On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Fred Bauder <[email protected]> wrote: >> For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any >> African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in >> a European country without African population, so everything seemed to >> me quite normal for a long time. >> >> I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans, >> but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with >> university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are >> African Americans and present US president is almost, too. >> >> What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively >> white? >> >> Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we >> solve to get more contributors. > > The short answer: Wikipedia editors are volunteers and African-Americans > rarely volunteer.
Regarding this claim in particular: incidentally, I was just at the Boardsource conference last week, which is an annual conference for board members and CEOs of non-profit organizations; it happened to be in San Francisco this year. There were maybe 600+ people there from organizations all over the country. Just from looking at the crowd, at least 10% -- probably more -- of the people there were African-American; these are all people who are leaders in their respective organizations, which ranged all over the place but seemed to be lots of health & human service organizations: child abuse prevention, food banks, YMCA, etc; as well as many other types of non-profits. And according to the U.S. volunteer agency stats on the subject, rates of African-American volunteerism are on the rise: http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/assets/resources/FactSheetFinal.pdf These rates lag behind the national average, but not by a huge amount. -- phoebe _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
