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
