" Without a healthy and diverse community of participants, the quality of our content will suffer."

I don't expect you to change your focus, but I've not seen any evidence of the apparent cornerstone of this thing being true. On en, I've seen a ton of hard work from a small amount of mostly white, mostly male, mostly young, mostly from developed countries, mostly etc. editors improve the heck out of a ton of articles. I'll give you "healthy", but I don't think diversity has helped this project much. It would be nice, but various things that you can't change stand in the way, like our combative culture that seems OK to men but not women. So, you may want to focus on reality instead of platitudes, or you may not. Saying we value diversity while doing the same ol same ol is probably the best course available to us. Else, some real drastic changes and thinking are required.

One thing I would love to see is cross wiki watchlisting, since I'll have no idea if anyone ever replies to this since I spend my time on en. Anyways, carry on.

I think this is a fair criticism. I don't know if I'd agree with it. But it points to a bigger issue: no one has any data on this issue. We were supposed to have a reader conversion task force, but it seemed to fall apart. So no one has actually been able to point to instances where diversity has undermined Wikimedia's content quality. Maybe they're out there, but nobody has given it an honest search.

Mind you, it's safe to say that a lack of diversity may be undermining Wikimedia's growth. There's only so many young middle class white guys in the world.

"Quality of our content will suffer" doesn't imply that young, white men from the developing world can't write quality content. It implies that a multiplicity of views is required to reach a certain standard of quality, and that we aren't achieving that now and won't unless we have more diversity. Perhaps this can be reworded to clarify.

Regarding data, I think it would be good to track this to the best of our ability. The best data we have on diversity is the UNU-MERIT study, which has well-known problems. There's been no work done to my knowledge linking diversity to the current lack of quality on any of the Wikimedia projects. However, let's not get too caught up with data. Wikimedia is built on the premise that a multiplicity of views represented in an open, shared space will lead to high-quality content. If we're suffering in this regard (as we our), it makes sense to prioritize this.

Finally, regarding reality vs platitudes. We can make Wikimedia more diverse. There are many things that could be done, and by calling it out as a priority, we will hopefully galvanize people to take on some of these ideas.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging diversity but to a very large extent, discussing this is a big waste of time. It would be a major mistake to devote money and resources to investigate this. There are good reasons why the cross section of society that contributes to Wikipedia is the way it is. Regarding some of those demographics mentioned:

• People with children are spending their time with their children. So unless the Wikimedia Foundation is willing to offer baby-sitting, expect that people with children will be under-represented.

• Too many singles contributing? It's not too hard to figure out why: they are hanging out with their partner. Let me tell you, between editing Wikipedia and having sex, people are going to choose sex a lot more often.

• Too many people with degrees contributing? It's not hard to figure out that those people know more and that's why they can contribute.

• A disproportionate number of people from the developed world? Guess what?! That's who has the computers.

• Regarding gender and age, these are complicated, but they are just the way things are and will be very difficult, if not impossible, to change. Those distributions' involvement may change as a result of society evolving but not because of us in any significant way.

Let us not forget the dark flip-side of this too: diversity can decrease the quality of the site in some situations. For instance, under-educated and younger populations will on average have lower quality edits than higher-educated and older populations. The point is that "diversity" isn't some magic thing that must be achieved and it has very little to do with the success of Wikipedia projects. The whole topic is mostly just a politically correct waste of time. The truth is simple: a certain fraction of the people who have the time and ability will contribute to Wikipedia. The current set of editors represents those people in proper proportion to their demographics.

Diversity should often be encouraged and there are easy ways to make some gains (e.g., an occasional link at the top of Wikipedia to a special note addressed to women encouraging them to participate more and explaining why would be an excellent way to reach out to women) but very little change is going to occur and not much effort should be spent on it.

Diversity within Wikipedia is unlikely to happen before it becomes a better environment for more of its editors.

The culture currently is suited to the comfort of its majority editorial population - single, white, men - often with a belief in their intellectual superiority and having the time and energy to devote to combat with any editors who challenge their view of themselves. That makes Wikipedia an unpleasant working environment for a lot of women... and also for the many men who aren't comfortable with socially combative environments.

The lack of diversity on Wikipedia may represent in some areas the state of society. But as far as gender diversity goes - and possibly age but I don't know enough to comment on that - it definitely reflects a male-orientated, combative culture. Since there are many areas of the net not dominated by this kind of culture - Project Gutenberg for example - changing this culture and the lack of diversity resulting from it is definitely a realistic goal for Wikipedia.

I'm curious, do you know any stats on Project Gutenberg and their diversity?

