Hi Anne,
Perfectly valid question. First, it's that the focus is on indelible physical characteristics of which people have little control short of serious surgical intervention. It'd be like saying it's been noted most contributors to Wikipedia are under 6' tall and the site and its purpose suffers without the input of 6'+ tall people. It's a non-sequitur.
Second, the proposition is to stop consideration of grants to anything but this one topic for 1/4 of a year. That is unprecedented for WMF (or so I think; someone correct me if that is wrong). Once the precedent is established, there'll be no rest for the WMF. It's not too different from moderating a public/semi-public discussion board. If you let some people clobber (use personal insults vs. others, for example) other members of the board but not everyone else, soon as a mod you lose credibility and people bothering to post to the board. At first the favortism pleases some, but in the long-term, the board loses viewership and commenters.
When favortism of any kind and money mix, it is caustic (like politics and religion at a family get-together). Think of the resentment so many people and groups have when they hear about certain donors to political campaigns who also happen to own large intetests in certain business concerns magically have their company(ies) get exempted from certain taxes, or have regulations on their activities eased or eliminated. The companies may not be specifically named, but the politicians' passed law or executive directive can be worded so that the donor gets the windfall.
But the gov't can afford the luxury of playing favorites or making pet projects for itself. Shoestring budget groups that rely on volunteers can't. Would the ASPCA turn me away as a volunteer at a pet rescue shelter because I wasn't like most of their volunteers in some rather arbitrary way (such as my gender)? No, don't think so. But if they did, that'd make a lot of bad word-of-mouth press for them, wouldn't it?
I think WMF needs to consider carefully the consequences of its decisions in this case. If you want to build a dam fir example, and all you look at is the fact that it'll generate lots of electricity and make your company money but ignore the fact it'll dry up the downstream farms, leading to lawsuits, gov't intervention later, local residents' disaffection, etc., it may be that failing to consider all the consequences of the dam's building no matter how noble and ideal you think its construction is will be something you are likely to regret.
If WMF still wants to pursue this kind of goal (which as you can tell I think rests on false assumptions as well as ethically questionable presumptions at best), there are ways to do so without shutting down making grants to other projects and/or alienating current contributors/key constituencies while also making the kind of progress that is likely to be long-lasting rather than short-term. It'd also be a lot less expensive and can be presented in an utterly gender-neutral way while still be appealing to women as well as men who may have good contributions to make but like women who don't, just either don't feel moved to or feel incompetent to do so. You can get the baby washed here without losing him later when you go to throw out the bath water.
Matt
-------- Original message --------
From: wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date:01/08/2015 7:42 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Cc:
Subject: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 27
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 07:41:56 -0500
From: Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month
gender gap project-related decision
Message-ID:
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I have one simple question: if the Grants program was to focus on some
other key area rather than the gender gap, would we be having this
discussion about how horrible it is to waste time this way? Would we see
throwing up of hands in this way if the focus was, say, requests from the
Global South? A focus on getting great bots built and working across
wikis? A focus on events and processes for media collection? (Incidentally
the latter more or less happens anyway with several groups applying for
funding for WLM within a narrow period...)
Frankly, there's not a single thing I've read, or a single objection I've
seen raised, that wasn't about how unnecessary it is to focus on women. I
don't think we've ever heard that about the global south, or non-European
languages, or a lot of other areas where there are acknowledged biases.
Risker/Anne
On 8 January 2015 at 02:07, mcc99 <mcc99(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dear fellow Wikipedia devotees,
>
> While I'm new to this list, I've been an avid fan and proponent of
> Wikipedia and all the great service it gives people since it launched.
> People can learn not just all the basics of nearly any topic imaginable,
> but for a large number, readers can with diligence become expert on more
Hi all,
Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making
team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event
Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months!
They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic
priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for
3 months (February-April).
Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more
attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we
can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not
mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should
become the victim of other projects.
This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working
on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good
projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less
important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a
negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects.
And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that
period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't)
To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and
organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate
well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with
a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple
of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good
quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates
that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough).
