Ryan: suppose you would have this information what would change? Would we prioritize
features differently? Would we stop doing certain things, start doing things? I am having
a hard time finding a use case.
D
—
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
What if we only asked the question in countries where
it was culturally
appropriate? Even a single data point would be more useful than none.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
> 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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;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;…
>> (aptly titled "A question for American Wikimedians")
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)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
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Analytics mailing list
>> > Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Tilman Bayer
>> Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> IRC (Freenode): HaeB
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Analytics mailing list
>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Analytics mailing list
> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>
>