That's a great point Tillman, and some very interesting reading material. As I was reading, I was thinking, perhaps asking "Do you consider yourself to be part of a (a) minority ethnicity or (b) majority ethnicity?" might suffice. It's kind of what we're after and it seems more universal than the US-centric "what ethnicity are you" question.
Dan
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
With all due respect and appreciation for the highly commendable intention behind the question, it is itself a symptom of systemic bias.
A while ago a community member asked me the same thing - why we don't ask for the editor's race in the WMF editor surveys. I wasn't around when the demographics part of the current editor surveys series was designed, but after looking into this topic a bit, I think the answer is simple: Because these are international surveys.
Survey questions about race are vastly more common and accepted in the US (and some other countries like, afaik, the UK or Australia) than in many other countries. In much of Europe, for example, asking people about their race, or classifying them racially, is considered very offensive (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_classification)#European_Union ). This is particularly true in my home country, Germany, for historical reasons - personally, I don't hold very strong views on the topic, but as a German who moved to the US last year, I can tell you that it was quite an unusual experience to be asked to state my race on an official form for the first time.
What's more, even when switching from "race" to the somewhat less offensive (but even more complicated) concept of "ethnicity", it seems difficult to come up with an internationally accepted list for the purposes of a global survey, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_censuses .
If you want to wade deeper into this morass, the following monograph has some interesting information:
Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Uwe Warner (2009): "Die Abfrage von 'Ethnizität' in der international vergleichenden Survey-Forschung". ISBN 3-924725-15-2 http://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/5917
It's in German, but there is an appendix ("Anhang A1" starting on p.60) which excerpts definitions of ethnicity or migratory background from censuses of 27 countries, most of them in an English translation.
They also quote (p.150) an internal working paper of the ISSP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Social_Survey_Programme ) which recommended to drop the "ethnic" variable from their international surveys entirely:
"We do not see any chance that any revision [of the questionnaires] would give something comparable across all countries. The problem is located at the conceptual level [...]. There are even big differences for the 'developed' world. For instance, for the American perspective an internal differentiation of US citizens is crucial while a differentiation of people with passports from other countries is rather meaningless. For other countries, e.g. Germany or Ireland, the reverse is true."
All that said, regarding diversity efforts that focus exclusively on the United States of America, a national editor survey in the US might not encounter the above issues. You may recall this mailing list thread from 2010:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/engine?do=post_view_flat;post=215980;p... (aptly titled "A question for American Wikimedians")
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
At the recent gendergap strategy retreat the issue of racial demographics was briefly brought up but no one had any numbers on it, so we didn't
know
if it was an actual issue or not. Anecdotal evidence suggests there is
also
a "racial gap" among editors, but it would be nice to have some numbers
on
this to facilitate discussion. I did some digging and the only
statistics I
could find were about the racial demographics of American readers (
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/American_Wikipedia_reader_demographics ).
It seems that none of our editor surveys have asked about race, although we've asked almost every other demographic question imaginable.
Does anyone know of any research or statistics related to the racial demographics of Wikipedia editors?
If not, should we consider doing a micro-survey as was done for gender recently? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey)
Most definitely not, unless it is geolocated to the US and maybe a select few other countries.
Ryan Kaldari
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