 at 16:05, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase bias? My guess based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
> I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
> It seems to me you are extrapolating from > insufficient data. identity and presentation are > not the same thing, but I guess the question in > this context is "what is presentation in an online > setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?" > > That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have > "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder. > > I would prefer we not track gender at all. > > --Sam > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, > koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote: > > yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting > > > > in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
> > important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
> > > > and again, this might be one of the reasons why people > > identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
> > and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
> > just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., > > heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
> > they say anything about their gender/s or sexual > > identity/identities... how come? > > > > sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
> > positions would be willing to switch perspectives for a > > minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
> > posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
> > I guess > > > > as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
> > are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or fluid > > identities, maybe? > > > > best, Claudia > > > > ---------- Original Message ----------- > > From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com > > To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
> > and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 > > Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender > > stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > > > >> To those following: > >> I think this is a valid question I am raising. The > >> question of whether written communication has a > >> different way of relating than oral, in the > >> context of a wiki, which by definition is > >> collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous > >> editing, is a valid question. > >> > >> Anonymity and pen names were first used often > >> times by women. > >> > >> I will also note that in terms of interface biases, > >> Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) > >> that use photos of their users as adornments, to > >> show what users have posted do worse than > >> wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and > >> courage ("be bold in editing") among their users. > >> > >> Clarifying what the question is in this thread is > >> a good first step towards answering it. If I was > >> confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is > >> an important discussion to have. > >> > >> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond > >> kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: > >> > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? > >> > > >> > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
> > life and online. > >> > Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
> > to "Dr Sir" etc. > >> > > >> > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
> > it has got somewhat > >> > better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
> > and its discussions > >> > about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
> > have a gender gap?" > >> > "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" > >> > > >> > Kerry > >> > > >> > -----Original Message----- > >> > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org > >> >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Sam Katz > >> > Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM > >> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities > >> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> > stats Re: Fwd: > >> > [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> > > >> > hey, > >> > > >> > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
> > expression > >> > online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
> > is in real > >> > space. Granted, this may be stylistically what you are > > trying to > >> > prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that > > indeed it may not > >> > have a gender bias directly if the structure does not > > impose it. > >> > > >> > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net > > wrote: > >> >> Hi Frances, > >> >> > >> >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
> >> >> personal nouns are gendered will always display the > >> >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just tested it > > from a > >> >> new dummy account. > >> >> > >> >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
> >> >> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
> >> >> space into gender friendly space for all, it seems. > >> >> > >> >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
> >> >> on gender stats > >> >> > >> >> best, > >> >> Claudia > >> >> ---------- Original Message ----------- > >> >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org > >> >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities > >> >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 > >> >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> >> >> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> >> > >> >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > >> >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: > >> >>> > >> >>> > > >> >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: > >> >>> > > >> >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
> >> >> to change the > >> >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
> >> >> gender is not the > >> >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
> >> >> and then some men > >> >>> > as > >> >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
> >> >> their gender > >> >>> > preferences. > >> >>> > > >> >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
> >> >> with the default > >> >>> > gender set to 'unknown': > >> >>> > > >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> >> >>> > > >> >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
> >> >> effect on > >> >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > >> >>> > > >> >>> > >> >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > >> >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm wrong-- > >> >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where > >> >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display > >> >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > >> >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't > >> >>> need to change his gender in preferences in order > >> >>> to be described accurately where a female user > >> >>> would need to set her gender in order to be > >> >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > >> >>> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with > >> >>> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. > >> >>> > >> >>> -Frances > >> >> ------- 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
> >> > > >> > > >> > _______________________________________________ > >> > 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 ------- > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 -------
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-- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation
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Hi Sam, while my impression has been that the feel in debates on this list is way from friendly-space inclusive (and I daresay that, of course, out of ignorance I have been contributing to the lamented climate myself...),
may I express the wish that you bring more arguments to strengthen your points within the discourse frame of this list - I find your pointers very important, not least for debating how to do better reasearch on the Wikipedia communities
But I'll refer my case somewhere else... I think for the
trans community this is pretty important, as well as for people posting from other countries where 'bias' means death.
let me assure you I am well aware of this kind of "gap" in worldviews and hence discourses,
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 22:02:10 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It is our job to improve wikipedia.
I hope we do that.
Frames I assume you mean linguistic frames.
I think in order to record or track gender pronouns on wikipedia you have to have a compelling reason to do it, not a compelling reason not to. There is no reason to identify users -- we agree on that that's why we allow anonymous submissions. I think any personal identifier is a really bad idea -- ask the EFF if you don't believe me.
