[Gendergap] Wikiproject: Womens Cafe for all language wikis

[Oliver Keyes]

The former contributors study - and this is my fundamental problem with the
brainstorming here - did not take the gender of the participant into
account. There is no reason to assume this applies explicitly or more
strongly to women. The appropriate response is either:


   1. To take the former contributors' concerns into account and brainstorm
   ways to fix them that apply regardless of gender, as the survey did.
   2. To find out if there is actually a distinction between the concerns of
   female ex-editors and male ex-editors and then brainstorm from the results.

Your idea of a dedicated portal for women deals with neither of these
problems. It will either have the same social standards as the rest of
Wikipedia, or it won't. If it does have the same standards, it's useless and
unnecessary, because the participants could do just as well on the rest of
the project. If it doesn't, it's useless, unnecessary and unfounded, because
you've yet to demonstrate any evidence stronger than "somebody said" that
there are gender-specific problems here. Further than that, it's simply
preparing these new editors to be metaphorically dropped in it from a great
height when they run into the rest of the community for the first time.

I appreciate the concerns of the female contributors here and at various
comment threads on blogs around the world. If my time in the political world
taught me anything, however, it's that such places are *not* breeding
grounds for reliable data. You tend to attract either people who are highly
enthusiastic and fine with the project, or people who are highly pissed off
by it. Making broad assumptions and actions based on the second- or
third-hand evidence of a few people who fall into those categories is
inefficient. I'm not talking about a four-year survey; what I was proposing,
and what garnered some support (and no opposition) before vanishing from the
face of the earth, was a repeat of Howie's survey with a gender drop-box.
This would not take long, and would allow us to see a) whether some work the
WMF has already put in has had any discernible effect, b) more accurately
what the proportion of men to women is on WMF projects and c) if there is
any discernible difference in the concerns reported by self-identified women
and self-identified men. From that we can see what needs to be done.

I'm fully supportive of opening up Wikipedia to more users, addressing their
concerns, and making women a particular focus due to their
underrepresentation, which may lead to systematic bias and an absence of
NPOV. But until you can actually demonstrate reliable evidence that there *
are* different concerns for men and different concerns for women, applying
different standards seems to be a complete waste of time.


On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 2:03 AM, <carolmooredc at verizon.net> wrote:

>
> On 2/14/2011 6:00 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
>
> "Men of course would be allowed to help and
> learn, but doubtless there would be a low tolerance for questionable and
> trolling behavior."
> How nice of you to tolerate our barbarianism.
>
> I believe that is a misrepresentation of what I said and what I meant.
>
>
> Again, this comes down to "do we want to divide the community"? If it's
> behavioural issues within the community, the behaviour of the community has
> to change. Dissecting it will only cause greater problems further down the
> line.
>
> It's a resource, not a division. It's an idea, not a demand. This is a
> brain storm. Feel free to come up with a better idea to help attract and
> keep women editors.
>
> Portal - which I notice was just mentioned - is another good idea. I
> haven't had quite enough experience with both to have a strong opinion on
> whether one or the other would better.
>
>
> I want to again take this opportunity to emphasise that *we don't know why
> so few women edit compared to men*. Is there any chance we could gather
> some statistically reliable data first, and come up with ideas on how to fix
> the (currently baseless) presuppositions later?
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results As I
> mentioned earlier today this shows that comments about removal of material,
> also were made by women in the NY Times debate and on this list.  Obviously
> it's a feature of Wikipedia all newbies have to learn to deal with, but
> coming up with strategies to keep it from being a major reason for leaving
> would be a big help for men and women, who may take such rejection more
> personally, depending on how it is done.
>
> And women in lots of off wiki articles and/or on this list have expressed
> that dealing with locker room or bar brawling attitudes and even hostility
> also is an important reasons women leave.
>
> I don't think we need a four year long study to figure out a few of the
> major issues, while ignoring the experience, ideas and solutions of women
> who joined this list to share them.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Carol in dc
>
>
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