On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 5:26 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com