I made a mistake, a very personal mistake. Not realising that I made this mistake at that time, but ever since I kept an unpleasant feeling about it. I signed up for attending the Diversity Conference later this year, and with that there were a lot of personal questions asked on the field of diversity. I think it is very good to have attention for diversity is my opinion, as Wikipedia (etc) should cover the whole of the diversity of mankind in knowledge. I stayed vague in the application about my personal way of diversity, but even with doing that I disclosed too much of my personal "diversity" feelings, and that is my mistake. Any more deeper explaing on this I do not want, that is too personal.
But why do I write about it here? Because in the rejection of the application I was triggerd by something what concerns me. In the message it said: "Many strong applications were submitted [...]" To me this reeds as that if someone does not want to open up their feelings regarding personal diversity, while trying to influence the movement with more diversity, this can't ever lead to a strong application.
In this world there are many people that express themselves strongly in their diversity, but that is only half of the people with the diversity. The other half keeps it indoors, mostly hidden for the outside world of anonymous people.
It can be a choice of organisers to select only those applications that have a strong story in the field of diversity (like for example because WMF funds only a meager conference). But then I think half of the diversity is missing. That is my concern.
In many conferences it is natural that if someone has a strong application, that person gets granted to come to the conference. With a Diversity Conference I think it should work the other way round: the stronger the story, and thus the stronger the application, the less it is needed to attend. The weaker the application, as result of a weaker story, the more that person can benefit from a conference on Diversity. I think we should be aware of this, otherwise we miss the big gaps in diversity, big gaps that are not addressed, aren't seen.
To say it otherwise: What are the topics in Wikipedia with the loudest form of expression in the world? football, disasters, politics, religion, ... What are the topics with the softest form of expression in the world? ... I think those are not in Wikipedia.
Romaine
Hi Romaine,
thanks for your e-mail.
On 07/09/2017 05:19, Romaine Wiki wrote:
But why do I write about it here? Because in the rejection of the application I was triggerd by something what concerns me. In the message it said: "Many strong applications were submitted [...]" To me this reeds as that if someone does not want to open up their feelings regarding personal diversity, while trying to influence the movement with more diversity, this can't ever lead to a strong application.
In this world there are many people that express themselves strongly in their diversity, but that is only half of the people with the diversity. The other half keeps it indoors, mostly hidden for the outside world of anonymous people.
I understand the point you raise. This is, in general, something that happens in many contexts within the Wikimedia movement and other collaborative projects, i. e. you may have some very active people who are less vocal or less prompt in sharing their opinion. On the other hand, other people occupy a lot of the bandwidth of the communication. This is problematic as we lose many opinions and point of views from our discussions and what we get is a biased representation of the ideas of the community (see the "readers vs editors" debate, for example).
However, to be fair, "Many strong applications were submitted [...]" is a set phrase that is used when dealing with any selection process (from research grants, to scholarships, to scholarly articles, etc.). In practice, it is used anytime a merit ranking as to be made.
It can be a choice of organisers to select only those applications that have a strong story in the field of diversity (like for example because WMF funds only a meager conference). But then I think half of the diversity is missing. That is my concern.
It is a valid concern, and a solution could implemented by choosing seemingly "counterproductive" criteria or quotas when giving scholarships to participants to conferences.
For example, in WM-IT we have scholarships for Wikimania and every year we usually give one or two (over ~10) scholarship to people who have an interesting background with respect to the "open" world (be it involvement or projects regarding open data, open access, etc) but no experience on Wikipedia. This strategy brought has the biggest returns so far with at least two people that eventually becomevery active members of WM-IT and even served in the board.
Hope this helps. Ciao,
C
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