Sure, we could ask the Education program to reach out to universities or university programs related to under-represented groups. The reason I ask isn't just to stir up controversy. I've done a lot of editing related to the US Civil Rights Movement, and I've noticed that there are virtually no other Wikipedians actively working on these articles (and lots of red links). The reason I ask is because I'm wondering if this lack of content is related to demographic issue or not. It seems like a fairly analogous problem to the gender gap, and thus worth doing some research on.
Ryan Kaldari
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere@wikimedia.org
wrote:
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 https://www.dropbox.com/mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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.orgwrote:
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
Analytics mailing list Analytics@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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics