[Gendergap] Wikipedia's gender gap: discussion on Metafilter

[jessamyn c. west]

> Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would
> spend a little time here :-)

Hi!

Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time
job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you
call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a
mod.

People have rightfully pointed out that our $5 barrier to entry is an
intentional growth-limiter and also more of a spam-defender. While our
user numbers are up in the 100K range, we have about 20K active
members and maybe a thousand or two active in any given day. This is
small by Wikipedia terms, very very small. That said our M/F ratio is
more like 60/40 m/f.

I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise
a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat
when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female
members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how
we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask
MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones.
Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also
have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a
different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message
that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by
racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because
we're a small site with a small mod team.

I'm also an editor at Wikipedia, username: jessamyn, usually working
on small projects like the Vermont town pages, new article creation
and a little vandalism undo-ing. I've also been on welcoming
committees in the past. Most recently I participated in a very long
and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time
[to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got
personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying
comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this
user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and
yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and
resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just
more of a "why bother" situation.

Anyhow, I'll go introduce myself in the introduction thread tomorrow,
just wanted to say hi, I'm around. Someone called me from the New York
Times today to talk about the issue [why me? I have no idea, honestly]
and there's a small piece that is up now with my comments and a few
other people's. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this
topic might do some PR work and make some comments if commenting is
allowed. I had about 400 words and a few hours to make my point, sorry
if it doesn't resonate for people.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia

Thanks for inviting me in to talk about this.

Jessamyn West
_____________
librarian.net