For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in
2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and
better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as
largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are
currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to
be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to
start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly.
Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team
recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a
proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but
now all these teams are delayed for three months.
And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki
Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We
intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done.
By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are
relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias.
This shutting down results in:
* Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project
proposals.
* Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of
the plans.
* Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good
reason.
Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them.
WMF: stop this negative campaign!
And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great
you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a
suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down
period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea.
It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is
the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it
exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the
situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor
in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap
is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the
world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a
different language. WMF is not sensing the worldwide community well
enough.)
Finally we should do more about this Community Gap.
For those celebrating: I wish you a happy new year with great projects that
make every single human being freely share in the sum of all human
knowledge!!
Romaine
Dear fellow Wikipedia devotees,
While I'm new to this list, I've been an avid fan and proponent of Wikipedia and all the great service it gives people since it launched. People can learn not just all the basics of nearly any topic imaginable, but for a large number, readers can with diligence become expert on more than a few and save themselves the cost of tuition/training. All this, in addition to satisfying their curiosity about millions of subjects.
That said, it doesn't matter who writes the content on Wikipedia so long as it's relevant and factual. Unlike the published, single-authority edited encyclopediae of the past, Wikipedia allows anyone with relevant information to contribute to it. Their additions or other edits are checked by volunteers to make sure the edit isn't a defacement, irrelevant, patently unfactual, or unverifiable. They are typically left as written or maybe edited only for grammar/spelling. Wikipedia is a rare success story in democracy of knowledge. If one feels moved to contribute, they do. If not, they don't. It's like voting in a sense, though it's true people in democracies should perhaps take the opportunity to do so more often. But it's up to them.
Like voting or anything else, to single out a particular group of people based on their indelible characteristics as being desirable as contributors to any field implicitly devalues the contributions not just of those currently contributing who don't fall into that category, but also says to any other group of a particular identity that you care more about the group you're trying to get more involvement from than them. "Identity politics" is unfortunately a fact of our current political climate and I hope one day we can, as MLK Jr. hoped, judge one another not by skin color (and I'd add gender, sexuality, and a few others), but by content of character. In the context of Wikipedia, this would translate to the veracity and applicability of contributions made to the vast Wikipedia knowledge-base -- not who in particular is doing the contributing, nor their indelible characteristics of person.
Because identity politics is today part of general electoral politics doesn't mean it need be for anything else, and especially given how such things as a person's ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., say nothing about what they know about or can do, I don't see how it's relevant to the veracity and applicability of Wikipedia's knowledge base. I don't care that, for example, a black person (Charles Drew, MD) came up with the process of creating blood plasma, an innovation that has saved millions of lives. He was tragically and mortally injured in a car accident, however, and so his potential future achievements were lost to humanity. (He was not refused treatment for his injuries at the hospital he was taken to because of his ethnicity, as is widely but falsely believed; he was just so badly injured that he died. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Drew#Death ). I also don't care that Adm Grace Hopper (USN) wad female, only that she wrote the first computer language compiler so programmers of lesser brain power than her (such as myself) could go on to program computers without struggling with binary switches and punch cards. Her contributions were what was important, not her gender, skin color, or anything else as far as her professional achievements go.
If you ask any RN the names of the greatest contributors to the nursing profession, you'll get a stream of women's names. To suggest that nursing "needs" more men or else it won't be able to achieve its greatest potential would be a crass and inaccurate insult to the many thousands of women who have made modern nursing what it is. Of course there have been and will be male nurses who stand out as contributors, but only a very small percentage, probably in keeping with the ratio of men to women in nursing. And yet, despite the high salaries RNs command, are there any gov't-sponsored initiatives to get men into nursing? If so, it'd be news to me and many others. But I ask, if men by and large, for whatever reasons, aren't interested in becoming nurses, why make a big deal about it? Are there gov't-sponsored campaigns to get more women into the relatively lucrative job of refuse collection? Or, the likewise lucrative jobs of plumber, ordnance disposal engineer, nuclear materials technician, etc.? No. But other fields that are a lot less dirty and/or dangerous, yes. (Think professional STEM fields.) This isn't by accident, nor is the fact that the nursing profession with its high salaries (for RNs, anyway) is in no hurry to recruit men simply because they're men. But why should they? That one receives care from a female vs. male nurse isn't relevant. To trumpet a "need" for men in nursing minimizes the huge contributions of women nurses and is a patently false proposition. Nursing needs competent, dedicated people in its ranks. The gender of them is irrelevant.
