Re: [Gendergap] Women's wikipedia...was... Co-Op
* Carol Moore dc wrote: >Was thinking about reforming wikipedia again! (fool that I am) and I >started fantasizing about running into some billionaires I used to know >and suggesting they just grab a mirror of Wikipedia and do it the right >way > >Well, anyway, to make a long story, short I ran into this Wikipedia page >that tells you the copyright compliant way to do it. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks > >And various interesting things when I searched: >https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+mirror+sites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 > >It does seem in the past there were some mirror sights that would jump >up and be very up-to-date, but for whatever reason don't seem to run >into them as much as in the past. Google has taken various active steps over the years towards penalising mirror sites, including Wikipedia mirrors. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] gendergap research
* John Vandenberg wrote: >What research is needed? > >We have academics across the world who want to do research on Wikimedia. > >What questions can we put to the researchers in order to obtain a >better understanding of > >* why women don't contribute? >* what would help them contribute? >* other? http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2011-December/002134.html -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Larry Sanger's blog post: Should there be a Wikipedia boycott over the lack of an image filter?
* Laura Hale wrote: >There was a real feeling amongst some people that this was a >red-herring type issue that was taking away valuable time and resources >from doing activities towards increasing female participation on Wikimedia >related projects, and that to a certain degree, the obsession with this >topic was actively derailing the ability to work on these goals. Perhaps we could conduct an experiment to see whether there is any truth to that? Maybe someone could make this point on the "gendergap" mailing list, and then we'd look whether people will discuss increasing female participation on Wikipedia, or would instead discuss issues surrounding depictions of human nudity, like record keeping requirements in national jurisdictions... -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Research into causes of the gender gap?
* Ryan Kaldari wrote: >On 12/17/11 3:54 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: >> Almost a quarter of Wikipedia contributors also happen to >> contribute to open source software > >[citation needed] :) Read [[File:Editor Survey Report - April 2011.pdf]] on commons; Q9. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Research into causes of the gender gap?
* Johannes Rohr wrote: >So in essence you are saying that Wikipedia is a game that boys like >to play more than girls. And there is not much you can do about it, >because editing Wikipedia is more like building Lego space ships than >like playing with dolls? I am saying that women are not driven to do this kind of thing; you'll hear from female non-contributors that they don't know why they should contribute. Almost a quarter of Wikipedia contributors also happen to contribute to open source software, even though they are probably less than a percent among users. They are driven to do this kind of thing. There is much you can do about it, but you have to first understand it is a general societal thing; contributing to Wikipedia is not blogging, and so even if there is not much of gender gap in blogging, that does tell you anything about the gender gap among contributors to Wikipedia. >What I was wondering about is, has this or any other hypothesis >actually been substantiated with some real (quantitative or >qualitative) research? Is there more that anecdotal evidence, >providing some solid ground for us to set the right priorities? That women do not know why they should contribute to Wikipedia can be found in various surveys; beyond that I've not seen much of an attempt to underlying causes. Like in your initial question, people look for "deterrents", but not so much for motiviation or qualification beyond silly answer options like "I don't have enough information to share". You would have to ask questions like whether non-contributors are used to collaborate with large and diverse groups of mostly strangers. You would have to ask what people (intend to) do for a living. When they've last been recognized by a stranger for having built or made something, online in particular, perhaps from someone living on the other side of the planet. If they tell their friends they made some article about the local monument, would they find that cool, or not care, or what else do they think the reaction would be. Are they used to write texts in some semi-formal, fact-oriented writing style? Are they used to some form of markup, "bbcodes" on a forum, formatting tags on their blogs, perhaps a CMS syntax they use at work? Is there something they would like to see covered in Wikipedia that currently isn't, and do they feel able to do the research needed to make one, even if they don't have the time? How would they like to be among the people who made Wikipedia? Open source developers are hundreds of times as likely as women to be a Wikipedia contributor, they tend to "build stuff" for a living, they are likely to have experience with collaborating with strangers, they tend to write documentation in some non-personal writing style, they tend to have their contributions in this area recognized by their peers, they're likely to have experience with code, and so on. They probably often like this whole Sharing Stuff thing, the ability to find something online and add to it to make it better. Every time you load a Wikipedia page, it'll have run through hundreds of lines of code I wrote when in secondary e- ducation when friends of mine played some football game. I am quite sure I am getting a greater kick out of that than they got from their game. Instead of looking at this, you get survey reports with "Percent of female editors who reported experiencing the listed harassment" where one of the "listed harassments" is "Someone tried to flirt with me". -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Research into causes of the gender gap?
