Well why only African American Wikimedians, I think the issue might be the same with other Racial Minorities in the US. How about Hispanic American or Asian American Wikimedians. Apart from social issues inherent to minorities, I think there might be something worth looking into, I doubt there would be any data available to look into it yet.
I seem to recall, there was also the issue of Gender bias among Wikimedians that was brought up earlier this year.
Regards
Theo
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:05 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com 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.
I ask myself the same question whenever I go to teach the incoming classes of computer science students here at my university. Although this is California, and we are close to having no ethnic majority in the state as a whole,* the university population doesn't neatly mirror state demographics;** and the CS classes, anecdotally speaking, mirror it much less so. (It would be easy to claim that this is true nationwide, though the data*** doesn't actually back that up). And anyway, we know that formal education is a poor proxy for being a Wikipedian, or even for computer culture as a whole. You could probably just as helpfully look at the demographics of Silicon Valley,**** or any other big tech center in the U.S., and wonder why it was skewed white.
I've only personally met a couple of black Americans in my time going around the U.S. meeting Wikipedians, which again is totally anecdotal, but considering that I've met a few hundred American Wikipedians in total would seem to argue for a low rate of participation. But then again, the people I've met at Wikimania and elsewhere are highly self-selected, and don't necessarily match our actual editor base with any certainty (I think about the black editor I met once at a small meetup who had never been to any sort of meetup before, or as far as I know since). I think the truth is that we just don't know, the same way that we just don't know exactly how many women participate or why.
We *do* know -- both anecdotally and statistically, based on the readership to editorship conversion rates -- that all Wikipedians are outliers: we are all unusual in some way. It is not common to both want to participate in a wiki project and then to expend significant amounts of time doing so, and we more or less know the general reasons why someone does become a Wikipedian. These motivations, from what I can tell, cut across nationality and gender and all other possible categories: and I've been wondering if we've been going about this diversity discussion rather the wrong way for a long time -- if we should focus not on why so few people out of the general population participate, but rather who is likely to make a good Wikipedian and how we can encourage them, in all circumstances.*****
-- phoebe
p.s. race in America, as you can gather from reading the Wikipedia article below, is far from a dichotomy: I'd frame this question rather as what's our overall diversity, in terms of ethnicity and class and gender, with an eye to how we succeed or fail at being welcoming and representative; and how we address topical systemic bias overall.
** http://statfinder.ucop.edu/library/tables/table_106.aspx *** http://elliottback.com/wp/black-diversity-in-it-and-computer-science/, data from here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf07308/pdf/tab13.pdf; compare to national demographics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Racial_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County,_California#Demographics ***** Things like university outreach programs do exactly this.
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