Women and other unrepresented people are invited to edit, to become skilled in editing (lots of practice and experience needed), and get well-deserved credit for excellence, but it is a process. Everyone stumbles at first, the point is not run anyone off or blame the difficulties associated with getting up to speed on gender or whatever.
Fred Bauder
----- Original Message ----- From: Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com To: Wikimedia wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Wikimedia Gendergap mailing list gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 07 May 2018 00:10:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Gendergap approach causing problems
Hi all,
On Wikipedia and in our movement we are aware of the gendergap that exists and all kinds of activities are organised to make the gap smaller. I think this is great as no single gap should exist in collecting all the knowledge in the world, as well as our movement should be diverse as the world's population is diverse.
The statistics are clear on this matter, this is something to take care of. However, a part of the approach is causing problems, because general statistics should not be applied on individuals as that reduces humans to numbers only.
The reason why I bring this up is because I recently received an e-mail from a user in the Wikimedia movement who has (temporarily?) stopped contributing as she is not happy with a specific aspect of the atmosphere in Wikimedia.
She does not speak out at loud, but I think we must be aware as movement of the silent cry, therefore this e-mail to bring awareness (but with respect for the privacy of this individual).
What has happened?
She was invited to participate in a Wikimedia activity, because: 1. she is a woman 2. she is from a minority 3. she is from an area in the world with much less editors (compared to Europe/US)
and perhaps also because her colour of her skin is a bit different then mine (Caucasian).
At the same time she has the impression that the work she does on the Wikimedia wiki('s) is not valued, nor taken into account.
She does not want to be invited because she is a woman, nor because she is from a minority, nor ....... etc. This is offensive. She only wants to be invited because of the work she contributes on Wikipedia/etc.
Besides the many good initiatives and intentions, this kind of approaches to our contributors is demotivating them, please be aware of this. I believe demotivation/frustration is the largest problem we face as movement.
I heard from people that the problem described is called tokenism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenism.
I believe the only way to close the gaps related to gender, minorities, etc, is to create an atmosphere in what everyone is appreciated for what she/he is doing, completely unrelated to the gender someone appears to have, the ethnicity, race, area of the world, etc etc etc etc.
Thank you!
Romaine _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe