New subject: a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers

17 Feb 2015

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:41 PM, koltzenburg(a)w4w.net &lt;koltzenburg(a)w4w.net&gt;
 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) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;
 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#…

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 &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

...
   Hi Claudial,
 I responded to your questions in the text - hope it's readable.
 Jane

  ____WereSpielChequers wrote:
 "the community is more abrasive towards women"

  I think he is simply referring to earlier discussions where the
 conclusion was "the community can be perceived to be abrasive" and this
 conclusion, in yet other discussions led to this conclusion, which should
 be rephrased as "the community is more often perceived as abrasive by women
 than by men"

  ____Kerry wrote:
 "But I would agree that if an organisation sets a target (25% women in this
 particular case) and then does not put in place a means of measuring the
 progress against that target, one has to question the point of
 establishing a
 target."

  ___Claudia (responding to Kerry):
 I think one has to question the point of not putting in place a means of
 measuring the progress...
 and also ask why, if the issue is a high priority (allegedly, one might
 add, in
 speeches at meetings, in interviews with the press...) this organisation
 does
 not fund any top level research... - or does it?

  I think here you are forgetting about the "holy shit graph" which shows
 a reduction in the number of active editors over time. This is much more of
 a direct threat to the Wikiverse than the gendergap, which, as has been
 stated before, is only one of many serious gaps in knowledge coverage.
 Oddly, I think it is one of the easiest of all "participatory gaps" to
 measure, but we seem to constantly get stranded in objections to ways that
 previous editor surveys have been held, leading to the strange situation of
 never actually being able to run even one editor survey twice. Since we
 have not yet been able to establish any trend at all, we are only comparing
 apples to oranges.

  ____Aaron wrote:
 "higher quality survey data"
 __Claudia (responding to Aaron):  ...how does one recognize low quality..?
 Hmm. I just looked and I couldn't find the criticism of the various editor
 surveys. Is this stashed somewhere on meta? Or do we need to sift through
 reams of emails until we find all the various objections? Objections
 galore, as I recall.

  ___Claudia: which "related participation gaps" do you have in mind here?
  Off the top of my head, some of these would be

  1) lack of geographical editor coverage such as active editors in rural
 areas or even in whole states such as Wyoming or South Dakota and the whole
 "Global South participation problem" (the Global South participation
 problem is even helped along inadvertently by the new read-only
 "Wikipedia-zero" effect);
 2) lack of topical expertise on subjects that technically don't lend
 themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as auditory fields (musical
 production) or visual fields (how to paint, how to make movies, how to
 choreograph motion)
 3) lack of topical expertise on subjects that legally don't lend
 themselves well to the Wikiverse, such as articles about artworks under
 copyright that cannot be illustrated in an article;
 4) lack of topical editor coverage on subjects previously shut out - there
 is still unwillingness by a whole group to re-enter the Wikiverse after
 being banned (earlier shut-outs such as blocking whole institution-wide ip
 ranges for vandalism or whole areas of expertise such as groups of writers
 for their COI editing, carry with them a history of anti-Wikipedia
 sentiment that lasts a long time in various enclaves)

  ___Claudia:
 and, again, in which language version(s)?
 That's easy - the languages that we can technically support but don't yet
 have Wikipedias for and the languages for which we don't even have the
 fonts to display them.

  best,
 Claudia

 On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 7:41 AM, &lt;koltzenburg(a)w4w.net&gt; 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 &lt;aaronshaw(a)northwestern.edu&gt;
 To:Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-
 l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
 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 &lt;darekj(a)alk.edu.pl&gt; wrote:

  As far as I recall, they did a follow-up on this
topic, and maybe a
 publication coming up? 
 Sadly, no follow ups at the moment.

 If we want to have a more precise sense of the
 demographics of participants the biggest need in
 this space is simply higher quality survey data.
 My paper with Mako has a lot of detail about why
 the 2008 editor survey (and all subsequent editor
 surveys, to my knowledge) has some profound limitations.

 The identification and estimation of the effects
 of particular causes and mechanisms that drive the
 gender gap (and related participation gaps)
  presents an even tougher challenge for
 researchers and is an area of active inquiry.

 all the best,
 Aaron  ------- End of Original Message -------

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] a cautious note on gender stats Re: Fwd: [Gendergap] Wikipedia readers