Could we have some facts please?
* What proportion of attendees at the conference were women? * - Several emails in this thread have claimed it was high, nobody has provided evidence. As Wikimedia funded conferences measure diversity, publicly reporting this figure should be *a good thing*.
* What proportion of attendees were Wikimedia Chapter or Foundation contractors or employees and attending the conference could be considered part of their employment? * - At least one email here claimed that volunteers broke their backs running the conference, which seems to overlook that a high proportion of registered attendees were employees and probably did most of the preparation. I asked this question last year about another conference, it was never answered properly, as it was never measured. Again, this ought to be *a good thing* to report on, as our values are to keep the volunteer at the centre of everything we do and driving our movement rather than paying Executives six-figure sums to tell us what we should believe in.
Lastly, this appears a yellow journalism fluff-piece. I prefer to see volunteers wearing hoodies rather than corporate black suits, regardless of their gender or orientation, these are the people most likely to make a meaningful difference to open knowledge within the Wikimedia movement. So good luck to pizza stained t-shirts, wear them with pride.
Let's not fall into the trap of indulging corporate style PR paranoia, let's stick to the *facts* of what gets measured and reported. Of course, if you are responsible for publicly reporting and measuring, then /shame/ on you if you are failing to do so in a mistaken belief that this is a way to manipulate public perception, or our perception.
Fae
On 07/06/2014, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Craig Franklin wrote:
I think there's something of a lesson here for people: don't trust the press.
The part of the piece I found most striking was that the author readily, and almost boastfully, admits to speaking to "a minority of the minority of the minority," but she seems to have no issue using this very limited sample size to evaluate Wikipedia on the whole. Even if we assumed that there are 22,000 registered Wikipedians, is a sample size of five or six appropriate? If she meant 22,000,000, it seems like an even crazier leap.
After re-reading the piece, I'd probably stand by a lot of it. It's not a great reflection of Wikipedia, but I also wouldn't call at least many parts of it inaccurate, per se, just crudely distorted and manipulated.
The author used the tactic where you mention that Mandela was a convicted criminal that spent 27 years in prison, but fail to mention that he won the Nobel Peace Prize and was the revered president of South Africa.
This tactic is an easy way to create a distorted, but technically accurate, impression. Some of the fine folks at Wikipediocracy are very good at employing this tactic as well. :-)
MZMcBride
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