diversity

Daft (or perhaps not so daft) suggestion here. Female contributors are well represented elsewhere on the net. Facebook, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Myspace, 2nd Life.

Can we not design surveys on those which don't specifically mention the surveying organization (common to do market surveys "blind" as it prevents bias) but explores what motivates and leads to editing or involvement on those sites and how users on those sites see editing on other sites (such as Wikipedia and A.N. Other). Request if they would mind following up the survey, and offer a choice of rewards - paid-for credit on sites where users have credits, etc.

The aim would be to survey MySpace users and learn what motivates both genders and various broad age-bands to edit, also look at common motivators and demotivators on Wikimedia and see how MySpace users feel about those, and ask MySpace users how they see editing on (eg) Facebook and Wikipedia to get cross-confirmation and direct perceptions. Do the same on 2-3 other major sites. We might get to see what women and other minority groups feel and how Wiki editing is seen by others who do contribute on other sites.

We may not be able to influence the balance of web use in a culture but we should be able to find out why some sites have a better gender balance than us and what motivates female contributors on those sites (or demotivates on ours) that we're not doing, or providing.

(Useful resource: Benchmarking)

FT2 (Talk | email)16:47, 24 July 2010

Having such surveys would surely be a good idea. I would be interested to know the results. But its probably not easy to find the right questions to ask. Wikipedia is different from a social network like Facebook. It has different aims. So it will be difficult to compare it and transfer the results. On the other side I am sure that the non WYSIWYG way of edition articles produces a barrier that is especially disliked by women.

134.76.223.209:14, 26 July 2010
 

I think a survey is a good idea too. But keep in mind that this is a VERY well-studied topic and we are unlikely to discover anything new.

According to a 2005 study, men are more "actors" and women are more "interacters" online. But even in the interaction space, Women are different. Women like to use the internet to interact with family, friends, and colleagues. Men interact too, but more with "special interest groups". (I guess that would include Wikimedia, since we're not family or face-to-face friends.)

There's some more recent stuff, since the eruption of social networking.


This one is more of the same... although an interesting/promising factoid is that UK women create more content. I wonder what kind of content that is, and if it's compatible with Wikimedia's vision?

A survey couldn't hurt, but it almost isn't necessary. There is a TON of literature out there about this topic.

Randomran16:37, 26 July 2010

There's a lot of research we could datamine. Not having read it my question would be, upon reviewing it, does it target our area of interest as outlined in my previous post?

I suspect they would give a lot of useful background, many answers, and inform our survey of areas to focus on, or questions that are already well answered elsewhere by specialist studies - but they wouldn't replace it. Our focus is quite specific.

FT2 (Talk | email)18:05, 26 July 2010

Seems to me we just need to get more specific. There might be some scholarly papers about different types of content creation, and how it differs by gender. But there's always some value in a survey in being able to ask specifically about Wikipedia.

Randomran15:56, 28 July 2010
 

More allready existing information on the topic. Have not read it myself, but thought I better link to it from here as there seems to be quite a lot of interest around this topic and someone might be interested in digging into it.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2010/Women_on_the_Web_How_Women_are_Shaping_the_Internet

Dafer4522:46, 29 July 2010