diversity

ha! I just reread Philippe's quilting comment, and he was actually talking about _online_ quilting communities, which debunks all my face-to-face stuff. But most of what I wrote is still generally applicable, I think :-)

Sue Gardner20:43, 15 June 2010
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Last edit: 21:09, 15 June 2010

I think you're right it is still applicable. I also think the face to face stuff is important as well. With no scientific (or for that matter very unscientific) studies I do feel that the women who are in the community tend to value "personal" interaction more. Whether that's meetups, skype, IRC or just personal email conversations I feel they like to understand a bit more about the people they are working with then the men do.

The combination of online work with some offline interaction (even rarely) can increase the trust and respect level greatly. Of course that's speaking very broadly and there are obvious exceptions, as a man for example I highly prefer a lot of those personal connections as well. I know you had a post on Foundation-l... oh a month or so ago about how you had met one of the commentators people thought was being rude/abusive and therefore looked at him a different way because you had seen him to be much less so in person. I think it is things like that that are great examples. I know that I felt much more connected to the community after my first meetup and I think more interaction like that could be good both for women and men. Editing to replace sig, edited logged out

Jamesofur 21:04, 15 June 2010 (UTC)21:02, 15 June 2010

Thanks Jamesofur; I agree with you.

And it's funny -- I wouldn't necessarily say that the women currently active on Wikimedia are particularly representative of their gender. (I hope that in saying that, I am being offensive to neither the women on Wikimedia, nor women in general ;-)

I do think it's possible that --even so--- some of them may, sometimes, display gender characteristics that are overrepresented among women generally -- e.g., as you say. they may be better at personal interaction. But I don't think we can assume they are generally representative of their gender.

Which is totally fine. In my view, the women active on Wikimedia today are in a similar position to the women who were starting to break through corporate glass ceilings in the eighties. (My mother was one of those --she was the first female principal in her public school board--, and I've worked with plenty of them -- they were all one generation ahead of me, so they were typically my bosses and sometimes mentors.)

There were a couple of things about those women that seemed to me to be characteristic // common to them all.

1) They weren't representative of 'typical' women. It's hard to define or even imagine what a typical woman is, but regardless, by definition, those early pathbreakers were unusual. For many, that meant they were unusually smart or dedicated or focused. (One of them, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city, had this line: "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." Ha ha.) And some of them had characteristics that made them more-easily-integrated into corporate-male-majority circles, relative to more gender-typical women. For example, they might have a personal style that tended more towards authoritative than warm.... they might be more inclined to show anger rather than fear ..... they might tend to be less harmony-focused and less conflict-averse ..... they might like sports, or pretend to like sports, etc. etc. etc.

Similarly, I would say the women currently active on Wikimedia might overrepresent "typical Wikimedian" characteristics, more-so than "typically female" characteristics.

2) Those pathbreaking women in the eighties were often expected to represent all women and women's interests, which many of them _really_didn't want to do. They wanted to be perceived and evaluated based on their unique skills and characteristics and qualities. But because there were so few of them, they were often expected to represent all women, which many of them resented. (The same is true for any 'diversity' characteristic, of course: at the CBC for example, journalists from visible minority backgrounds often struggled with expectations that they would have special insight into their community-of-ethnic-origin -- which many did not have, and did not want to develop.) It was complicated: they wanted more women around in part so they would themselves be normalized... but they did not necessarily want to make increasing-female-representation their own focus of work.

I think the same thing is true, to some extent, for women on Wikimedia. Probably most would be uncomfortable speaking on behalf of 'all women,' and I expect that many of them would be happy to have a large volume of female participation in the projects, because it would free them to be 'just a person,' rather than 'unusual due to gender.' Free software communities talk a fair bit about this issue --- for example, in this classic essay by Val Henson here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

I am not disagreeing with anything you said, just commenting a little -- I will probably stop banging on about gender here soon, but I do find these issues really interesting :-)

Sue Gardner20:08, 16 June 2010

I would really love for someone to do a true systematic study of motivations and barriers for both male and female contributors. I know that Wikisym this year is talking about having a meeting about researching Wikipedia; maybe I can find an ethnographer or something that I can really push towards this.  :-)

~Philippe (WMF)20:27, 16 June 2010

Yeah, I would love that too. (And I am always in favour of research.) But honestly, there is a lot that's already well known and documented -- this is in no way a unique problem, and our circumstances WRT gender aren't that unusual. For example, there's lots of overlap with open source communities challenges, and lots of overlap with females-in-technology challenges generally.

Kirrily Robert's done lots of good writing, as have other LinuxChix and WikiChix people.

Some semi-random interesting reading.....

