Jason, thanks for your work. The problem you are trying to solve, however, is still not well-defined. Yes, we lack female editors, and yes, this probably has an adverse effect on our content. Until we understand why the women are not participating, and why when they do, they drop off more rapidly than men, it is fruitless to try to ramp up participation among women. In fact, this could worsen the situation if we manage to gain on board tons of women who leave in frustration after a few weeks or months, never to come back. We would then be damaging our chances to gain editors who could be become highly valued contributors. Other, unrelated research has shown that reversions have a tendency to drive people away very effectively, and new users have become more likely to be reverted since 2006. My suspicion is that women are affected by reversions more than men. If we think of this whole problem area as a multi-step process, then I think we need to set up something like this for every nth new user (male or female, whoever agrees to participate): 1) one-on-one interviews at start of sign-up 2) periodic checkup interviews per month 3) exit interviews at end of 3-month non-activity period.
Once we understand the issues affecting newbies better, we can implement changes (or not) that can improve our lopsided participation profile (not just for gender but for all other participation gaps as well). On the content side, there is nothing preventing us from actively and aggressively starting translation efforts to spread the female biographies we already have across more language versions of Wikipedia. Wikipedia suffers from the gendergap in academic bias and is in fact worse by definition, because Wikipedia follows academia, and does not create original research (according to policy). Notability issues (because women didn't make the grade in early dictionaries of biography) become more prominent for women, just as they do for under-privileged non-white-US groups, so the women's biographies that are already out there in some language version are probably notable enough to be translated into any other language version. Having female biographies to read in any Wikipedia category breeds the creation/addition of more biographies by encouraging a "copycat" effect. Similarly, as women tend to be more oriented towards family issues, education, and daily life, we should aggressively ramp up coverage such as round-the-world customs regarding graduation ceremonies, weddings, funerals, baby showers, etc. Also, things like clothing items and accessories, fashion trends, and cooking utensils are all notoriously under-covered on Wikipedia in all languages, whereas lots of content that is there in some language could just be translated across wikis. It is my expectation that Wikidata will make such translation tasks trivial and building interfaces to add content through translations is a type of contribution that can attract casual new users without seeming too threatening (in terms of potentially being reverted). Jane On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Jason Radford <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Since participating in the Inspire campaign, I got interested in the > question of exactly how many women would be needed on Wikipedia to close > the gender gap. I ran some simulations and came up with some fairly > radical numbers. For example, according to my calculations, there are so > few current and new female editors that, even if every current and new > active, female editor stayed active for ten years, we wouldn't close the > gap. > > I've posted the results > <https://civilsociology.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/closing-the-gender-gap-on-wikipedia-results-from-some-simulations/> > to my blog. It's password protected so I can share the results and get > feedback without making it pubic. You can access them by using the > password "wikipedia". I'm hoping some of you with experience researching > gender representation on Wikipedia would be able to catch any errors. > > Thanks! > Jason > -- > Jason Radford > Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago > Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University > *Connect*: LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/jsradford>, Twitter > <http://www.twitter.com/jsradford>, University of Chicago > <http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Ejsradford/> > *Play Games for Science at Volunteer Science > <http://www.volunteerscience.com>* > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >
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