> Hello, > > My name is Nicole Willson and I have been editing wikis for the past 5 > years, mostly wikiHow. Some of you know me and some of you don't so I > figured I'd write a brief intro first. I also was one of the organizers > for > Recent Changes Camp in Boston (which had a high percentage of female > attendees), have taught wikis to middle schoolers and worked/interned at > various feminist organizations including the New York City Chapter of NOW > and the YWCA in Princeton. > > I've been lurking on the list and have almost participated in some of the > conversations, but wanted to get a feel for the culture here first. I > considered contributing to the conversation about what motivates women to > edit but didn't for the following reasons: > > - I am not sure that my motivations are that different from that of men. > - I am not sure how much of my motivation has to do with my gender and > how > much of it has to do with my personality or past experiences. > - I was afraid that someone would take my reasons and turn them into some > broader stereotype about women, like what happened with most women > editors > being wiki gnomes. > - I could have responded with information about women editors based on > personal experience and stats from the Poynter, but didn't want to > detract > from the current conversation about how to get more female involvement in > the WMF projects. > > I don't mind that there are men on the list. Personally, I believe that > men > can be feminists and work against sexism. I do think that they have > something to offer. For example, there's the National Organization for > Men > Against Sexism which is very active in Boston and does talks in > conjunction > with NOW and they work together on events to discuss how to eliminate > sexism. > > I just wish to be asked things directly, instead of having people make > assumptions about my experience as a woman with wikis. It's great that > the > men on this list know women who edit and are in discussion with them, but > I'd rather hear directly from those women if at all possible. > > I was encouraged to join this list by folks on #wiki in freenode and I do > think I could help. I wish there was a list of things I could do to help > (which was actually one of my barriers to entry for Wikipedia, not being > able to figure out the roles I could take on right away). For example, > half > of the female admins that we know the gender for on wikiHow are female, > and > I'm sure some of them would be happy to talk about why they are involved > with wikiHow as opposed to Wikipedia (where many of them have accounts) > if > they were asked. I also have some theories about why wikiHow has more > women > (NOTE: nobody involved in the wikiHow project ever intentionally designed > the site so that there would be more women, it just happened that way). I > may be able to help with this and with the efforts going on in NYC. > > Lastly, I had a question about Fred's statement about rules. If following > rules isn't that important in the beginning, how come I have only gotten > feedback once about what I've done wrong with date formatting and never > gotten a message about what I've done right on Wikipedia? I've made at > least > 150 edits, so one of them must have been good, right? Instead I get a > message about date formatting (which someone else could probably fix > easily) > and told to look at the MoS (which assumes that I know that it stands for > Manual of Style). It seems to me that there may be a disconnect here.
Yes, we're definitely running on one cylinder with respect to positive feedback. If the Metaverse Mod Squad http://www.metaversemodsquad.com/ were hired to evaluate and improve our operation (actually possible, but I have no idea what the terms would be) I'm pretty sure that would be one of the first of many things they would advise and organize. There is a lot of resistance to some simple game-like reward system, points even like you get on Yahoo Answers. No one has ever taken such suggestions seriously. I remember when I was playing on Northern Lights, a game, another player would chat and occasionally give me a cookie. And you can do that on Wikipedia, a barnstar or a whole cheesecake, see Wikipedia:Awards Of course, there, on Northern Lights, there was a real time chat system inside the game. We might or might not benefit from that. I think further development of our anemic reward system is something we could do. The great userbox row relates to this somehow as it was a sort of social media devise which made user pages into a sort of defining portrait of the editor, see Wikipedia:Userbox policy poll These: Wikipedia:Userboxes/Politics#Feminist_movement may be interesting, btw. Fred _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap