[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

[Risker]

On 18 November 2010 13:44, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 17:31, Przykuta <przykuta at o2.pl> wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:African_American_Wikipedians
> >
> > 146 who use template {{User afr-amer}} on user pages. i don't know who is
> active in wp
>
> After looking into the number of American, Polish and Serbian
> Wikipedians, I thought that the numbers are interesting. However,
> those numbers mean nothing:
>
> * 3,561 are categorizing themselves as American Wikipedians [1];
> population 300M+, English is native
> * 1,779 as Wikipedians in California [7][8]; population: 36M, English is
> native
> * 1,450 as Australian Wikipedians[4]; population 22M, English is native
> * 921 as British Wikipedians [10]; population 62M, English is native
> * 689 as French Wikipedians [12]; population 65M, English is not native
> * 616 as English Wikipedians [11]; population 51M, English is native
> * 561 as Polish Wikipedians [3]; population 38M, English is not native
> * 146 as African American Wikipedians; population 38M, English is native.
> * 101 as Wikipedians in San Francisco [9]; population 3/4M, English is
> native
> * 68 as German Wikipedians [5][6]; population 81M, English is not native
> * 24 as Serbian Wikipedians [2]; population 7M, English is not native
>
>
<snip>

Actually, none of these "statistics" are relevant, because the overwhelming
majority of Wikipedians do not use userboxes to describe their nationality,
age, sex, or race.

While I'm sure that Wikipedia's editorship is not particularly reflective of
the world at large, using userboxes as a metric to determine representation
of various groups is not particularly helpful.  Many very involved users
don't include userboxes in their userspace (myself included), or don't use
the userboxes that involve sex, race, age or nationality. It strikes me that
I see probably 50 language-skill-related userboxes for every userbox that
confirms geographic location or sex.

Risker/Anne