This is a sensitive topic, and I'm a white man myself, so please slap me if
I say something dumb.
2018-05-07 7:10 GMT+03:00 Romaine Wiki <romaine.w...@gmail.com>:
>
> What has happened?
>
> She was invited to participate in a Wikimedia activity, because:
> 1. she is a woman
> 2. she is from a minority
> 3. she is from an area in the world with much less editors (compared to
> Europe/US)
>
> and perhaps also because her colour of her skin is a bit different then
> mine (Caucasian).
>
> At the same time she has the impression that the work she does on the
> Wikimedia wiki('s) is not valued, nor taken into account.
>
By whom?
By the people who invited her?
By other participants in the event?
By other editors in the same wiki site?
By the readers?
> She does not want to be invited because she is a woman, nor because she is
> from a minority, nor ....... etc. This is offensive.
> She only wants to be invited because of the work she contributes on
> Wikipedia/etc.
>
This makes a lot of sense to me, but that's just me and attitudes are
different for each person.
> Besides the many good initiatives and intentions, this kind of approaches
> to our contributors is demotivating them, please be aware of this.
Again, it's probably demotivating to some. Maybe to 98%, maybe to 30%,
maybe to 5%. I honestly don't know.
I believe demotivation/frustration is the largest problem we face as
> movement.
>
I don't know if its the biggest problem. On this mailing list we are a
small group of meta-active Wikimedians, and we are the minority among
editors. We don't actually represent all the editors. And of course the
editors are a tiny minority compared to the readers.
I'd argue that the hard time that some editors are giving newcomers is a
bigger problem. Gender is certainly a part of that, and there are many
other parts.
We meta-wikimedians can find a better way to invite people to events, and
we can change ourselves. That doesn't sound too hard. Changing the wider
editor culture is harder.
I heard from people that the problem described is called tokenism
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenism>.
>
Yes, that's when representation is given to a weakened group, but that
representation is too weak to be meaningful, and may do more harm than good.
> I believe the only way to close the gaps related to gender, minorities,
> etc, is to create an atmosphere in what everyone is appreciated for what
> she/he is doing, completely unrelated to the gender someone appears to
> have, the ethnicity, race, area of the world, etc etc etc etc.
>
So that's where it gets really complicated, because it's always related, in
ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes invisible.
Let's take school education as a hopefully easy example. People from
different areas of the world will have very different things to write about
it. In some areas of the world everybody gets school education—boys and
girls, rich and poor, rural and urban. In other areas it may be only boys;
or only people in cities; or only people who know a certain language; or
only people who belong to a certain religion; or only people who have a
certain amount of money; or only people who have a certain skin color. I
want articles about education to have contributions from as many people as
possible, from different genders, from different skin colors, and from
different areas, and so on.
An American white woman has different things to say about education from an
American black man. These differences are important and frequently
discussed in American media. But the American white woman and the American
black man *don't even imagine* what people from The Philippines have to say
about education. What people from the Philippines have to say about
education probably has little to do with the internal American debates on
this topic. And of course it breaks down further, because a person who
lives in the capital of Philippines and knows English has different things
to say about education from a person who lives in a village in Philippines
and doesn't know English.
On articles about education I want to hear from all of them. And about
every other topic. (And yes, I want contributions from people who don't
know English in the English Wikipedia. By definition they cannot contribute
directly, but we must do everything we can to make at least an indirect
contribution possible.)
How do we do it right?
How do we get more different people to even try to contribute to articles?
How do we get everybody's contributions to be accepted? (Guess whose
contributions are more likely to be challenged as "non-notable",
"unencyclopedic", or "unreferenced".)
I don't know. Am I even asking the right questions?
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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