On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in a European country without African population, so everything seemed to me quite normal for a long time.
I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans, but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are African Americans and present US president is almost, too.
What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively white?
Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we solve to get more contributors.
The short answer: Wikipedia editors are volunteers and African-Americans rarely volunteer.
Regarding this claim in particular: incidentally, I was just at the Boardsource conference last week, which is an annual conference for board members and CEOs of non-profit organizations; it happened to be in San Francisco this year. There were maybe 600+ people there from organizations all over the country. Just from looking at the crowd, at least 10% -- probably more -- of the people there were African-American; these are all people who are leaders in their respective organizations, which ranged all over the place but seemed to be lots of health & human service organizations: child abuse prevention, food banks, YMCA, etc; as well as many other types of non-profits.
And according to the U.S. volunteer agency stats on the subject, rates of African-American volunteerism are on the rise: http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/assets/resources/FactSheetFinal.pdf These rates lag behind the national average, but not by a huge amount.
-- phoebe