On 1 June 2014 01:39, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
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, I don't know if wiki-syntax in and of itself is more of a barrier for women than men. What I do know is that wiki-syntax is a lot harder today than it was when I started editing 8 years ago, and that today I would consider it more akin to computer programming than content creation. That is where the barrier comes in.
The statistics for percentage of women employed in computer-related technology is abysmal; we all know that. Even organizations that actively seek out qualified women (including Wikimedia, I'll point out) can't come close to filling all the slots they'd willingly open, because there simply aren't that many qualified women. They're not filling the seats in college and university programs, either.
Eight years ago, only about a quarter of English Wikipedia articles had an infobox - that huge pile of wiki-syntax that is at the top of the overwhelming majority of articles today. There were not a lot of templates; certainly the monstrous templates at the bottom of most articles today didn't exist then. The syntax for creating references was essentially <ref> insert url </ref>; today there is a plethora of complex referencing templates, some of which are so complex and non-intuitive that only a small minority of *wikipedians* can use them effectively. I know wiki-syntax, and I have found it increasingly more difficult to edit as time has gone on. I don't think it's because I'm a woman, I think it's because I'm not a programmer - and women who *are* programmers are only a small minority of all programmers, so it follows that women are less likely to have the skills that will help them sort through what they see when they click "Edit".
It's exactly why I've been following and keeping up with the development of VisualEditor - because I believe it will make it easier for those who aren't particularly technically inclined to contribute to the project. I believe it's the route to attracting a more diverse editing population, including but not limited to women. And I think that it's pretty close to being ready for hands-on use by those who are new to our projects, now that it can handle pretty well most of the essential editing tasks. It's not perfect, but it's getting there.
Risker/Anne