[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[Brian J Mingus]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 3:43 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
> wrote:
> >> For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any
> >> African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in
> >> a European country without African population, so everything seemed to
> >> me quite normal for a long time.
> >>
> >> I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans,
> >> but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with
> >> university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are
> >> African Americans and present US president is almost, too.
> >>
> >> What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively
> >> white?
> >>
> >> Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we
> >> solve to get more contributors.
> >
> > The short answer:
>
> <snip>
> this seems like a whole lot of unfounded (and fairly offensive)
> generalizations? If you're really making a class-based argument, then
> yes, I think the privileges of having free time, a decent education
> and good internet access are all class-correlated to some extent and
> are all likely prerequisites for becoming a Wikipedian -- and that's
> applicable everywhere. But class cuts across ethnicity and gender; you
> can make the same arguments about poor white people, or whoever. (For
> what it's worth, I grew up in a rural area that was lily-white but
> very poor, and very poorly educated; urban demographics aren't the
> only part of the U.S. to consider).
>
> -- phoebe


I haven't seen the numbers lately but in the past it was true that the
majority of Wikipedia's traffic came from Google. If that is still true it
seems likely that Google's demographics mirror what we are seeing here. The
implication is that what we are seeing here is indicative of the
demographics of internet use in general, which does seem to indicate that
these folks just aren't on the internet in the first place. There are of
course other explanations, such as, they simply choose not to edit. But I
believe if you check the demographic statistics from Hitwise and elsewhere
there will be a strong correlation with this overall trend. Basically, these
people are underprivileged in our society and it reflects in our
demographics.