Hi all
This is a nuanced issue and as ever, the press has failed to capture that nuance. I received a call from the Sunday Telegraph on Saturday evening and had less than an hour to draft, agree and send a quote on behalf of Wikimedia UK. However within a short statement it's impossible to convey the sort of detail that we're discussing here. As John says, he has been working on a video about the UK community's work to address the gender gap - which includes an interview with Jess among others - and we will be planning communications around the release of the video where we can hopefully paint a more subtle picture of the current situation. It seems highly unlikely that the Mail would cover that but at the very least I am now in contact with the Telegraph reporter who wrote yesterday's story, and will send it to her (amongst others).
All best Lucy
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 12:40, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 09 December 2019 at 11:47 Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess.
From Jess:
https://twitter.com/jesswade/status/1203583885369630721
Jess does not subscribe to the narrative found in the Telegraph and Mail, for sure.
That narrative has been around for ten years, during which time much progress has been made on English Wikipedia. I think in fact around 2011 the community realised there needed to be a more positive effort with newbies; and as recently as 2016 some kinds of knee-jerk deletionism started to receive serious deprecation.
I don't doubt that more work needs to be done. As far as I know, the editor retention issue is much less pressing than it used to be. In 2009 the Murdoch press was pushing the line that the 2007 decline in editors, which had just come to light in terms of stats rather than anecdote, was an existential threat. No longer.
Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture.
So, informed and accurate coverage of Wikipedia stories is also to be wished for. If a single idiot adding templates can cause a media furore, it is either trivial or non-trivial. If it isn't trivial ... well, the link to ANI I gave has to be interpreted. In a past furore I helped a Guardian journalist to understand exactly what had happened, via a page history. We see shoddy journalism based on the vaguest ideas of fact-checking. We should call that out.
Charles
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