[WikiEN-l] NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors

[David Gerard]

On 31 January 2011 17:49, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I do find it ironic that former members of the Arbitration Committee are
> proposing that Arbcom go around enforcing "civility" on admins (and everyone
> else?) when they know perfectly well that it's far outside the scope of the
> committee to do so.


The problem is that the other two-thirds of Wikimedia are having their
reputation adversely affected by en:wp's reputation.

e.g. Tim Starling feels there's no point working on technical measures
to attract newbies until en:wp's terrible newbie-biting is fixed:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-December/050843.html

e.g. on the internal list, when I pushed WYSIWYG, the *first* reaction
(from a board member) was "that's pointless to think about when people
are treated so badly on en:wp."

Crossing the streams of project autonomy would be bad, but a good way
to leave others feeling they need to is to make excuses to avoid
solving the problem in question. So you may want to not do that.


> The so-called "civility issue" is only one thing that turns off female
> participants. Another is the need to master significant amounts of technical
> information before being able to edit.


As noted above, even the paid employees amongst the techies want the
civility problem fixed before they'll work on that. I believe that
puts the ball back in your court.


- d.