On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:05 PM, emijrp <emi...@gmail.com> wrote: > By the way, you can't invite 1000 women that a day after leave because they > don't understand how to edit (usability) or other reason. First, you have to > understand why women leave. When you solves that, every woman that arrives, > will continue editing "forever". You won't need to invite them. > I agree with this point, and I wonder whether we're approaching outreach from the wrong perspective. We are asking "what is good for Wikipedia?" when we should be asking "what is good for the women we want to sign up?" If we create an environment in which they can thrive, then they'll come and they'll stay, and we won't have to keep begging them to join us.
But we have serious problems in the community. I've been on wikibreak for a few months, during which time I barely looked at Wikipedia (the English Wikipedia). When I did start to look again, I saw a community that is really fracturing. Lots of serious incivility, old grudges being played out in various places, and what one editor called regular Leninist purges. None of this is new, but it's getting worse. Plus, too many rules too rigidly enforced, too many confusing templates, and a push for quality that often boils down to endless nitpicking. And the most off-putting thing of all -- you spend hours, days or weeks on a piece of work only to see someone come along and casually destroy it. It is causing established editors to leave or reduce their involvement, including some of the few women we have. Old editors are leaving for the same reasons new editors are failing to arrive or stay. As I've argued many times, we need less outreach and more "inreach". Can we persuade the Foundation to be more hands-on in dealing with the existing issues, rather than outreach? For example, I'm thinking it could offer a $15,000 prize for an essay that best gives us insight into the problems -- competition widely advertised, and open to anyone, including non-Wikimedians -- judging panel to be composed of Foundation employees. Perhaps a major publisher could be persuaded to publish the winning entry as an extra incentive. I'm also thinking the Foundation could hire a consultant on how to fix toxic communities. We are basically confronting a kind of workplace bullying as the essence of the problem, and there are plenty of people around who specialize in that. We tried to persuade the Foundation some years ago to hire a consultant on how to handle harassment, but it didn't work out. I think if we had done that, quite a few of the issues we see now might have turned out differently. I wonder whether the Foundation feels conflicted in this. On the one hand, they want to promote the idea that "Wikipedia is wonderful. Come and join us!" On the other hand, acknowledging the community's problems too openly puts out the opposite of that message. So we end up not getting the kind of all-out, top-down push for community health that we need. Sarah _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
