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

[Risker]

On 31 January 2011 14:38, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 31 January 2011 18:23, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In what way, David? I'm sorry, but the Arbitration Committee isn't
> Wikipedia
> > Governance Central.
>
>
> It's the closest en:wp has.
>
>
> > I have no idea what the board members are saying on the internal-L
> mailing
> > list; however, if they're expressing concerns about behaviour there,
> > they might want to actually mention it onwiki on the projects  where
> there
> > are concerns.
>
>
> You're snapping at me, as if I'm causing this problem for you. I'm
> not, I'm telling you about it.
>
> Are you saying you would need them to intervene directly? It may be
> feasible for the arbcom - the closest en:wp has to a governing body -
> to invite WMF to do so. This would likely avoid directly crossing the
> streams (which would be bad) but get an outside force in there if the
> internal one really feels it isn't up to the effort.
>
>
>

David, I'm not snapping at you particularly, although I do think you've
hijacked this thread, which is intended to be about the gender gap. (I'll
resist the urge to insert a sexist comment here. :) )

The only people in the WMF projects I regularly participate in who are
formally recognized as leaders are the WMF trustees.  I would love to see
them being more public in sharing their opinions, their observations and
their experiences; they have the opportunity to see things from a very
different and much broader perspective than those of us at ground level. I
am sure that HaeB would be happy to find a place on Signpost for a monthy
"Discussion with a Trustee" that could then be flipped over to Translatewiki
or wherever to share with multiple other projects.

It is all well and good for (I count three) former arbitrators to say that
Arbcom should be enforcing the civility policy, and to act as the governors
of the project. But we are not the governors; in July 2009 the community
soundly reminded us of that when we tried to set up an advisory council. And
by the time a case gets to us, rude behaviour is often only an offshoot of
the core problems of the case.

Arbcom is hardly in the position to go through and review the actions of all
admins with the hope of rooting out which ones are "uncivil" and which ones
aren't.  Even with the diminished number of active administrators, there are
still 800 of them, and we aren't a human resources department. I believe Rob
also has a good point; most entry-level rudeness and newbie-biting comes
from non-administrators, be they RC patrollers who often revert and leave
templated user messages without really reviewing the edits, or new page
patrollers who are tagging articles for deletion less than 3 minutes after
their creation. (I note that WereSpielChequers makes the same point.)

Fred, yes, if someone files a request for arbitration, it's going to be
taken seriously and reviewed seriously; the point is that people are not
filing requests for arbitration that turn on this issue.

And finally, I'll point out that if you're reading this list, you're a
vested contributor. Please stop using that term as if it's a bad thing.

Risker/Anne