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.
Even a general question like that is pretty complicated. What is a minority
in one country is a majority in another, so to do this with any meaning,
you'd have to also ask where people were located.
I think one way to get started on tackling this important but incredibly
touchy subject is to collect the best research we can find on ethnic
demographics among global Internet users. Organizations like
pewinternet.orghave done rigorous work on demographic questions like
this, at least in the
U.S. When it comes to the gender gap we know that we are subject to a bias
that the rest of the Web does not, by and large, so a good place to start
is probably understanding the context Wikipedia operates in on the matter.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/