I've made my case. It should in theory not be pushed aside by some academic ivory tower spiel. But I'll refer my case somewhere else... I think for the trans community this is pretty important, as well as for people posting from other countries where 'bias' means death.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
Sam,
So, gender display online != gender display offline, but
knowing
gender online == knowing gender offline? That's not how
frames work.
Does knowing someone's gender increase bias? Probably.
Because it's a
biased and gendered environment we've found ourselves
with. Does not
knowing someone's gender remove bias? Not in the
slightest - because
area effect microaggressions are a thing, and a
community built by one
demographic has processes and standards optimised /for/ that demographic and /away/ from a lot of others.
This idea - that women were the first to adopt pen names
and so it's
possible to avoid microaggressions and bias if you
simply stay
anonymous - is discriminatory in and of itself (if we
have an
environment where women have to hide who they are to
contribute, the
problem is the environment. Do not put the burden and
responsibility
of avoiding the discrimination on the people suffering
from it).
Moreover, people won't actually avoid the gender bias,
just the
extremes of it, because structures still exert their own
bias.
And, yes, structures /might/ not impose gender bias. But our structures /do/, implicitly and explicitly, in a million
ways. When we
have male pronouns as the default, when we have a system
that is
totally ignorant of the differences in sociological
conditioning
between different demographics (we have adversarial
dispute resolution
procedures and a clinical inability to control
aggressive users. How
do you think that meshes with Western, at least, gender essentialism?), we have a structure imposing gender bias.
And that's the structure that we have, and arguing that
there might be
a universe in which this doesn't happen is not a useful
argument to
make. It's akin to dealing with an inferno in an
apartment building by
showing up and pointing out that, /strictly speaking/,
buildings don't
/have/ to be on fire. It's, you know, true, and that's
nice, but it's
not particularly applicable when our building quite
clearly /is/ on
fire.
So let's get back to brainstorming on how we improve the
data we have
in this field, and our understanding of the dynamics and
biases and
makeup of the community, and away from "there could be a
community
somewhere where these problems are moot", please.
On 7 March 2015 at 16:05, Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com wrote:
people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase
bias? My guess
based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net
wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
> I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
> It seems to me you are extrapolating from > insufficient data. identity and presentation are > not the same thing, but I guess the question in > this context is "what is presentation in an online > setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?" > > That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have > "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder. > > I would prefer we not track gender at all. > > --Sam > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, > koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote: > > yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting > > > > in attacks, however, the perceived gender is
probably
more
> > important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
> > > > and again, this might be one of the reasons why
people
> > identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
> > and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
> > just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., > > heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
> > they say anything about their gender/s or sexual > > identity/identities... how come? > > > > sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
> > positions would be willing to switch
perspectives for a
> > minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less
than
20%" -
> > posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
> > I guess > > > > as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
> > are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people?
or fluid
> > identities, maybe? > > > > best, Claudia > > > > ---------- Original Message ----------- > > From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com > > To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
> > and communities
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 > > Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> > stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > > > >> To those following: > >> I think this is a valid question I am raising. The > >> question of whether written communication has a > >> different way of relating than oral, in the > >> context of a wiki, which by definition is > >> collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous > >> editing, is a valid question. > >> > >> Anonymity and pen names were first used often > >> times by women. > >> > >> I will also note that in terms of interface biases, > >> Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) > >> that use photos of their users as adornments, to > >> show what users have posted do worse than > >> wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and > >> courage ("be bold in editing") among their users. > >> > >> Clarifying what the question is in this thread is > >> a good first step towards answering it. If I was > >> confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is > >> an important discussion to have. > >> > >> On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond > >> kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: > >> > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? > >> > > >> > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
> > life and online. > >> > Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
> > to "Dr Sir" etc. > >> > > >> > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
> > it has got somewhat > >> > better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
> > and its discussions > >> > about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
> > have a gender gap?" > >> > "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" > >> > > >> > Kerry > >> > > >> > -----Original Message----- > >> > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org > >> >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Sam Katz > >> > Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM > >> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and
communities
> >> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> > stats Re: Fwd: > >> > [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> > > >> > hey, > >> > > >> > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
> > expression > >> > online or indeed expression in general is the
same
as it
> > is in real > >> > space. Granted, this may be stylistically
what you are
> > trying to > >> > prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents,
that
> > indeed it may not > >> > have a gender bias directly if the structure
does not
> > impose it. > >> > > >> > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM,
> > wrote: > >> >> Hi Frances, > >> >> > >> >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
> >> >> personal nouns are gendered will always
display the
> >> >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just
tested it
> > from a > >> >> new dummy account. > >> >> > >> >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
> >> >> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
> >> >> space into gender friendly space for all, it
seems.