This returns me to my primary point, which I hope you can see. WMF may think this idea to single out a particular group based on an innate characteristic to encourage them to be Wikipedia contributors is good for some reason, but it rests on false assumptions around a connection between one's gender and their competence at any given task. Unless the task is inherently tied to a person's sexual biology, it doesn't play a part in whether or not they are good or not at something, nor whether or not they want to do it. (I am for example a good improv-style comedian; many have suggested I go to open-mic nights and share my schtick with the crowd. Thing is, I don't want to, so I don't. It's enough for me to know I can keep my friends in stitches when I am so moved.)
As for devaluing current contributors should they happen *not* to be female: WMF, like a political party, needs to be careful, I suggest, not to drop a dozen eggs while going to pick up three. Also, in the process of telling other identity groups you're focusing on just one, you marginalize them. "Playing favorites" is a trap the gov't has fallen into and the results have been bad for it.
Like others on this list, I also got an email today from someone who subbed me to a supposed Google Group for lesbian Wikipedia contributors. While I knew immediately it was a fake [1. I'm not female and thus 2. Cannot by definition be a lesbian], its very existence shows the disaffection with the decision. It also underscores the hazards of going the identity politics route. For example, to be extra-inclusive within the target audience (women), would this initiative now need to be tweaked to include a special sub-effort of outreach to gay women? And what about bisexual women? They are, arguably, like gay women, a group in need perhaps of specific outreach and encouragement. But maybe the same can be said of black people (or African-American, if you prefer), Lationos (or Hispanics, again, if you prefer), or maybe people of western Asian descent (i.e., people whose ancestors lived in pre-modern era Asia in countries now named China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan). And then there are people of Indo-Asian ethnicity (India, Pakistan, etc.). Polynesians. Mexicas. Native Americans (or Indians, depending on who you ask). Gay men. Bi men. Gay Latinos. Transsexual Polynesian-Indo-Asian women, men, or both. There's no end of it once the precedent is established, and there'll be no peace for the WMF.
The gov't can get away with using identiy politics and pursuing policies of favortism based on whatever aspects they choose to use. Age, sex, ethnicity, non-natural personhood (i.e., corporate welfare/punishment), etc., are all open to them because they are the gov't. Unless people are ready to rebel against them, they have the say about where the taxpayers' bounty goes and who is favored over another. It may annoy some in the pop'n (esp. those not getting the largesse), but too bad. Unless you're ready to go rebel, you have to accept it.
Non-profit shoestring volunteer-dependent endeavors cannot afford to be choosy or worse, be or appear to be high-handed. One key to success in the marketplace is recognizing that everyone's money is as green as anyone else's. In the case of WMF, the currency is contributors of knowledge. WMF can't afford to alienate them in favor of *maybe* picking up a few more volunteers/contributors. Again, don't drop a dozen eggs trying to pick up three more. The risk isn't worth the reward. The only thing WMF has going for itself is popularity and justifiable faith in what it provides. Lose either of these things and it's done for. If you start counting such irrelevancies as the physical or similar aspects of contributors (like their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) as being ipso facto relevant to the value of their contributions, you've lost the second thing (justifiable faith). If you openly, in fact or in appearance, start playing favorites from among your readers/contributors/volunteers for any reason, you are sure to lose the first (popularity).
WMF would be better-served focusing not on the sex, etc. of its contributors, but on its long-term survival strategy. At the moment, WMF is living hand-to-mouth and relying on end-of-year micro-donations to keep itself afloat. This isn't a sustainable model.
