[Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Pavlo Shevelo]

I like (and support) most of all the following wording

> ... there's a lot to be said for being
> motivated enough to do it that you learn the systems without any help,
> becoming a part of the community the way most of us did. But just
> relying on those mechanisms does restrict our editor base a lot, and
> saying that only those people willing to jump through many interface
> and social hoops can join the club is just as unhelpful for our
> worldwide community of researchers and writers

>From that point of view we see two thresholds/barriers in front of
each WP-newcomer:
* to master craft of research;
* to master system (with DIY "facepages"/profiles, indents and
signatures in discussion, etc.) - that is interface hoop;
* becoming part of the community (socialization) - social hoop.
oh, actually there are three of them :)

Yes we (all of us) were motivated, even fanatic :) enough to survive
in so Spartan conditions, but should we insist that all newcomers have
to go same way?

Yes, one of favorite proverbs says
"Wind from the North creates Vikings"
but I'm not sure that Wikipedia needs only Vikings :)

Sincerely,

Pavlo


On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 12:59 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Tim Landscheidt <tim at tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
>>  While I appreciate the efforts to encourage wider partici-
>> pation, IMHO we should make sure that we keep the quality of
>> our "products" and our "human resources" in mind. No edits
>> at all may be better than one edit in ten days for probably
>> 99% of the population. And I don't think that we will at-
>> tract the right 1% who will wander the libraries and the web
>> in search of the missing pieces of information, tackle thick
>> books and pause before clicking on the "Save" button to es-
>> timate whether their edit will find the approval of their
>> peers, by emphasizing that editing is easy or fun - because
>> it isn't. And it probably shouldn't be.
>>
>> Tim
>
> spoken like a true wikipedian :)
>
> (are you sure that editing isn't fun, though? I'm pretty sure that if
> most of us didn't derive at least some joy from it (at some point in
> our editing careers) we wouldn't be here having this conversation.)
>
> I find it helpful to translate the question of whether editing is an
> inherently elitist activity -- as it may well be -- by thinking of
> analogies in the sphere of my day job, which is being a librarian in a
> big university library.
>
> To be a librarian -- or even to be a successful grad student or
> professor -- you have to really, really like to do research. A lot.
> You have to find true pleasure and satisfaction in chasing down the
> world's most obscure references or figuring out how to make sense of
> the literature on some topic. You have to be a total research nerd, in
> other words.
>
> But we cannot do research *for* every single student who wanders
> through our doors (I serve a school of 30,000 people). We have to help
> them figure it out how to do it themselves. And there's been a real
> push in the last 20 years or so to move academic librarianship from
> the model of the cranky old scholar who might let you touch the books,
> to the model of teaching "information literacy" -- how to research and
> evaluate information for yourself. I do a whole lot of teaching, and
> it can be frustrating to watch student after student work on their
> papers and do a bad job of their research and their bibliographies,
> and complain about how it's not easy to do research, when you know
> that it's possible to do it better. But my job is not to do it all for
> them: it's also to aid them along the paths of becoming scholars
> themselves. There's a real temptation to say "research isn't supposed
> to be easy! It's supposed to be a rite of passage into the academy!
> Get a backbone, kids!" But I think collectively in the profession we
> have basically come to the understanding that taking that attitude
> doesn't make it any easier for non-librarians and non-academics to
> navigate our crazy, unusable systems -- doesn't make people of any age
> any more likely to actually do research -- and that maybe, just maybe,
> if we do enough outreach, and work enough on making our systems easier
> and better, we'll reach more people overall as well as only the people
> that are predisposed to become information nerds themselves.
>
> I think of Wikipedia the same way. Sure, not everyone wants to or has
> the ability to edit. And hey, there's a lot to be said for being
> motivated enough to do it that you learn the systems without any help,
> becoming a part of the community the way most of us did. But just
> relying on those mechanisms does restrict our editor base a lot, and
> saying that only those people willing to jump through many interface
> and social hoops can join the club is just as unhelpful for our
> worldwide community of researchers and writers -- and the world of
> scholarship in general -- as keeping the books chained up in the
> library was.
>
> -- phoebe
>
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