Jane
I think we are talking about two different things. Ownership of or access to equipment with access to the internet is not the same thing as we are talking about. If anything, the fact that more women own any such equipment only goes to reinforce what we already know, which is that not many girls/ women are taking part in editing the Wikipedia.
Rui
2014-06-01 9:30 GMT+02:00 Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com:
Of course I am just a sample of one, but in my personal circle of female friends, most of them only interact with a smartphone or tablet and though they may own a full-fledged computer, they only interact with that machine for certain boring and obligatory tasks such as filing taxes and printing. This is in and of itself, a reason not to edit, in my mind. Research into the use of tablets in 2012 in the Netherlands did indicate that more women were active on them than men, and a simple google search picked this 2013 BBC article up about the same holding true for women in the UK: "Women own most of the UK's tablet computers says study" http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23355944
Disclaimer: I am a frequent user of an iPad-1 that my mother (of all people!) gave me for my birthday.
2014-06-01 8:52 GMT+02:00, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com:
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2014 06:39:38 +0100 From: Fæ faewik@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks] Message-ID: <
CAH7nnD3meyLLRFd+ssS-trSajXRreq0uiDOm07M_9nx-oiqyTw@mail.gmail.com>
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On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote: ...
... selects strongly against women.
Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding wikitext than men?
(Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")
As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax, given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article creation quite happily.
There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave differently to others. None is something that appears to "select strongly against women", though the encyclopedia's way of defining notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend to be biased towards men.
If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could provide a link?
Fae
FWIW, I think that Lila said at the Zurich hackathon that she had found research indicating that fewer women click the "edit" button than men do. That sounds like a phenomenon that could use some research and experimentation.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014-05-10_Wikimedia_Hackathon_Lila_...
Also, the Individual Engagement Grants Committee and WMF have funded a research project in this IEG round focused on women's participation. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_and_Wikipedia
Pine
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