On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Steven Walling <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Ryan Kaldari <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> There is nothing stopping us, however, from analysing *relative* trends >> using existing data. For example, we could generate graphs showing the >> relative difference per month in edits by men and women and this data would >> be unaffected by the unreliability of the absolute numbers (since we would >> only be looking at changes in the percentages). >> > > Using bad data here is worse than having no data. As Aaron and I > recommended when we talked in person, we should not invest is using the > gendered language preference data to track overall gender among editors. > It's a case of garbage in, garbage out. Instead, we should be investing in > more reliable ways to track gender among the editor population, if it's a > metric that we care about. > You can get accurate information from bad or incomplete data. For example, I can measure changes in tide levels without knowing the volume of the ocean. That's all I'm proposing doing here, measuring the change per month. Please take a look at the Trello card for a more complete description of the proposal. Ryan Kaldari
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