Wikipedia is a free web-based teaching and reference service. It is only a question of when someone with a better mousetrap who has a way to make money from their site comes along. (Remember the #1 search engine in 1996? It was called "Alta Vista". Then came Google. The rest is history, and the big reason for that is simply Google's AdSense. If Alta Vista had come up with that idea, maybe they'd still be around.)
I won't suggest Wikipedia stop being Wikipedia. Did Google stop being a free search engine after they learned how to make money from it, allowing them to continue being Google (and more)? No. Neither should Wikipedia. But WMF has to figure out how to become able to sustain itself without the kindness of strangers. Projects like closing the (so-called) gender gap will actually work against the aim of making Wikipedia more atteactive than it is now as a web site for gaining knowledge but without the heaps of embedded editorializing found today in newspapers on- and off-line, in textbooks covering almost anything but the hard sciences, etc. Still, it can create for itself opportunities to pay its own way and attract donations that people feel good to make.
About a week and a half ago, I asked for input re a project suggestion. ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTribute ) To date, I haven't gotten feedback because perhaps the list has been filled with discussion about the exclusivity of the 3-month gender gap project funding. Already, the topic has distracted people from possibilities that may otherwise have been entertained that could generate income for WMF. Aside from the idea's merits as such, it is also a way to encourage donations/get fees, and in an ongoing basis rather than principally at one time of the year (December). But even if WMF thinks it isn't worth pursuing, it needs something else -- something it can charge for that will have broad, on-going appeal to many people and/or business entities. (AdSense, for example, is used by ordinary people with blogs and large high-traffic commercial web sites alike.) It has to leave people feeling good about Wikipedia and WMF and be popular broadly and "agnostically". Does your local gas station care if you're male or female? Gay or straight or bi or asexual? Or does the Red Cross decide when there's a blood drive that only certain donors will get the cookies and coffee or be encouraged to get them while telling other donors to wait until that particular group has gotten some first? If they did, donations'd fall off fast, or blood donors would go directly to hospitals to donate -- assuming they still felt like it.
Maybe my note and/or opinion will be ignored, or denounced, or something else. Perhaps it'll have no effect at all. But as a devoted Wikipedia enthusiast, donor to WMF, and pro-knowledge-democracy advocate, I can tell you that raising a fence if even temporarily to full participation in WMF activities for Wikipedians interested in seeing it grow is bad on multiple levels: politically, philosophically, practically, and financially, and most especially, relative to its foundational purpose of allowing others to contribute/participate to this great effort of recording the world's collective knowledge on an on-going basis and without hindrance, except insofar as the contributions are accurate, relevant, and sincere.
It's a dream worth keeping alive. I for one would hate one day to look back on 1Q 2015 and say to the others with me in the nursing home "Yeah, Wikipedia -- it was a sad day back in '15. The beginning of the end. I was there. I tried talking them out of it, but... it just didn't work. Now we're all stuck with www.selected-contributors-only-o-pedia-not-wikipedia.com and that's nothing close to what we used to have in Wikipedia."
Of course by then, we may all have computers implanted in our brains that tell us anything we want to know just by thinking the question. Doubt it, but who knows.
Thank you for reading.
Matt
The real problem is that there have been "conferences for 3 or 4 years all
around the world" but (a) no new empirical work on the actual size of the
gender gap; and (b) whether that is changing over time; and (c) the
underlying reasons for that gap; and (d) whether any past conference,
program, or initiative has moved the needle even a whit.
Instead of hiring a couple statistics people and doing serious surveying
and analysis to figure out what truly needs to be done, WMF is delighted to
throw money at the problem. "Come one, come all, with your grant pitches!
We've got the money, hurrah!"
Cart before horse.
Tim Davenport
Carrite on WP
Corvallis, OR
===old message===
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2015 10:34:45 -0500
From: Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good
projects for 3 months for no reason
Message-ID:
<CAA6ZO2Q-_ZboFzZfCTF3ajXzY-5MzqmjbF3OC+GVuAy-rA8P4g(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the
problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap.
The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests
for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the
WMF.
