On 12/4/06, niht-hræfn nihthraefn@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
understand that this is very effective for some." Of course wiki and programming are not one and the same, but some women find the environment helpful, and I'd think that making women feel welcome to edit and discuss Wikipedia would be a noble enough goal for us.
That being said, I don't personally think an all women environment is crucial or even necessarily desirable, but it's not a ludicrous idea that we should kick out of Wikimedia.
"During their first phase", it further emphasise the limited duration of such things with language like "short term interventions".
The list that was created, however, wasn't a mechanism for introduction but a forum for the discussion of an important issue most likely to interest vested contributors.
It is also the case that the recommendations in the paper are made in a vacuum. Not only did they not substantially verify their suggestions through experimentation, to the extent that they had evidence it appears they did not consider the results outside of improving the involvement of women. So, for example, if following their suggestions would increase the involvement of women but otherwise harm the productivity of the community it's not clear whether they would have noticed or noted that impact.
On the subject of new member introduction we can probably do much better than what is suggested by the paper: We could perform one-on-one introductions and tutorials for new users. It would be logical and not-at-all unreasonably prejudicial to try to pair new users up with people who have similar interests, backgrounds, and working styles. I expect that this would frequently result in women introducing women to the community. Furthermore, this an activity which could be taken up by anyone on this list without prior approval or even discussion ([[Special:Log/newusers]])).
Our welcome process used to be a lot more helpful, today I see many junior users pumping their edit count with scads of impersonal robotic welcomes... sometimes they even welcome people whos only edits have been blatant unreverted vandalism. I think this is unfortunate and it certainly doesn't help us increase the number of quality women in our ranks (or quality men for that matter). ... but any of us can step up to solve this, so perhaps it's just not so fun to discuss on the lists.