* Johannes Rohr wrote: >I recently joined this list as I am one of the persons in charge of >the community-oriented goals which Wikimedia Deutschland has set for >itself for the coming year, one of which is to increase female >participation in Wikimedia activities & projects by 50% until the end >of 2012, I am well aware that this is a very ambitious target, and I >feel that in order to maximise the chances of meeting it, we will have >to be as clear as we can about what are the main deterrents, >preventing Wikimedia from developing the same way as the rest of the >Internet in terms of narrowing the Gender gap. What is it that makes >Wikipedia so different, that the seemingly natural disappearance of >the gender gap which we have seen in the Blogosphere and in social >media, seems to completely pass by the Wikiverse? You are comparing a global project to build an encyclopedia with media for self-expression and communication. There are gender gaps in other areas. Lego for instance, where you build things from little bricks, in computing where people build information systems, in architecture where people build buildings, in civil engineering where people build bridges and dams, in construction, in production, where you also build things, and also in maintenance where people keep things once built in a con- dition so they keep performing the functions they were built for. This varies across regions but the trend is fairly consistent. The Internet does not really matter here, other online projects where people build things also suffer from low female participation. I make open source software, very few women there, I make web standards, help design and define the technology that enable things like Wikipedia, you don't get to see many women there either, I follow the Demoscene, a competitive computer art sub-culture where men compete on who makes the best animations, computer graphics, digital music, and so forth, and when you spot a woman there it's probably a girlfriend. Female parti- cipation increases as you move towards individual self-expression, say creating fan-artwork, or as you mention blogs and "social media", I'd suppose product reviews, general "talk" forums and chats, and so on. If all boys would, as they grow up, play nursing baby dolls, play having the neighbours over for dinner, dress up Ken with various clothes and accessories; and girls would be building lego space ships to conquer the galaxy, would command grand armies in computer games, would play with action figures of super heros that fight for truth and justice, who'd be writing Wikipedia then? I don't know the answer, but it seems obvious to me that in order to understand the Wikipedia "gender gap" you would have to understand how to reverse the roles, make it so Wikipedia is edited mostly by females, not just how to remove what some suspect a deterrent might be to increase participation by three or so percentage points. And so the most important answer you'll find in surveys is that women often are unsure why they should contribute to Wikipedia, while this seems to come naturally to men. >I have seen a number of quantitative studies, which unambiguously >confirm the existence of the gender gap as such, but I have seen very >little on what causes it to be so persistent in the Wikiverse. There >is a number of commonly proposed explanations such as the discussion >culture and the poor usability. If those were the main issues, you would have to address them in a form where the improvements only attract women without attracting more men to actually close the "gender gap", or at least disproportionally so. That may be rather difficult to achieve beyond the margins of error in sur- veys. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] study about gendered names and IRC
* Ryan Kaldari wrote: >I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study >that was conducted regarding IRC: >http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf > >The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some >female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high >traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they >received. The bots themselves were completely silent. It seems only some of the bots were silent. I could not find how they determined there were humans on the other hand. If I ran spambots that tried to lure people on malicious web sites or whatever, I would make them pick out new users or users with unusual nicknames, as they would otherwise be quickly discovered and probably only hit experienced users who are not too likely to fall for this kind of thing. Also, a channel like "#poker" sounds more like a nest for spambots. Similarily, my im- pression is that the networks they used do not require anything special to send private messages. In contrast, on Freenode these days you have to authenticate to services which in turn requires registration which in turn requires confirming an e-mail address, as I recall it anyway. If you don't have that, spambots should not be a big surprise. In the ten years I've hung out on freenode, I got maybe one or two messages that might fall vaguely in any of the categories here, so this isn't telling me much really. Long before freenode, pretty much the first IRC channel I got on was by invitation. My internet service provider was sending out incorrect bills to users of a recently introduced service and I was looking for other victims and was told several people in that channel had the same trouble so I went there and chatted with folks in the channel. Turned out that the vast majority of people there were lesbians. Don't recall attacks on that network either, but that was in the 1990s before spam was a notable problem. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] wiki-post-it increases female participation, and replaces image filter?
* rupert THURNER wrote: >to increase female participation, drjunge suggests to implement "post-it"s. >they can be placed on any position into wikipedia pages, and are only >personally viewable in a first step. later the visibility might be extended >just like with other social networks. one funny side-usage of these >post-its is that they of course can be placed onto images one does not like. > >as i am not female and not non-participating, i'd wonder what you think >about such an idea? If you want to close the "gendergap" then you have to think about how to turn 10% female participation into 90% female participation. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] AfD on woman musician's BLP
* Carol Moore wrote: >Because the two editors calling for deletion may be biased vs. woman >pianist's ethnicity, I don't know if this really is an article fit for >deletion, especially for those of us who are inclusionists. Could you explain the difference between people who are biased with respect to other people's ethnicity -- and racists? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] User blocked for sexist comment, many disagree - it wasn't sexist.
