Marie,
Thanks very much for this overview of your early experience as an editor.
Would you mind sending this email to the editor growth team so that they
can look at your experience for ideas about what they can improve? Their
email list is called "Editor Engagement" and you can find it on
.
I'm also pinging Mssemantics who may be interested in your experience for
her research.
Pine
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Marie Earley <eiryel(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
What's interesting to me about this discussion,
and Gender Gap generally,
is the discrepancy between what is perceived as being driving women editors
away (and if you really want to see a classic example then the 'drop the
sticks' closed section of this discussion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Arc…
)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive263#Topic_ban_proposal_for_Gibson_Flying_V>
and the things that I have actually found difficult on Wikipedia. These are
my bullet points about my first few months of joining Wikipedia.
1. Was reading something on WP and, out of curiousity, clicked on the
other tabs 'edit' 'history' and 'discussion' just to see what
they were
about.
2. Realized they were discussions about editing WP and decided to look
further & considered editing WP myself.
3. One tab open with daunting looking amounts of code that I could make
absolutely nothing of, and another tab open next to it with a thing called
'Sandbox'.
4. Almost gave up there and then due to the mistaken idea that I if I
wanted to write an article then I would have nothing but a completely blank
canvass and have to write all the code from scratch by myself.
5. Came back to it the next day thinking, "That can't be it.", created an
account and started making small edits, single lines with a citation,
obvious copy edit errors and asked for help on noticeboards when I was
stuck.
6. I had some stuff seized on, deleted as 'unimportant' or tagged for 'not
enough refs', 'orphan', as well as some curt / abrasive comments but nice
and helpful ones too. I should say something more about this - Wikipedia
does not exist in a vacuum, either online or in the world, if nasty
comments are the reason that women don't edit Wikipedia then they wouldn't
use social media either - but they do. Did I think that my edits were being
treated disproportionately to male editors? Yes, but I am female and the
off-line world that I inhabit is also sexist - so what else is new?.
7. So what did have me tearing my hair out early on? I would say that it
was what I would call 'the washing machine effect'. I would have saved
myself a lot of time and trouble if I had had a quick-start guide that
explained Help:XXXX, Template:XXXX, WP:XXXX. I would click 'Help' and be
taken to the help homepage, search 'X', be taken to Help:'X', click on
'Y'
- and here was the bit I didn't realize - when I clicked on 'Y' I was also,
by default, leaving 'Help'. I regarded clicking the Help button as walking
into the the lobby of Hotel Help, I would go through 2-3 links and then
think, "Wait a minute, this is just ordinary Wikipedia, and this is just a
definition of [word]. When did I leave Help?" Back button, back button,
back button. "Okay, start over..." I would go around, and around like this
for ages, either stumbling across what I was looking for, finding another
way of doing what I wanted to do, or ask at the Teahouse (not New Users
House? Why?).
8. I only ever visited the Commons when I need a picture for something,
used the search engine to see if the Commons had what I wanted and then
went back to Wikipedia. I didn't stick around to read the conversations so
I didn't even know much about that side of it until I joined Gender Gap.
Things that I think might help:
1. A
culture of irresponsible behaviour stems from bad people. A culture
of responsible behaviour stems from good people. The way to really make a
difference is to crowd out the bad with the good so they bad get bored and
go and find a new place to play. An increased number of sexist images will
then be deleted by the improved culture of the community.
2. The greatest form of outreach is Wikipedia itself. When I was a student
what was valuable to me was a way of accessing resources on topics. I
recently went through Amartya Sen's page and fixed the bibliography /
referencing including author / editor links. This is what his bibliography
looked like before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#…
and this is it now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#Bibliography
The same with the referencing section, before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amartya_Sen&oldid=611115580#…
and after:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen#References Similar
clean ups / new articles on other academics from the world of feminist
economics / political science / political psychology / sociology / care
work / human development etc. will increasingly gain Wikipedia a reputation
amongst students and scholars as a useful reference tool and recruiting new
editors from that pool of visitors would change the culture. A similar
thing needs to happen with articles like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies
3. I recently added the biography of the political theorist Jane Bennett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_(political_theorist)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bennett_%28political_theorist>. I had
in draft for a long time, I took her bibliography from her CV and worked
through it item by item. As I did this I checked to see if any co-authors
had biographies so I could author-link them. Michael J. Shapiro was one, I
went through his bibliography and cleaned it up, the co-authors of his
books include James Der Derian, Hayward Alker, David Campbell (academic) -
I added author-links on Shapiro's bio but all three of them need their
bibliographies sorting out in a similar way and their pages need checking
for infoboxes, authority control boxes and LCCN ref no. in authority
control boxes.
4. Where dates of birth are known on biographies they should be added to
WP's calender, I've added Jane Bennett's, 31 July 1957
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_July#Births
5. When you first 'land' on Wikipedia what are the key pages beyond the
main page:
6. The 12 groupings
are: General reference / Culture and the arts /
Geography and places / Health and fitness / History and events /
Mathematics and logic / Natural and physical sciences / People and self /
Philosophy and thinking / Religion and belief systems / Society and social
sciences / Technology and applied sciences
A quick glance at the Outline for Philosophy and thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_and_think…
shows
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Outlines#Philosophy_and_thinking>
'Ethics' with 'Sexual ethics' singled out for special mention - why?
Under
Indexes for Society and social sciences
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Indexes#Society_and_social_sc…
we have an index for BDSM but red links for Social Policy, Political
Science and Development Studies.
7. There are no Portals of the following names: Pro-life portal /
Pro-choice portal / Abortion debates portal / Same-sex marriage debates
portal... so why is there an, equally contentious, 'Pornography portal',
shouldn't it at least be a 'Pornography debates portal'?
8. For me issues like particular pictures making it onto the Commons only
matter if they are put into articles or if they become featured / POTD. If
there is a debate then fine, mention on Gender Gap and give a link, the
same with other debates where a 'support' or 'oppose' may be needed.
Taking
on sexist editors and trying to find new systems of dealing with them and
the images they want to put up is admirable, but there is an element of
fiddling while Rome burns, for instance this is a video on how to edit
Wikipedia - which new editors is this likely to attract?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvsVaTymzM
Recruitment of better editors = better content = attracting better editors
= crowding out the bad.
Marie