Amir, It's funny - after reading your mail I wondered if I had read Romaine's mail correctly. Rereading both it seems that is exactly what you were trying to say - we all carry our own little bundle of biases with us whereever we go and whatever we read. When I read Romaine's mail I stopped cold at "tokenism" - for me tokenism is when you count the paintings by women in any museum and you find none of the women have more than one painting in the collection, though they have lots and lots of male artists with more than 20 works in the collection.
When it comes to Wiki meetups, everyone has their own reasons for wanting to come or not. I have a feeling at edit-a-thons open to the general public that it's a bit like being in a cage or aquarium where you yourself are the attraction. Instead of meeting people who want to contribute I tend to get questioned about my own motivations. I agree that as a member of this list I am already a hard-core insider of this movement and can no longer think about these things in a "normal" way (i.e. as a reader). What I do know from talking to lots of family and friends is that most people have absolutely no clue about our gaps in knowledge or have even heard of the gendergap at all. When I say gendergap, they think gender pay gap and I have to start explaining that no one is paid for their edits (which always leads the conversation into a whole new tangent). When it comes to the women, thankfully the word "nonbinary" is relatively new and we can easily measure the binary gender with Wikidata queries to see how we are doing. This is still sketchy and problematic, because lots of historical women and men still do not have their gender assigned at all on Wikidata - binary or not. We still can't measure gendergap per occupation, language, or citizenship however, because those statements are also still mostly lacking for most historical people. Citizenship is actually quite comical when you start drilling into the data on Wikidata. Some people want to be extremely specific about borders, which makes some towns flip all around in terms of citizenship for people who don't have precise birthdates - did I mention that women don't like to disclose their birthdates? I would LOVE to be able to count brown and black women, but this is of course completely off limits to us due to ethical concerns. Here in the Netherlands we are going to hold a hackathon for women. I will talk about Wikidata and hope to recruit a few women to help out with the maintenance lists on women, such as this one: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Women/Wiki_monitor/lawiki My hopes based on previous events, are not high. Best, Jane On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:03 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > This is a sensitive topic, and I'm a white man myself, so please slap me if > I say something dumb. > > 2018-05-07 7:10 GMT+03:00 Romaine Wiki <romaine.w...@gmail.com>: > > > > > What has happened? > > > > She was invited to participate in a Wikimedia activity, because: > > 1. she is a woman > > 2. she is from a minority > > 3. she is from an area in the world with much less editors (compared to > > Europe/US) > > > > and perhaps also because her colour of her skin is a bit different then > > mine (Caucasian). > > > > At the same time she has the impression that the work she does on the > > Wikimedia wiki('s) is not valued, nor taken into account. > > > > By whom? > > By the people who invited her? > > By other participants in the event? > > By other editors in the same wiki site? > > By the readers? > > > > > She does not want to be invited because she is a woman, nor because she > is > > from a minority, nor ....... etc. This is offensive. > > She only wants to be invited because of the work she contributes on > > Wikipedia/etc. > > > > This makes a lot of sense to me, but that's just me and attitudes are > different for each person. > > > > Besides the many good initiatives and intentions, this kind of approaches > > to our contributors is demotivating them, please be aware of this. > > > Again, it's probably demotivating to some. Maybe to 98%, maybe to 30%, > maybe to 5%. I honestly don't know. > > I believe demotivation/frustration is the largest problem we face as > > movement. > > > > I don't know if its the biggest problem. On this mailing list we are a > small group of meta-active Wikimedians, and we are the minority among > editors. We don't actually represent all the editors. And of course the > editors are a tiny minority compared to the readers. > > I'd argue that the hard time that some editors are giving newcomers is a > bigger problem. Gender is certainly a part of that, and there are many > other parts. > > We meta-wikimedians can find a better way to invite people to events, and > we can change ourselves. That doesn't sound too hard. Changing the wider > editor culture is harder. > > I heard from people that the problem described is called tokenism > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenism>. > > > > Yes, that's when representation is given to a weakened group, but that > representation is too weak to be meaningful, and may do more harm than > good. > > > > I believe the only way to close the gaps related to gender, minorities, > > etc, is to create an atmosphere in what everyone is appreciated for what > > she/he is doing, completely unrelated to the gender someone appears to > > have, the ethnicity, race, area of the world, etc etc etc etc. > > > > So that's where it gets really complicated, because it's always related, in > ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. > > Let's take school education as a hopefully easy example. People from > different areas of the world will have very different things to write about > it. In some areas of the world everybody gets school education—boys and > girls, rich and poor, rural and urban. In other areas it may be only boys; > or only people in cities; or only people who know a certain language; or > only people who belong to a certain religion; or only people who have a > certain amount of money; or only people who have a certain skin color. I > want articles about education to have contributions from as many people as > possible, from different genders, from different skin colors, and from > different areas, and so on. > > An American white woman has different things to say about education from an > American black man. These differences are important and frequently > discussed in American media. But the American white woman and the American > black man *don't even imagine* what people from The Philippines have to say > about education. What people from the Philippines have to say about > education probably has little to do with the internal American debates on > this topic. And of course it breaks down further, because a person who > lives in the capital of Philippines and knows English has different things > to say about education from a person who lives in a village in Philippines > and doesn't know English. > > On articles about education I want to hear from all of them. And about > every other topic. (And yes, I want contributions from people who don't > know English in the English Wikipedia. By definition they cannot contribute > directly, but we must do everything we can to make at least an indirect > contribution possible.) > > How do we do it right? > > How do we get more different people to even try to contribute to articles? > How do we get everybody's contributions to be accepted? (Guess whose > contributions are more likely to be challenged as "non-notable", > "unencyclopedic", or "unreferenced".) > > I don't know. Am I even asking the right questions? > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. 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