The purpose of the campaign is to invite requests for funding, have extra
support available if people need mentoring or assistance of other kinds. To
do this campaign well, the WMF staff needs to refocus the time of people
toward this endeavor.
A wonderful response from people reading about this campaign would be to
ask: what can I do to help bring in high quality grant requests?
Those of you who are familiar with making grant requests or using the
IdeaLab, offer to help people who are newer to the process.
Those of you who are developers and see a way to improve an idea with
technology, step in and make suggestion.
Over the past 3-4 years all around the world people have holding
conferences and discussing the gender gap. Now is the time to expand on the
work that has been done in these conference. Help spread the word. Assist
with translations to help some who is less comfortable writing in English
bring there ideas to meta.
The point of this targeted campaign is far more than reserving a specific
amount of dollars for the gender gap issue.
The biggest obstacle to success will be the lack of human resources to
refine and execute the projects.
Therefore is the reason that people and organizations are being asked to
set aside other projects in order to help address this vital area of
concern.
I hope everyone reading this email will do at least one small thing to help.
Warm regards,
Sydney
Hi all,
A few of my friends and I have been planning to document the history of
counterculture in Bengali art and literature. These friends are also
working in that domain professionally, and have access to a huge repository
of texts, images, and other relevant details that they are willing to make
available digitally in the form of free contents. We wish to have the
contents as wikis, and, pictures and video snippets that might be involved
- as properly licensed free materials. Now, the concern is if there is some
Wikimedia Project that would host contents that are based on such an
enormous amount of original research. Wikipedia is certainly not the
appropriate place. And, as there exist no earlier works on this particular
domain on the internet, references would be negligible. I was thinking
about Wikibooks, instead. I am not entirely sure if that fits either, but I
assume it fits better than Wikipedia, at least. The last option is to host
it ourselves with the MediaWiki setup, and I am considering it very much.
But, the idea essentially is to make people edit and enrich it with as much
inputs as possible. It would be really helpful, in that case, if it could
be placed in one of the Wikimedia projects. Suggestions, of every kind,
would be deeply appreciated.
Best,
Sucheta
Hello all,
On 24 January 2015 Wikimedia Belgium organises her first General Assembly.
The assembly is open for members and volunteers on Wikipedia and other
sister projects. The main subject of the meeting is the budget of Wikimedia
Belgium.
* Location: Brussels
* More information about the budget is on Meta, reactions are welcome on
the talk page of the grant request.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_BE/Budget_2015_H1
* More information about the General Assembly will follow on
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetings
Kind regards,
Romaine
FYI :)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 1:50 PM
Subject: Tilman Bayer joins Product & Strategy Department
To: Staff All <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
It’s my pleasure to announce that Tilman Bayer is joining the Foundation’s
Product & Strategy department as Senior Analyst. I would like to thank
Katherine Maher for supporting and helping to prepare this move from the
Communications department.
Tilman has been working with us since July 2011, and has been a Wikipedian
since 2003. He is leading the development of the organization’s new
quarterly report, and its integration with the quarterly review process. In
his role in Communications, he has already coordinated our reports in their
previous monthly format, and has kept detailed public minutes for the
majority of quarterly reviews at WMF. He will continue to do so.
He will ensure we not only continually refine and improve the quarterly
goalsetting, review and reporting processes, but can also look for
opportunities to highlight lessons learned - successes and failures -
across the organization and the Wikimedia communities, so these can
meaningfully inform our strategy.
In addition, Tilman will bring his many years of experience as a volunteer
and his insight into the many complexities and intricacies of the Wikimedia
universe to bear with product-related research and analysis questions,
supporting Product Managers and other team members as we dig into hard
problems that benefit from his expertise, e.g. simplification of templates,
translation tools, cross-wiki messaging tools, mathematics editing, etc.
Tilman was previously responsible for many day-to-day communications
responsibilities and supported or led key communications initiatives. These
responsibilities will be transitioned to other Communications team members,
including Fabrice Florin who is joining the team for 6 months (separate
announcement to follow).
