Thanks for the link, that was an interesting piece of research. I’m glad, though not surprised to see that among the regulars women are more likely to become admins than men. I would like to count that as evidence that the core community is not consciously sexist, though it may also be proof of a theory of mine about the heyday of Adminship 2004-2007 - just before I started editing. This was the era when “good vandalfighter” was sufficient qualification to pass adminship. It was also the era when a lot of teenagers and adolescents came to the defence of wikipedia and patrolled it for the sort of vandalism that is now reverted by computer programs. My hypothesis about that era is that teenage boys would oppose each others requests for adminship (RFA) if they thought that other boys were younger or less qualified than they had been when they became admins. But teenage boys didn’t oppose the RFAs of teenage girls. Girls, and women in general, are less likely to push the boundaries by running for adminship before they are clearly qualified, and here I think the vagueness of the criteria for adminship may deter women more than men. It would be interesting to look at the gender ratios of clear versus narrow results at RFA, I suspect that women are disproportionately among the near unanimous results (>95% support) as opposed to those with more substantial opposition.
I am disappointed to hear that the gender ratio is not improving, but considering the ossification of a broadly stable community and the shorter Wikipedia career of women, the risk is that the gender gap grows over time unless we can lengthen the Wiki career of women or get an infusion of new women into the community. The higher revert rate, and greater contention, does leave me wondering if Wikipedia’s notability criteria may be institutionally sexist or at least a reflection of sexism in society. In academia and many other professions it is or has been harder to get to the top if you take a career break to have a family. Wikipedia’s notability criteria generally skew our biographies to those who get to the top in their professions. This could be a double whammy for women editors, if they write about other women they may be steering themselves to subjects deemed by wikipedia to be more marginally notable, and if they seek to avoid controversy by writing about the unsung figures in a field they are skewing themselves towards articles where sufficient notability for includion in Wikipedia is itself controversial. The huge differential between female readership and female editorship and our relative failure compared to some other sites leaves me wondering how much of this is down to our problems with mobile editing. In theory Wikipedia can be edited on the mobile platform, however very very few do that, and the mobile platform is much closer to being a broadcast media than the “desktop” platform. If the gender ratio among PC and netbook users is different to the gender ratio among tablet and smartphone readers then this could account for some of our gender imbalance - and make improving editing on mobile a gendergap issue as well as an ethnic-gap issue. WSC Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: Wiki-research-l <wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 1:05:02 AM To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published! Pine This paper has some good studies about gender and new editors and reverting https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shilad_Sen/publication/221367798_WPClubhouse_An_exploration_of_Wikipedia's_gender_imbalance/links/54bacca00cf253b50e2d0652/WPClubhouse-An-exploration-of-Wikipedias-gender-imbalance.pdf It shows that both male and female newbies are equally likely to drop out after being reverted for good-faith edits, BUT that female newbies are more likely to be reverted than male newbies, leading to a greater proportion of them dropping out. It also shows that male and female editors tend to be attracted to different types of topic. "There is a greater concentration of females in the People and Arts areas, while males focus more on Geography and Science." (see Table 1 in the paper). And their engagement with History seems lower. So why are newbie women reverted more? This paper does not investigate that. But I think it has to be either than they are reverted because they are women (i.e. conscious discrimination) or because women's edits are less acceptable in some way. I have *hypothesised* that newbie women may get reverted more because women show higher interest in People but not in History suggesting women are more likely to be editing articles about living people than about dead people. BLP policy is stricter on verification compared with dead people topics, or with topics in male-attracting topics like Geography and Science, so women are perhaps doing more BLP edits as newbies and more likely to be reverted because they fail to provide a citation or their citation comes from a source which may not be considered reliable (e.g. celebrity magazine). If this could be established as at least a part of the problem, maybe there might be targeted solutions to address the problem. E.g. maybe newbies should not be allowed to edit articles which are BLP or have a high revert history (suggesting it's dangerous territory for some reason, e.g. real-world controversy, "ownership") and are deflected to the Talk page to suggest edits (as with a protected article or semi-protected article). Currently we auto-confirm user accounts at 10 edits or 4 days (from memory). But these thresholds are based on the likelihood of vandalism (early good-faith behaviour is a good predictor of future good faith behaviour). But, having trained people, I know that the auto-confirmation threshold should not be used as "beyond newbie" indicator; they are newbies for many more edits. How many edits do you need to stop being a newbie? I don't know, but as I know myself with over 100k edits, if I edit an article outside my normal interests, I am far more likely to be reverted than in my regular topic area, so we can all be newbies in unfamiliar topic spaces. There is a lot of convention, pre-existing consensus and other "norms" in topic spaces that the "newbie to this topic" doesn't know. All editors in this situation may back off, but the established editor has a comfort zone (normal topic space) to return to, the total newbie does not. Kerry _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