I think we need to begin acting on what we know, and expanding some of the experiments that have already begun. Lots of it is obvious work, it just needs some focused attention :-)

Sue Gardner21:53, 16 June 2010

Aye I agree, more research (especially wiki oriented) would be great. All I basically have it my own uninformed mind ramblings :)

Thank you for the links, starting to work through them now but very interesting it really is an interesting issue but I think it is the time to look at it and I feel there have to be ways to help it along in a more diverse direction and that is by far the biggest thing since there is definitely economies of scale making it easier as we go.

Jamesofur05:33, 18 June 2010
 
 
 
 
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Last edit: 01:28, 17 June 2010

I think that there are four three major barriers to entry on Wikimedia projects, and I don't feel that they are terribly different for women or men.

1) Usability: If you can't figure out wikicode, you can't edit to any substantive degree. It's as simple as that. Wikicode has grown ever more complex over time, but that's only because it has gained much needed functionality. A combination of two (user selectable) separate editors for Wikimedia projects might solve this, if that were possible: a normal editor, with standard wikicode, and a WYSIWYG editor (shutters), to which new accounts default.

2) Cabal: New users feel like they're being treated as inferiors by established users. They feel that their opinions aren't valued, and that their edits are patrolled. They're right:P. I do this to all newbies I encounter. I try to be polite about it, and I try to AGI, but I don't automatically trust new users (AGI is en.Wikinews's version of AGF. It's different than AGF due to the demanding nature of factchecking news). They usually don't know what they're talking about, and they may well accidentally mis-edit a page and require reversion. That's just the nature of being a newbie.

However, I recall being a newbie, and I didn't like how I was treated. I almost left Wikinews due to the rudeness I encountered, and the sheer, overwhelming weight of the bureaucracy on Wikipedia weighed down on me until I eventually quit editing (beyond minor copyediting). Simply being polite to new users would go a long way to fixing this problem, IMO.

3) I completely forgot: I have no idea what I was planning to write here, but it was awesome, I assure you.

4) Bureaucracy: As mentioned above, Wikimedia's (in particular Wikipedia) level of red tape has become so extreme that you need to sign forms in triplicate before you're allowed to edit any non-backwater page. Whatever happened to "the only rule is that there are no rules"? There are so many rules that new users feel overwhelmed.

Barriers aside, my feeling is that the gender divide is caused almost entirely by two things: 1) women not having as much free time, and 2) women just not seeing the point of participating in Wikimedia projects. These projects are set up with a reward structure similar to those in MMOGs: "increase your online wang" (edit count), "grind XP to level up" (gain admin power), "grind rep" ('win' community discussions *eyeroll*), and "camp spawns" (watch articles of your choice, revert whenever possible in order to show you're good at anti-vandalism). I'm not sure if you're familiar with MMOGs, but they are traditionally geared toward OCD males... and looky there! That's Wikimedia's prime target demographic as well;).

Removing the "grind" from Wikimedia projects, if that's possible, and revamping the reward structure so that it appeals to people that aren't OCD college age males should be our main priorities. I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished. For the record MMOG developers are having the same issues. They want to appeal to mass audiences, but are stuck with a total worldwide subscriber base of ~40-50 million due to the OCD nature of their games. Anyone who doesn't tend toward twitchy behaviour finds MMOGs boring in the extreme. The developers would like to change that and expand their audience... but how?

Gopher65talk21:20, 15 June 2010

This is all really interesting -- and some of it is totally new to me. I'm going to do more reading on MMOGs -- feel free to point me towards useful stuff if you know any :-)

(Side note but also interesting -- the book CyberChiefs: Autonomy and Authority In Online Tribes, by Mathieu O'Neill. He studies primitivism.com, Daily Kos, Debian and us, and has some interesting observations about gender.)

Sue Gardner21:58, 16 June 2010
 

Wow...I can't believe I'm joining this discussion just now! :P

While I wouldn't disagree that the "grind" really has a lot to do with editors joining (and subsequently staying) on a Wikimedia project, I think it also has a lot to do with how the projects' image, both internally and externally, has changed over the last ten years. In my part of the woods, people look at the projects as simply resources, and that's it. They see no incentive to edit because they think that people will be doing those things for them, and that's the mindset that we're working to change. On the Tagalog Wikipedia, we have an active campaign to encourage anonymous users and casual readers to edit, and though I'm not sure just how successful the campaign is, I can say that at least we get the message across.

At least here, MMORPGs are popular because not only do we make lots of them every year, and not only are they a billion-peso industry because of all the material that are being sold, but because they are capable of 'clicking' with the population. Now the question is how to make Wikimedia 'click'.

Sky Harbor (talk)03:51, 18 June 2010