Lars Aronsson, 20/07/2013 02:19:
But that seems to be about as hard as getting sports people to edit Wikipedia.
That's hard on sv.wiki? Oh, the envy! </irony> I don't know if asking gender to people on a website is really more accepted/acceptable than other demographics questions, but that would seem wrong in itself to me. (Apart from the highly-connotated word "race" which is basically unusable unless you're talking with someone you know very well.) I don't see why gender would be more relevant than the social context of origin; it's definitely the opposite IMHO, gender is largely irrelevant in our case (unlike Facebook or a dating website). We have a focus on gender just because that's a problem so easily seen, not because it's actually more important. From a statistical point of view, Ryan's interest is definitely legit. We have some statistics from other resources like comScore or Google I think, but their focus is different and reliability always mysterious; Google is mostly interested in income and so on to tailor ads. It would make sense to put some effort in getting useful data ourselves if there are no other good sources. If asking about ethnicity is impossible, we could invest more efforts in measuring correlates, for instance: 1) find out what other metrics correlate best to ethnicity and focus on those, infer possible underrepresentations (is there more than income and education which we currently ask? do we have enough focus on those? we also don't ask about education of the family of origin IIRC and we were only able to conclude that wikimedia editors are more educated than average); 2) ask the question directly, "Why didn't you edit/register? ... x-1) Thought it was a male-only club, x) Oh, isn't Wikipedia a nerd cabal?, x+1) Because Wikipedia feels like a WASP-only thing" etc. This would require a lot of effort to come up with a good phrasing to cover all "discrimination" feelings and to avoid leading/loaded/biased questions which would skew results, but doesn't sound impossible. (Profs in my university regularly do such things for sexual harassment and other discrimination surveys in order to assess the scale of the problem.)
Nemo