Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2014 06:39:38 +0100 From: Fæ faewik@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks] Message-ID: CAH7nnD3meyLLRFd+ssS-trSajXRreq0uiDOm07M_9nx-oiqyTw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote: ...
... selects strongly against women.
Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding wikitext than men?
(Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")
As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax, given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article creation quite happily.
There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave differently to others. None is something that appears to "select strongly against women", though the encyclopedia's way of defining notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend to be biased towards men.
If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could provide a link?
Fae
FWIW, I think that Lila said at the Zurich hackathon that she had found research indicating that fewer women click the "edit" button than men do. That sounds like a phenomenon that could use some research and experimentation. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014-05-10_Wikimedia_Hackathon_Lila_...
Also, the Individual Engagement Grants Committee and WMF have funded a research project in this IEG round focused on women's participation. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_and_Wikipedia
Pine