Please join me in congratulating Tilman to this new role. Tilman - thank
you for taking this on; I look forward to continuing our work together!
Sincerely,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
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Well "Austin Hair",
You display a profound lack of understanding of ME, it seems. I am polite until others are rude, become threatening, even a thinly veiled way, so allow me to tell you first that I do not care a whit what YOU think of me or my opinion on this or any other topic. And if others object to my opinion on a topic, sensitive or not, they can make their case and it will stand or not on its merits.
But if you think you or anyone else can intimidate me into staying quiet when I see something fundamentally wrong happening, guess again.
Now to put it politely, at least to start with:
Go climb a tree.
-------- Original message --------
From: wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date:01/08/2015 11:30 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Cc:
Subject: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 29
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 17:01:08 +0100
From: Austin Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month
gender gap
Message-ID:
<CA+bW_FVVBcn6BM6dutAwbJ884A1WMFBUMCTbnQOjvubK5r046w(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 4:30 PM, mcc99 <mcc99(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> But in future, I think I'll sign in more often, esp. now that half the WikiGods have my uid on an alert trigger now. :)
I think the question is only being asked because you're displaying a
profound lack of understanding of how Wikipedia and Wikimedia work,
not only in your recent proposal, but in commenting on this sensitive
topic.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and you've been polite in
expressing it—that goes a long way, at least with me. So please don't
think that it's a matter of demanding a certain number of WikiCred
points before the WikiGods will let you sit at the WikiGrownups table,
or anything like that. Just understand that this issue has a lot of
people on edge, and at this rate it won't be long before "politely
ignored" becomes less ignored and less polite.
Austin
Sebastian,
While I bristle at the words "misguided", "dubious", and especially the implication (and indeed it's only that) that I'm in support of discrimination based on X (sex, etc.), which I hope by now others can see isn't so, at least I've gotten an actual counter-argument from someone that pulls together premises and leads to conclusions that at least follow from the premises.
Well of course I think my case is stronger ;), but I at least can acknowledge when someone else actually made a counter-argument.
Matt-------- Original message --------
From: wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date:01/08/2015 6:28 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Cc:
Subject: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 25
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 11:19:46 +0100
From: Sebastian Moleski <sebastian.moleski(a)wikimedia.de>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month
gender gap project-related decision
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Hi Matt,
as thorough as your characterization of the issue at hand is, as
misguided it is as well. The main point of the gender debate isn't the
physical differences between men and women and some purported
difference in authorship flowing from that. That would rightfully be
considered absurd and thus isn't really seriously promoted by anyone.
The gender gap debate is rather an acknowledgment that only a
surprisingly small subset of half the population contribute to
Wikipedia - and the systemic bias that stems from that. In fact, it
seems rather obvious that an encyclopedia that aspires to represent
all of human knowledge must necessarily be written by a representative
subset of humanity - or at least a representative subset of the
scientific community. We, so far, spectactularly fail at that with
respect to gender but also geography, language, and professional
backgrounds and expertise. As a result, it's more than sensible to try
to address that with the gender gap as the most prominent failure.
I also find your argument that focusing on increasing female
participation is devaluing the contribution of the prevalent majority
highly dubious. It's unfortunately a rather unoriginal argument as it
has been used many many times before in the political arean to combat
initiatives aimed at increasing diversity and decreasing
discrimination. The incessant fault of the argument is the premise
that the value of a particular contribution is dependent on the value
of all other contributions rather than viewing it in its own right. To
give an example: when someone writes an outstanding article on the
Great Wall of China and someone else writes an outstanding article on
Jacques Chirac, the value of each of these contributions is completely
separate from one another as well as from the fact whether one of the
authors was "recruited" through a drive to increase female
participation. They've both made excellent additions to Wikipedia and
should be lauded for that. Making moves to increase female
participation does not in any way devalue male participation.
While I have no knowledge whether this focused approach to
grant-making will indeed lead to increased female participation, I
find it sensible to at least try it out. We'll see in the end whether
it was succesful.
Best regards,
Sebastian Moleski
Schatzmeister / Treasurer
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Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin