[Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Tim Landscheidt]

Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> [...]
> Besides that, contemporary term for "site" is "social network". There
> are just more and less successful social networks. Wikimedia is
> successful social network for a very specific type of demographics:
> young middle class males. Actually, not so young anymore. I think that
> we are loosing males from younger generations, too.

> That means that we have to work on diversification of our editor
> demographics. And one edit in ten days is better than no edits at all.
> We need cleverly created concepts which would make editing easy, fun,
> causal. With a lot of interesting content around; probably, based on
> existing Wikimedia content, but not necessary.

> The time when wiki concept was new and interesting passed a few years
> ago. And even Microsoft has better sense for new technologies than us.

> For example, our goal is not to make a possibility to read Wikipedia
> from iPhone. Apple did that. The goal is to have easy access to
> editing from iPhone.

Isn't an iPhone one of those gadgets with about 10 cm of
screen and no keyboard? Why would we want to encourage some-
one to edit with such a device? It must be very frustrating
to do so properly, and we don't profit, in fact it is to our
disadvantage if it's done improperly.

  While I appreciate the efforts to encourage wider partici-
pation, IMHO we should make sure that we keep the quality of
our "products" and our "human resources" in mind. No edits
at all may be better than one edit in ten days for probably
99% of the population. And I don't think that we will at-
tract the right 1% who will wander the libraries and the web
in search of the missing pieces of information, tackle thick
books and pause before clicking on the "Save" button to es-
timate whether their edit will find the approval of their
peers, by emphasizing that editing is easy or fun - because
it isn't. And it probably shouldn't be.

Tim