[Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs

[Jutta von Dincklage]

> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:33:30 -0700
> From: Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs
> 	of	women
> To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects
> 	<gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAGWts0H0U4POruZN0qtCwqNJZuWY-
> 30=UsAxwCxhYuqwUFctVQ at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
> Update, and a request:
> 
> The discussion thread John started has been very active, with I think about
> 30 posts from a wide variety of customer service (OTRS) volunteers.
> 

This could be a good idea, but let's not forget that women who start editing Wikipedia first need to find out how to get help and this needs to be obvious in the interface. 

I recently supported a female colleague of mine to join and start editing Wikipedia and I witnessed her signing up etc. and it was surprisingly hard and confusing... Unfortunately, we ended up in this testing group for account creation :http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project/Testing_content/Login_page/Frank%27s_proposal
In this testing group, the second screen is the one about topics. 'Health', the topic that we needed, was not one of them, so we selected 'biology' instead and a whole list of topics that need improvements was presented to us... However, she already knew which article she wanted to create, so it was a bit like 'Ok, how can I get out of here and draft my article?' I ended up showing her how she can do this and also ended up putting the Template:New_user_bar manually onto her user page, so that she's got a nicer profile page. I am sure we would potentially have lost her without my help... 

I thought I share this little experience. I think what I'll do next, is "test" her and see how she goes in getting some help without asking me ;-)

Cheers,
Jutta