[Gendergap] Women's issues noticeboard

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Tue, 22/2/11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > Given the demographic imbalance
> in our community, and the resultant risk
> > of systemic bias in our editorial decisions, it might
> make sense to
> > create a Women's issues noticeboard in en:WP and other
> Wikipedias, where
> > related matters can be brought up for review.
> > Thoughts?
> > Andreas
> 
> Please create it and inform everyone.
> 
> Fred
> 

Stephen Walling wrote:

> Noticeboards are huge magnets for drama.

> There are longtime English Wikipedia editors already starting to grumble
> about this effort. If we're going to make progress by bringing the 
> community along with this, rather than having them fight us, we should try 
> to minimize the potential for drama, especially of the accusatory kind 
> that gets performed on incident noticeboards.

> I would suggest we not create not a noticeboard for this issue
> specifically. 

Women's views are too often drowned out on talk pages, simply because of 
their numerical inferiority. A noticeboard would help.

While I understand the concern about the potential for drama, I think
any method used to make Wikipedia more gender-neutral will attract a share
of drama. Having an institution to look at women's issues is a pretty 
mainstream idea.

The UK has a [[Minister for Women and Equalities]] (a poorly researched
article at this time); there is a [[Minister responsible for the Status of 
Women (Canada)]]; a [[Minister for the Status of Women (Australia)]]; even 
Afghanistan has one: [[Ministry_of_Women's_Affairs_(Afghanistan)]].

Denmark has a [[Minister_for_Gender_Equality_(Denmark)]]; Sweden has a
[[Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality (Sweden)]], etc.

The United States have affirmative action. We should not fear controversy,
or grumbling; our democratically elected governments don't let that stop 
them either. If the Wikipedia community cannot support something that is 
standard in democratic society, then we do have a problem with our
demographics, and whatever problem we have will become readily apparent.

I wouldn't mind calling it a gender issues noticeboard. (That would be
[[WP:GIN]] as opposed to [[WP:WIN]].)

Andreas