> >> >> > >> >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
> >> >> on gender stats > >> >> > >> >> best, > >> >> Claudia > >> >> ---------- Original Message ----------- > >> >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org > >> >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and
communities
> >> >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 > >> >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> >> >> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> >> > >> >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > >> >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: > >> >>> > >> >>> > > >> >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org
writes:
> >> >>> > > >> >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
> >> >> to change the > >> >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
> >> >> gender is not the > >> >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
> >> >> and then some men > >> >>> > as > >> >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
> >> >> their gender > >> >>> > preferences. > >> >>> > > >> >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
> >> >> with the default > >> >>> > gender set to 'unknown': > >> >>> > > >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> >> >>> > > >> >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
> >> >> effect on > >> >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > >> >>> > > >> >>> > >> >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > >> >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm
wrong--
> >> >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where > >> >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display > >> >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > >> >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user
doesn't
> >> >>> need to change his gender in preferences in
order
> >> >>> to be described accurately where a female user > >> >>> would need to set her gender in order to be > >> >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > >> >>> incentives, and ones that could be
addressed with
> >> >>> different default behavior for an "unknown"
user.
> >> >>> > >> >>> -Frances > >> >> ------- 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
> >> > > >> > > >> > _______________________________________________ > >> > 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 ------- > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 -------
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
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Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation
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Hi Sam and all,
real life experiments
why not describe their rationale, their setting, the variables, if people knew they were producing data for your experiment etc.
does knowing someone's gender increase bias?
I'd say the outcome depends on cultural factors, e.g., bias is likely to be the higher in people who have the cultural habit of counting just two genders, for example
hi all,
Kerry said Wikipedia feels like being back in the 70s, early 70s, I'd say my feeling is: gender stats based on two genders only (let me reiterate this point) is a no go if you want to enable and encourage change. Gender gap should not be a singular: there are more than just two genders
let us take a look at the Wikipedia default in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences
it knows of options, but these are:
x prefer not to say x I am female x I am male
so, here, the default setting is a binary plus odd-person-out, and that is placed at the top; if you do nothing, the first box is ticked
luckily, newcomers neither see it at the start nor do they have to relate to this issue at all. Yet, if you do nothing, your user account is still being set in relation to a gender binary systemic bias
one might do some research into this and ask newcomers (by age group, maybe) what they feel when seeing this. But I would prefer not to draw any attention to this systemic default at all
anyway, what does this say about gender awareness among the users/staff(?) who may not even see this as an incident of Wikipedia's systemic bias?
and yes, even if this was not your intended meaning of the question:
is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
I'd say: when gender discrimination is known, it is more likely that gender discrimination is part of the game... currently, wiht the Inspire Campaign, gender discrimination is being -- well -- advertised, in a way: with female users being singled out as a minority among Wikipedia editors - so what effect is to be expected in this light, given that an alleged majority of male* Wikipedians read this banner several times these days?
opinions?
so how to encourage change without drawing attention to "gender gap" in the singular only?
how bring change without feeding into a worldview that is itself aprt of the problem?
opinions?
cheers, Claudia ---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 15:05:26 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
people's gender. does knowing someone's gender increase bias? My guess based on the real life experiments is yes.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:23 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
when what is known? gender discrimination?
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Sat, 7 Mar 2015 10:28:55 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
does a wiki have single authorship (like the original britannica) or multiple authorship? does it value anonymity? is gender discrimination more likely when it is known?
On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:32 AM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
why not for a wiki like Wikipedia?
and, in your opinion, what exactly makes this wiki "a
ton harder" to deal
with?
thanks, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-
l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 17:29:22 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender
stats Re: Fwd:
[Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
It seems to me you are extrapolating from insufficient data. identity and presentation are not the same thing, but I guess the question in this context is "what is presentation in an online setting?" "how is gender shown in an online setting?"
That's pretty easy in one sense, but then you have "in a wiki like wikipedia" and it's a ton harder.
I would prefer we not track gender at all.
