[Gendergap] What elements would improvements have?

[Nihiltres]

Hi, I'm Nihiltres. I'm male, I live on the island of Montreal, and I have a history of trying to support others in contributing to Wikipedia. (Warning: long, rambling post follows. If TL;DR, skip to past the line of asterisks.)

I'll be straightforward and say that gender issues are not my cup of tea. I don't want to be a part of something that stirs up the kind of emotions that gender issues generally do.

Despite my aversion to the specific issue, I think that there are specific, gender-neutral lessons that we can take from why the gender gap exists in the first place. I strongly agree with Sue Gardner's attitude as quoted in the NYT that we should avoid "women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas" and instead try methods of "subtle persuasion and outreach". Kat Walsh's essay "Women and Wikipedia" also resonated with me, particularly in the section where she suggests that "the culture is not biased against women, but rather biased toward certain traits and against others". Let me REALLY echo this sentence: "I don't think it's about gender in particular, and I hate to focus on gender specifically; it discounts the experience of the women involved and it makes things uncomfortable for the men involved."

I think that I see, through some of my help work, a pattern that might be relevant. It might be stupid, and it certainly plays on a stereotype—so please take it with a grain of salt. It has been my experience that Wikipedia is a tricky place to get started in. This isn't inherently the problem. We have a lot of rules, and many of these are for good reason. A veteran Wikipedian will have probably picked up a fair amount of knowledge regarding copyright (law), conflict of interest (journalism, ethics), verifiability (epistemology), markup ([X]HTML, CSS, wikicode)… and the list goes on. This is in some ways a good thing, and in some ways a bad thing. Experienced Wikipedians have a lot of knowledge inherent to the Wikipedian process that *helps make Wikipedia of better quality*, though it makes getting to be an experienced Wikipedian in the first place quite the learning process.

Not everyone can absorb all of this knowledge. While experienced Wikipedians will likely pick a lot of it up over time, the problem that we are facing is just to get people (and to some extent particularly women) *in the door*. Newbies need a place to start. I think that this is one of the most important places in which we Wikipedians are weak. We have reams of documentation—scary amounts of it, in fact. If a newbie comes in, there is a fair amount of reading to do before they can get started. If they skip the step, it's reasonably likely that someone at some point will come along and say "You're doing it wrong" and potentially scare the newbie off. Getting a more personal route through the jungle of documentation would be hugely helpful to these people.

Now for the stereotype. I'll stress again that I know that this is a stereotype, and that I think it will apply to many men as well as many women. This is that women tend to favour interpersonal interaction.

To quote Kat Walsh again, "I think there need to be many different ways to be a part of Wikipedia--if you're the kind of person who reads the manual first and wants minimal interaction, there should be a place for you; if you want someone to talk you through your first interactions and spend time getting to know people personally before you contribute, there should be a place for you too." I don't want it to be a gender issue, but it occurs to me that if the stereotype has any basis in reality (which stereotypes often do), it might be a general improvement that can counter an implicit, *unintentional* skew against women's participation.

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If I could make one quick fix to Wikipedia possible, it would be to integrate something along the lines of the #wikipedia-en-help chat channel on Freenode IRC (see http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help for an in-browser version) more directly into Wikipedia. Why do I suggest such a particular change? The chat channel has several benefits:

* It's immediate. Once you hit the chat channel, you can get help synchronously, rather than having to check back for answers by refreshing a page. *Push, not pull.*
* It's personal. Once you get some help, you have a contact. If you work with the same person more than once, there's an element of trust that goes beyond "this person is a certified Wikipedia helper-person".
* It's scalable. Wikipedia is huge. If we want to sensibly get new users the help they need, we need to give them *very* simple instructions to get *to* the help. If we focus help services in one place to do this, we end up with huge wiki pages that aren't friendly to new users who would benefit most from *personal*, focused help. If I look at the history of Wikipedia's general "Help desk" page, it tends to have at least 60k bytes of wikitext at any given time. The table of contents alone stretches vertically for about a page and a half of my reasonably large (1080 pixels vertically) computer screen, using the default font size. If you can start talking with a single helper on a chat channel, it doesn't matter how busy ("noisy") the chat channel is: that's what direct messaging is for.

That's my idea, anyway. I don't want to suggest that it's the best plan, or even that it's remotely feasible. It's merely one spontaneous idea that I think could help, and I'd love to hear critical commentary on it. What *elements* of it appeal most to people? I think that looking for elements of the improvements that we want to implement is more important than finding a specific quick fix.

Here's to a more inclusive future for Wikipedia.


Nihiltres