On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 6:16 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 5:26 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
There's been discussion of the gender gap among Wikimedia editors on and off for many years now, and it's a focus of the strategic planning process. This is a part of a larger issue of how to get members of underrepresented groups to edit more, to combat system bias on all fronts. (Or, simply how to get more people to edit regardless).
I just read this article: "International Collaboration for Women in IT: How to Avoid Reinventing the Wheel" http://iisit.org/Vol7/IISITv7p329-338Craig734.pdf
which is about how the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, an international academic computing membership organization) has a women's interest group -- ACM-W -- which is tasked with increasing women's participation in IT -- an equally daunting task. What's mostly interesting about this article is it describes how ACM-W has an ambassador program, with individuals tasked with increasing participation in various countries. In turn these ambassadors report that one size doesn't fit all -- increasing women's participation in IT depends on a variety of factors, including the general status of women's education in a country, and that the techniques one uses to encourage female participation might vary quite a bit depending on other cultural factors.
Of course this is not an earth-shattering conclusion, but it's also clearly applicable to Wikimedia. I haven't seen many papers that take an explicitly international view to the issue of women in IT, so I thought it was interesting.
-- phoebe
In my admittedly sociologically-slightly-impaired IT oriented mind, I am not sure that the rationales for people to enter the IT field writ large (information technology, computer science, computer engineering, etc) match those for people to contribute to Wikipedia.
However, the generality of opportunity identified there seems useful.
I guess I was thinking more about the commonalities of process: of encouraging people to do something that requires some education but a lot more self-motivation, and involves interacting with a somewhat non-mainstream and sometimes exclusionary culture that may be (to a greater or lesser degree) hostile to their participation. And what I found interesting about this paper, even though it's not a great paper at all, is it gets towards tossing out the idea that how you do that is similar across the board no matter what, that in fact what it means to interact with computer culture varies a lot depending on entirely outside circumstances. I think that we often make this mistake in Wikimedia too, conflating English Wikipedia culture with the culture of all of the projects, or forgetting that what it's like to edit on a small project is very different from what it's like to edit on a big project, and that how we recruit -- if we are recruiting anyone at all -- might vary a lot depending on the combination of circumstances the potential editor is in and what it is they're trying to do.
Like I said, not an earth-shattering conclusion at all, but I've really never seen it expressed much in the context of the women-in-IT problem (which could just be a result of my limited reading). And I don't think we make the case much in Wikimedia either, maybe because there's such a recognizable set of personality traits that truly committed wikipedians tend to possess across the board that it often seems like those traits are the essence of editor-ness.
Greg: I think you're totally right about making things more accessible to the average person -- by which I think we mean not an off-the-scale-encyclopedist-geek -- rather than any special group, and of course you can define average in ways unconnected to gender, cultural background, age, income level, computer skills, etc. I think when making broad changes (e.g. usability) we have to trend towards whatever this average is -- virtually all of our readers get the same interface experience, after all, no matter what their background might be. And any improvements that make it easier to edit for this mythical average population will clearly tend towards benefiting many more people in all categories. When doing outreach, though, I think we have to account for the differences. I'd give a different class on Wikipedia to a bunch of fifth graders than I would to twenty-year-olds than I would to people my dad's age; but really maybe more than age it might be their technical proficiency that I have to account for the most, or their level of academic training, or their general obsessiveness about facts, or their prior knowledge of what an encyclopedia is, or whatever. Generalizing *just* about age -- or just about gender, or a host of other categories -- doesn't really get you very far in the end. But it is also clear, I think, that we haven't even reached all of the hyper-geeky people in the world (of any gender or situation) who might think contributing to wikimedia is really cool, so even if we're only focusing in on this rather indefinable subgroup there's still a lot of work to do.
-- phoebe
p.s. Once upon a time I collected stamps too. There's no hope for me, is there?