* ChaoticFluffy wrote: >Hi Björn, thanks for a very thoughtful email. I just want to point out that >the problematic comment the user made was not calling another user a woman. If you think we would be better off if the comment had not been made in the manner it has been made, I think we should look at what lead to it and how to avoid similar circumstances that may lead to similar comments in the future. I offered an interpretation and steps to mitigate this kind of problem in the future in line with my personal experience. I do not care about identifying the greatest offense, I care about educating people so they can understand reactions to their communications and be- havior before they communicate and do things. Consider how this incident would have unfolded if the blocked user had never called the other user a "he". It wouldn't have, there would have been no reason to point this apparent mistake out, no need to respond, no warning, no response to the warning, no block, no discussion about the block, no thread here, etc. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] User blocked for sexist comment, many disagree - it wasn't sexist.
* Sarah Stierch wrote: >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Block_review_for_Baseball_Bugs User Medeis does not identify as female in any easily recognizable way. It is difficult to avoid gender in the english language without running into other problems (repeating the name all the time is likely seen as aggressive, for instance). When a misplaced "he" slips, getting caught would be embarassing and if you feel like responding, deflecting that with an attempt at humour is quite normal, as is making reference to the issue, so the "*That* clarifies it. :)" is quite expected. Knowing that I would either not point the gender mixup out at all, or at the least, would make it a (...) top-level comment rather than a response without deemphasis, so the information is there, but people would not feel particularily inclined to respond. If I wanted to help the blocked user to avoid this kind of remark, I'd send them a private message linking a tutorial that discusses ways to write in a gender neutral manner and other gender etiquette issues that are relevant on Wikipedia, like whether it's okay to say "she" when the name sounds very female but you cannot be certain of it, or how to react when you are mistaken, as may have been the case here. I could not find one in the english Wikipedia namespace though, it may have to be written first. >The first "unblock" statement shares the link to the joke and the reprimand >by an admin on the users page telling them they can get blocked for ongoing >comments like that. Fluffernutter points out that there is a "boyzone" in >Wikipedia and that it's not right to mock a users gender. I do appreciate >Fluffernuter speaking up about this, I know it's not always something that >she likes to get mixed up with (so to say - as we talked about in IRC >today). Well, "boyzone" might not be a good word to use when you want to convey that gender should not be highlighted inappropriately. It's been some time, but I've been part of online fora frequented mostly by young women and remarks like the one here directed at me were quite normal and mutually understood as good humour in almost all cases. It doesn't take all that much, in the right context, to make a similar remark that would actually hurt whoever it is directed at, though. I got that aswell. >Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, an educational environment. And when people >have to start questioning "Is this offensive or not? Is it sexist or not?" >then clearly there is a problem with something in the culture and system. There are actually two dimensions to "sexist". If we all agree that sexist remarks are bad and wrong, then remarks you do not find bad or wrong cannot be sexist, so you have a conflict between the intuitive understanding and the textbook definition. It's normal that our intu- itions are sometimes a bit off. Centuries ago it may have been normal to say and mean certain things about women that today everybody would readily recognize as highly offensive, or hilariously ludicrous. Such changes do not occur over night and everwhere at the same pace. If we do not have to question whether, say, "a woman's place is in the kitchen" is offensive, that may mean we all agree that's her place. If the exchange had been "Her current age is a prime number", "*That* clarifies it. :)" we wouldn't find that offensive and don't have a word like "sexism" for the remark, we rather wouldn't understand where this is coming from. Whether it's gender or prime numbers, the two comments didn't really contribute to the discussion, and wandering into the off- topic quickly leads to communication problems (see my initial comments). It seems obvious to me that no offense was intended here. I very much doubt that blocking a user will help him avoid communication accidents in the future. Neither would I expect an administrator leaving notes on sexist jokes on a user's pillory-esque public talk page to help much. I would be much more impressed by a brief and carefully worded private note explaining some other user's perspective on what I wrote with no expectation on me to take any action (including responding to the mail). Next time I am about to write something similar, I would have this on my mind and would try to look at that through this other perspective I have learned about and could adapt without feeling uncomfortable with my own intuition. In contrast, if I feel like I should react to such a note, I would have to decide whether to reject the criticism, or admit to having behaved poorly, or something similar; any of that would annoy me a lot, and next time I would primarily recall being annoyed, rather than concentrate on how my communications come across. My experience is quite universally that the subtle and helpful approach works much better in cases where there is hope for a net positive change. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49
