The whole framing of this question is misguided. There are lots of people whose work is undervalued on Wikipedia for a lot of reasons. If there is an effort to reach out to a particular group of volunteers that is underrepresented then that should be celebrated as a positive contribution to our projects and movement. What we should not do is say "how can I make this about my own personal situation?" This is about the movement and the mission, but too many volunteers think it should be about catering to their own personal whims and needs. If there are legitimate grievances then we should address those problems and not try to tear down efforts to address different problems.
On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 10:08 AM, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi, I usually push diversity in any situation but only after I got a core quality group of volunteer. the first degree of diversity is the diversity based on wiki activity, IMHO.. I care about the rest and I try to be honest if I go in that direction and why I do that. If anyone is offended for something, that happens even if you do your best, in my experience being clear helps on the long term. This a real documented example, if you want to read: http://www.wikisciencecompetition.org/people/ . For WSC2017 it was mostly my job to find these profiles, 90% of them. I did my best to find motivated jury members and, as a first step, I searched for expert wikimedians based on their CV on the profiles and their activities. My goal was to be balanced per topic, than per geographical area (language mostly, some description in English are poor), than maybe per gender, in that order. The evaluation of scientific images require expertise, that's the core business. I shared my experience here: http://www.wikisciencecompetition.org/2017/11/16/how-was-the-jury-for-wiki-s... In any case, I couldn't know who these people really were sometimes, I didn't care at the first step. You know where they work, but they could be foreigners. You know their enwikipedia activity (I need people with some decent English fluency, so I started there and in any case I found what I needed) but sometimes that does not reveal a lot, and English descriptions are gender-neutral. So even if it wasn't planned I got some unbalance, and I only discovered during the set up of the page that a certain nickname was a blond guy and not a Arab or Chinese girl. I did my best to "fix it" at that point but mostly because when you miss some positions and you look for additional 3-4 names it's no big difference to look here or there. But still, the first search was based on their expertise. And they all kew that.
I think it was quite balanced in the end, taking care of the issue but not ranking it more critical than the scientific quality of the profiles. Plus. I told some of the female jurors that they could be "promoted" to the main jury for next edition but that's because they deserve it. So, in the end I look also for "girls" and "exotic profiles", I admit that, but this was not my main goal, and it was never more important that the quality. So at least these people knew that they were part of a team, that they were there to share their expertise, not being displayed as a "token". I think it's more easy and relaxed if you always stick to the content and the quality as a first step, IMHO. if you want the movement to grow roots you need real people, motivated people, and real sharing. I really hope they will set up real national challenges next time, thanks to the expertise we shared. Alessandro
Il Lunedì 7 Maggio 2018 14:33, Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> ha scritto:On 7 May 2018 at 05:10, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
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 was invited to participate in a Wikimedia activity, because:
- she is a woman
- she is from a minority
- 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).
I'm sorry to hear that a contributor feels unable to continue because of this.
In order to examine what improvements we can make, can you tell us - without breeching confidentiality - how this approach was made, and what exactly was said?
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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