[Gendergap] Proposal: Forking gendergap: Main list for women and transgender, sublist for male supporters

[Fred Bauder]

> Hello,
>
> My name is Nicole Willson and I have been editing wikis for the past 5
> years, mostly wikiHow. Some of you know me and some of you don't so I
> figured I'd write a brief intro first. I also was one of the organizers
> for
> Recent Changes Camp in Boston (which had a high percentage of female
> attendees), have taught wikis to middle schoolers and worked/interned at
> various feminist organizations including the New York City Chapter of NOW
> and the YWCA in Princeton.
>
> I've been lurking on the list and have almost participated in some of the
> conversations, but wanted to get a feel for the culture here first. I
> considered contributing to the conversation about what motivates women to
> edit but didn't for the following reasons:
>
> - I am not sure that my motivations are that different from that of men.
> - I am not sure how much of my motivation has to do with my gender and
> how
> much of it has to do with my personality or past experiences.
> - I was afraid that someone would take my reasons and turn them into some
> broader stereotype about women, like what happened with most women
> editors
> being wiki gnomes.
> - I could have responded with information about women editors based on
> personal experience and stats from the Poynter, but didn't want to
> detract
> from the current conversation about how to get more female involvement in
> the WMF projects.
>
> I don't mind that there are men on the list. Personally, I believe that
> men
> can be feminists and work against sexism. I do think that they have
> something to offer. For example, there's the National Organization for
> Men
> Against Sexism which is very active in Boston and does talks in
> conjunction
> with NOW and they work together on events to discuss how to eliminate
> sexism.
>
> I just wish to be asked things directly, instead of having people make
> assumptions about my experience as a woman with wikis. It's great that
> the
> men on this list know women who edit and are in discussion with them, but
> I'd rather hear directly from those women if at all possible.
>
> I was encouraged to join this list by folks on #wiki in freenode and I do
> think I could help. I wish there was a list of things I could do to help
> (which was actually one of my barriers to entry for Wikipedia, not being
> able to figure out the roles I could take on right away). For example,
> half
> of the female admins that we know the gender for on wikiHow are female,
> and
> I'm sure some of them would be happy to talk about why they are involved
> with wikiHow as opposed to Wikipedia (where many of them have accounts)
> if
> they were asked. I also have some theories about why wikiHow has more
> women
> (NOTE: nobody involved in the wikiHow project ever intentionally designed
> the site so that there would be more women, it just happened that way). I
> may be able to help with this and with the efforts going on in NYC.
>
> Lastly, I had a question about Fred's statement about rules. If following
> rules isn't that important in the beginning, how come I have only gotten
> feedback once about what I've done wrong with date formatting and never
> gotten a message about what I've done right on Wikipedia? I've made at
> least
> 150 edits, so one of them must have been good, right? Instead I get a
> message about date formatting (which someone else could probably fix
> easily)
> and told to look at the MoS (which assumes that I know that it stands for
> Manual of Style). It seems to me that there may be a disconnect here.

Yes, we're definitely running on one cylinder with respect to positive
feedback. If the Metaverse Mod Squad http://www.metaversemodsquad.com/
were hired to evaluate and improve our operation (actually possible, but
I have no idea what the terms would be) I'm pretty sure that would be one
of the first of many things they would advise and organize.

There is a lot of resistance to some simple game-like reward system,
points even like you get on Yahoo Answers. No one has ever taken such
suggestions seriously. I remember when I was playing on Northern Lights,
a game, another player would chat and occasionally give me a cookie. And
you can do that on Wikipedia, a barnstar or a whole cheesecake, see
Wikipedia:Awards Of course, there, on Northern Lights, there was a real
time chat system inside the game. We might or might not benefit from
that.

I think further development of our anemic reward system is something we
could do.

The great userbox row relates to this somehow as it was a sort of social
media devise which made user pages into a sort of defining portrait of
the editor, see Wikipedia:Userbox policy poll

These: Wikipedia:Userboxes/Politics#Feminist_movement may be interesting,
btw.

Fred