diversity

Robert Horning, the dynamic that you describe plays itself out in various ways and definitely has an effect on the volunteer editor's level of participation in various tasks. And I think that we may be introducing bias into our decision making and our processes if we have allow them to be designed by our high volume contributors.

We need to find a way to include as many people as possible. One of the main reasons that women give me for not participating more is "too busy". I think that it is not so much a complete lack of time to make any edits but rather something more along the lines of the situations that you describe.

This problem was something that the Wikipedia English Arbitration Committee was faced with on a regular basis for our internal work. It is not a good practice to always have the decision making framed by the person with the most free time so it is important to put processes in places to make sure that the work is spread out across the broad spectrum of the group (be it a committee, wiki, or article).

FloNight♥♥♥09:57, 12 May 2010

FloNight, could you elaborate or give some examples from ArbCom? Dealing with the time differences and commitment differences between editors is a difficult part of consensus building and discussion. The squeakiest wheel usually gets the grease... or at least gets more attention than the other wheels.

Randomran15:28, 12 May 2010