Jason, Thanks for this thoughtful analysis. I think you've done an excellent job laying out your reasoning.
Unfortunately, as you know well, any analysis of the gender gap and the retention of women editors necessarily involves a lot of estimates and extrapolations. Some of that is unavoidable without conducting a new full-scale research project (such as getting an accurate, up-to-date % of women editors to replace old estimates from previous studies). But other estimates can probably be replaced with fresh data at reasonable cost, and could refine your projections. For example, it shouldn't be too difficult to generate new editor retention numbers, like those from the editor trends study, with publicly available data. It's possible that we're retaining active editors at a different rate than we were in 2009. We're certainly retaining *new* editors at a lower rate than we were back then. Overall, I agree that radical action is probably necessary if we want to see substantial increases in women editing. The outcome of several Inspire grants might help inform those actions: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Survey_women_who_don%27t_contribute Thanks again for sharing! Please keep us posted, Jonathan On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 5:09 PM, 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 > > -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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