On 17 November 2010 13:35, 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.
Oh gosh, I want to jump in here too, super-fast. Good question, Milos :-)
I think the answer to this question is complicated, but known/knowable.
Essentially I think it's fairly obvious that US Wikimedians are disproportionately male and disproportionately white -- like Phoebe, that's definitely been my own anecdotal experience in meeting Wikipedians, and although the people we meet face-to-face may not be perfectly representative of all Wikipedians, we don't have any reason to think the actual US Wikimedia editor population is dramatically different from the people we happen to meet.
I would attribute the maleness and whiteness mostly to the tech-centricity of the Wikimedia community. We know it's a tech-centric group, presumably because editors were in the beginning early adopter types, and continuing because the editing interface is still relatively non-user-friendly.
And we know that the tech community in general (in the United States) skews male, white and Asian ... And that that is self-reinforcing over time. In fact, this research http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_14383730?nclick_check=1&forced=true found that blacks, Latinos and women are losing ground in (Silicon Valley) tech, not gaining it.
I would expect that all the factors that skew tech community demographics, have a big overlap with the factors that skew Wikimedia community demographics. There's lots of good research and thinking about that. (For example, the book Unlocking the Clubhouse has lots of good thinking about gender, and some about African-Americans and Latino-Americans.) There is lots of available information.
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.*****
I agree with Phoebe. Wikimedians are unusual in many ways. There's probably no point in Wikimedia trying to recruit general-population "women" or "African-Americans" or "Latino-Americans." We are likelier to succeed if we aim to recruit women, African-Americans and Latino-Americans who share some of the common Wikimedia characteristics -- like, a base level of good comfort with technology, a passion for learning, love of language/words/text, unusually high intelligence, a good base level of self-confidence, sufficient leisure time and inclination to volunteer, and so forth.
My two cents, written fast :-) Sue