Hi Anne,

Perfectly valid question.  First, it's that the focus is on indelible physical characteristics of which people have little control short of serious surgical intervention.  It'd be like saying it's been noted most contributors to Wikipedia are under 6' tall and the site and its purpose suffers without the input of 6'+ tall people.  It's a non-sequitur.

Second, the proposition is to stop consideration of grants to anything but this one topic for 1/4 of a year.  That is unprecedented for WMF (or so I think; someone correct me if that is wrong).  Once the precedent is established, there'll be no rest for the WMF.  It's not too different from moderating a public/semi-public discussion board.  If you let some people clobber (use personal insults vs. others, for example) other members of the board but not everyone else, soon as a mod you lose credibility and people bothering to post to the board.  At first the favortism pleases some, but in the long-term, the board loses viewership and commenters.

When favortism of any kind and money mix, it is caustic (like politics and religion at a family get-together).  Think of the resentment so many people and groups have when they hear about certain donors to political campaigns who also happen to own large intetests in certain business concerns magically have their company(ies) get exempted from certain taxes, or have regulations on their activities eased or eliminated.  The companies may not be specifically named, but the politicians' passed law or executive directive can be worded so that the donor gets the windfall.

But the gov't can afford the luxury of playing favorites or making pet projects for itself.  Shoestring budget groups that rely on volunteers can't.  Would the ASPCA turn me away as a volunteer at a pet rescue shelter because I wasn't like most of their volunteers in some rather arbitrary way (such as my gender)?  No, don't think so.  But if they did, that'd make a lot of bad word-of-mouth press for them, wouldn't it?

I think WMF needs to consider carefully the consequences of its decisions in this case.  If you want to build a dam fir example, and all you look at is the fact that it'll generate lots of electricity and make your company money but ignore the fact it'll dry up the downstream farms, leading to lawsuits, gov't intervention later, local residents' disaffection, etc., it may be that failing to consider all the consequences of the dam's building no matter how noble and ideal you think its construction is will be something you are likely to regret.

If WMF still wants to pursue this kind of goal (which as you can tell I think rests on false assumptions as well as ethically questionable presumptions at best), there are ways to do so without shutting down making grants to other projects and/or alienating current contributors/key constituencies while also making the kind of progress that is likely to be long-lasting rather than short-term.  It'd also be a lot less expensive and can be presented in an utterly gender-neutral way while still be appealing to women as well as men who may have good contributions to make but like women who don't, just either don't feel moved to or feel incompetent to do so.  You can get the baby washed here without losing him later when you go to throw out the bath water.

Matt

-------- Original message -------- From: wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org Date:01/08/2015 7:42 AM (GMT-05:00) To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Subject: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 130, Issue 27

Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 07:41:56 -0500 From: Risker risker.wp@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month gender gap project-related decision Message-ID: CAPXs8yQwWn20skVwA+iY6CwsB7bQrmTdabhxzZ0nPx6kfXdHow@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I have one simple question: if the Grants program was to focus on some other key area rather than the gender gap, would we be having this discussion about how horrible it is to waste time this way? Would we see throwing up of hands in this way if the focus was, say, requests from the Global South? A focus on getting great bots built and working across wikis? A focus on events and processes for media collection? (Incidentally the latter more or less happens anyway with several groups applying for funding for WLM within a narrow period...)

Frankly, there's not a single thing I've read, or a single objection I've seen raised, that wasn't about how unnecessary it is to focus on women. I don't think we've ever heard that about the global south, or non-European languages, or a lot of other areas where there are acknowledged biases.

Risker/Anne

On 8 January 2015 at 02:07, mcc99 mcc99@hotmail.com wrote:

Dear fellow Wikipedia devotees,

While I'm new to this list, I've been an avid fan and proponent of Wikipedia and all the great service it gives people since it launched. People can learn not just all the basics of nearly any topic imaginable, but for a large number, readers can with diligence become expert on more