--Sam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
yes, I agree the point you raise is interesting
in attacks, however, the perceived gender is probably
more
important than how the attacked user might identify
(or not)
and again, this might be one of the reasons why people identifying as female* tend to refrain from joining
surveys
and simply prefer not to be forced to say "who" they
"are" -
just like many others who do not identify as (e.g., heterosexual) males feel that online spaces get less
safe if
they say anything about their gender/s or sexual identity/identities... how come?
sometimes I think: if only more contemporaries in
hegemonic
positions would be willing to switch perspectives
for a
minute or two, nonsensical statements like "less than
20%" -
posited as outcomes of "research" - could be done
away with,
I guess
as for another attempt at switching one's
perspective, who
are those 80%? trans*, inter*, and male people? or
fluid
identities, maybe?
best, Claudia
---------- Original Message ----------- From:Sam Katz smkatz@gmail.com To:kerry.raymond@gmail.com, Research into Wikimedia
content
and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent:Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:57:58 -0600 Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers
> To those following: > I think this is a valid question I am raising. The > question of whether written communication has a > different way of relating than oral, in the > context of a wiki, which by definition is > collaborative, tracks users but allows anonymous > editing, is a valid question. > > Anonymity and pen names were first used often > times by women. > > I will also note that in terms of interface biases, > Facebook and other platforms (Acquia Commons) > that use photos of their users as adornments, to > show what users have posted do worse than > wikipedia in terms of encouraging safety and > courage ("be bold in editing") among their users. > > Clarifying what the question is in this thread is > a good first step towards answering it. If I was > confused, I stand corrected, but I believe this is > an important discussion to have. > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Kerry Raymond > kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote: > > Do you say that as a man or as a woman? > > > > As a woman, you are assumed to be male routinely
in real
life and online. > > Many people make no effort whatsoever, letters
addressed
to "Dr Sir" etc. > > > > Has it got better over the years? Yes, in my real
life,
it has got somewhat > > better over the years. But getting involved in
Wikipedia
and its discussions > > about gender is like being back in 1970s. "Do we
really
have a gender gap?" > > "Does it matter if we have a gender gap?" > > > > Kerry > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org > >
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Sam Katz > > Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2015 2:54 AM > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
stats Re: Fwd: > > [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > > > > hey, > > > > I just want to note that I am not convinced that
gender
expression > > online or indeed expression in general is the same
as it
is in real > > space. Granted, this may be stylistically what
you are
trying to > > prove. But I just wanted to add my two cents, that indeed it may not > > have a gender bias directly if the structure
does not
impose it. > > > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM,
wrote: > >> Hi Frances, > >> > >> your assumption (an "unknown" user in a language
where
> >> personal nouns are gendered will always
display the
> >> masculine form) is correct for deWP, I just
tested it
from a > >> new dummy account. > >> > >> you might call it a truly sytemic bias, and
especially so
> >> because community majority has not seen to
changing that
> >> space into gender friendly space for all, it
seems.
> >> > >> so this adds another item of disharmony to my
cautious note
> >> on gender stats > >> > >> best, > >> Claudia > >> ---------- Original Message ----------- > >> From:Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org > >> To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities > >> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> Sent:Thu, 5 Mar 2015 16:43:04 -0800 > >> Subject:Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on
gender
> >> stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers > >> > >>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Mark J. Nelson > >>> mjn@anadrome.org wrote: > >>> > >>> > > >>> > Frances Hocutt fhocutt@wikimedia.org writes: > >>> > > >>> > > One change that could address the latter
incentive is
> >> to change the > >>> > > defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine
grammatical
> >> gender is not the > >>> > > default for new users. It could be randomly
assigned,
> >> and then some men > >>> > as > >>> > > well as some women would have the incentive
to set
> >> their gender > >>> > preferences. > >>> > > >>> > That's how it currently works, according to
the manual,
> >> with the default > >>> > gender set to 'unknown': > >>> >
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions
> >>> > > >>> > I'm not sure if that's a recent change, or
what's in
> >> effect on > >>> > Wikimedia's own wikis, though. > >>> > > >>> > >>> I'm aware that it defaults to "unknown". My > >>> understanding--and please correct me if I'm
wrong--
> >>> is that an "unknown" user in a language where > >>> personal nouns are gendered will always display > >>> the masculine form (i.e. Usuario for a user of > >>> unknown gender on es.wp). So, a male user doesn't > >>> need to change his gender in preferences in order > >>> to be described accurately where a female user > >>> would need to set her gender in order to be > >>> described as "Usuaria". Hence, different > >>> incentives, and ones that could be addressed with > >>> different default behavior for an "unknown" user. > >>> > >>> -Frances > >> ------- 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
> > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 -------
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