Sorry, should have clarified that the statement was purely subjective personal experience - and back in the 90's at that. I volunteered with Project Gutenberg for several years working on editing previously scanned in documents. The culture there was not combative or male-orientated in my (obviously limited) experience... but whether that was reflected in gender-diversity or any other kind of diversity I couldn't say - though I'll see if I can track down any stats. On Wikipedia I'm very aware of my gender - and my English reserved nationality! - in a way that didn't seem to be at all relevant there. I'd guess that the delayed publishing and hierarchy in editorial process helped with that. Things that probably couldn't be applied to Wiki - although the editors with admin privilleges go some way towards that and I'd personally like to see more of them around to create more leadership within the community. There may be other ways in which Gutenberg manage their volunteers that might provide useful pointers. If you're interested I'll go see what I can dredge up.

Yeah, I'm very interested. A lot of open source projects involve some friction and push-and-pull. So I'm curious which ones have been more welcoming. This is somewhat related to gender, but it's much bigger than that really.

I do not share your view, Dakinijones, and I feel strongly that it is deeply misguided. The idea that Wikipedia has a "combative" culture has taken a life of its own and, unfortunately, does not represent reality well. My experiences have been anything but combative and I encounter more people who are helpful, nice, and intelligent than those who are rude or ignorant. In that respect, Wikipedia is not much different than real life. Disagreements and even arguments naturally arise when collaborating on something. Nothing will change this and it has nothing to do with gender. It has a lot to do with people being passionate about making a good encyclopedia and sometimes that passion spills over. I believe strongly that Wikipedia is not much more "combative" than any other free and open collaborative project.

Suppose there existed a wiki-style encyclopedia edited only by women. Would this be some wonderful utopia where people do nothing but smile and sing while writing articles and then send each other baked brownies when they are done? We both aren't naive enough to believe that. My suggestion is that such an encyclopedia would be roughly just as "combative" as the current Wikipedia.

There's one last aspect of this that I want to mention. It's that part of the perceived "combativeness" arises from the success of Wikipedia producing a high-quality product. As the bar has been raised in terms of quality, it stands to reason that less people can make beneficial contributions. When these people have their edits reverted, they feel a sense of hostility from the other editors who have "blocked their additions". By definition, these editors are unaware that their additions lowered the quality of the article; and thusly the label of "hostile" or "combative" is unfairly achieved.

The notion that Wikipedia is excessively combative is a cancer. I passionately hate it because it is unfairly slanderous and largely without merit beyond what is to be expected.

I appreciate your point, Jason.

Dan Kahneman gave a wonderful talk at TED this past year. He noted that there's an important distinction between our experience and our recollection of that experience.

He shared an example of patients undergoing colonoscopies, a generally unpleasant experience (or so I hear). He noted that people who had longer procedures that ended comfortably recalled a more pleasant experience than those who had shorter procedures that ended uncomfortably. This, of course, does not map to the reality of the experience.

We have to be careful not to let our recollection of our experiences on Wikimedia projects unfairly color our actual experiences. I suspect that most people have a largely positive experience here, but the bad experiences are the ones that stick. To the extent that we can reverse this, we should, but self-awareness is the first step toward improvement.

We seem to agree that some level of diversity is critical for quality, and that we should aim for more diversity than we already have.

Your point seems to be that we should be realistic in regards to our expectations over what level of diversity is possible or even desirable. If that's a fair representation of your point, then I agree with it.

However, I think your analysis of leisure time is too simplistic. Over 10 million people visit FarmVille on Facebook every single day, and they are not all young, single men. You might argue that those people are not the type of people we'd want contributing to Wikimedia, although I'm not sure there's hard evidence of that either. Anecdotally, I know several people who play FarmVille regularly who would be great Wikimedia contributors.

The biggest point I'd like to make is that we shouldn't make the current diversity of our contributors for granted. We can make a difference. It starts by making a strong statement that diversity is important, then by following through on the low-hanging fruit for improving it. Moreover, let's be systematic in testing ideas and measuring their impact. It's easy to have opinions about all of these potential measures. Let's try them and see the actual impact, so that we're not just relying on opinions.

Well if not the quality of wikipedia, User: 146.155.21.158 has certainly made a impact on some of the quality of wikimedia and to thank him making the community in Talk:Strategic Plan/Movement Priorties more 'healthy and diverse' I will thank and also keep people healthy by offering piping hot chicken with extra helping of Wiki:Love. Mcjakeqcool Mcjakeqcool 23:38, 28 February 2011 (UTC)