Did you read all the New York Times opinions about why women make up less than 13% of the Wikipedia editing community? Since then I’ve been following Wikimedia’s discussion list: ‘Gendergap – Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects.’ It started out really nice and I was encouraged, as I am every now and again, to be part of the Wikimedia community. I like grammar. My college courses trained me to identify and cite resources. But I’m still kind of scared of contributing to Wikipedia. Friends, especially girl friends, do you edit Wikipedia?

Recently the Gendergap conversation has had me pulling my hair out because it’s all about ‘women’ as a group and that usually means pointing out gender stereotypes. This is the email I wrote to them tonight:

Hi,
I’ve been lurking this list for some time and have been getting a bit depressed by the direction it’s taking as of late. It was all cha-cha-cha in the beginning, but now I’ve seen references to women not wanting their children exposed to vulgarity, women and transgendereds needing a separate list to feel comfortable, and women on Wikipedia being compared to rural Africa as served by NGOs.

As a chick that likes computer stuff, I’ve encountered this before in looking for peer groups and it makes me feel double alienated–I don’t even like children and now they’re part of a conversation about me as a female on the internet.

Personally, broad statistics about women nearly never ring true, and that’s a conversation block. Nerdy guys have taught me WordPress, torrenting, and heaps of other useful internet skills. In turn, I have taught some lady friends. It would be more encouraging to get back to what we know and how we can share it.

I don’t edit Wikipedia because I’ve never taken the time to learn the system and I’m afraid I’ll screw up. I assume it would feel like making a big mistake in a newspaper and having the whole neighborhood scoff, and I think that becomes a part of my Wikipedia profile forever and ever. I’d like to find a YouTube video to walk me through basic involvement. If it’s that cute guy from Portland who is now a Wikipedia community manager presenting it, well all the better. I could also be encouraged to edit if the community had an offline component that included meeting for microbrews.

Thanks,
Carissa

What do you think? Why have or haven’t you participated in Wikipedia? Have you never even thought about editing it, but you reference it all the time?

UPDATE:

So, the flame wars got out of control on the list, with people accusing each other of sexism over the tiniest shit, the list founder resigning, and people posting about how they were in tears. Seriously, I found it total personal baggage that should be dealt with somewhere else. If I wanted to take a community college course on gender, that’s where I’d be. It’s disheartening when conversations about women get dominated by issues better meant for therapy, and that happens a lot, in my opinion it’s a huge problem in women’s rights discussions. Anyway, eventually Sue Gardner wrote this to the group and I thought you might find it interesting:

Hi folks,

Wow! I was absent for two days and this list caught fire! The newer
mails feel like we’ve been nearer a resolution, but still: there was
lots of heat

I’m going to take a minute to try to summarize and reflect back a
little. Bear with me: I’m on my phone, so I’m not going to be able to
quote individuals or respond inline to earlier mails. But I have read
everything.

To recap: Laura originally made a proposal to ask the men on this list
to leave. Her rationale was that men have been inappropriately
dominating the discussion here, which had the effect of silencing
and/or frustrating women who expect and want this to be a safe,
constructive space. I believe that in making that proposal, she was
acting out of frustration not just on her own behalf, but on behalf of
other women here who’ve been feeling silenced, whether they’ve spoken
up or not.

If Laura’s proposal had gotten significant support from women on this
list, personally I would take that very seriously. It would make me
sad to think that women here couldn’t see a workable option that
includes both women and men —– but if there had seemed to be a
consensus among women that a women-only list is desirable or better, I
would buy that as a regrettable-but-accurate expression of where we’re
at.

But, although some people expressed agreement with the basics of what
Laura said, there wasn’t much support for the idea of kicking men off
the list. So on that basis, we won’t do it.

(To recap for anyone who doesn’t know: Erik Moeller started this list
at my request. That makes me the de facto owner, although I’m totally
willing to share that responsibility with others, and I think we all
have a responsibility to help self-govern.)

So. Having said that, personally I think the issues Laura raised are
real, and the discussion they prompted was useful. I think some
helpful stuff has gotten said, particularly when some of the quieter
people started to speak up, and I’d like to now say a few things too.

Essentially: since the list started, a number of people (including me)
have observed that i) there are a lot of men here, maybe more than
women, and ii) the men have talked quite a bit. Certainly there have
been times on this list when I felt like a small number of men were
dominating the conversation, and occasionally also seeming to me to
deny women’s experiences, and/or to tell them how to feel about them.
(Lots of men were also asking questions or just listening or offering
support of various kinds.)

That didn’t surprise me: I think it’s “normal.” If you’re a man, and
you’ve been trained that your opinion is valuable and wanted: well,
then you are fairly likely to believe that, and to act accordingly.
Similarly, a couple of women here have talked about how they’ve been
socialized to stay quiet and to defer, and that therefore that’s what
they tend to do. In general, I think it would be hard to fault people
too much for their cultural conditioning. And honestly, women here are
likelier to be more aware of (and thoughtful about) our conditioning
than men are, because as the non-dominant group we’ve had to think
about it more. So I am not surprised that some men here haven’t been
(IMO) super self-reflective and self-moderating. And I am also,
honestly, not surprised to see a few women get really, really angry
about that, because my guess is this is not their first time at that
rodeo

I think that everyone here has a responsibility to try to be
self-aware about how their behaviour is affecting other people. The
Quakers have a really nice principle for their meetings, that in
general, quiet people should aim to talk more, and talkative people
should aim to restrain themselves. I think that’s a really good rule.
I would like to hear more from the people here who’ve been holding
back. And I believe we would hear more, if the talkative people were a
little more restrained.

I also want to say something about men on this list, in general.
Personally, I believe we need to have, and want to have, and should
have, men on this list. I say that because I want Wikipedia to have
more female editors, and I think that the men here can and should be
(and want to be!) part of the solution, working towards that.

Thirteen per cent of Wikipedia editors are women. I assume that many
of those women have no interest in personally, themselves, working to
increase the number of women editors on Wikipedia. Which is totally
fine with me: why should they? If they didn’t sign up to be gender
warriors, then they shouldn’t be gender warriors: they are in no way
obligated to do it.

But somebody’s got to make this happen, and I’m happy to have allies
regardless of their gender. I consider everyone on this list an ally.
Nobody here IMO is trolling, and I’m really happy that nobody here is
contesting the basic premise: that we want to fix this problem.
Everybody’s acting in good faith: I truly believe that. Some of us are
probably inadvertently offensive, and some of that offence comes out
of unexamined privilege, for sure. And some of the women here have
expressed lots of anger and frustration, some of which probably
doesn’t belong on this list, but spills out here because it’s been
brewing for years due to their experiences elsewhere, in addition to
their experiences on Wikipedia and/or this list.

I think we all have a responsibility to try to be our best possible
selves here — by which I mean our most generous, constructive,
helpful, collaborative, trusting, listening, understanding selves.
Everybody’s damaged; nobody’s perfect; we’re all going to make plenty
of mistakes. But everybody here wants to solve this problem: that’s
why we’re here. It’s going to be a lot of work, and we’re going to
need all different types of people. A bunch of non-mutually-exclusive
categories: we will need radical feminists, plus experienced editors,
plus new editors, plus external observers, plus people who like to
question and probe, plus staff people, plus men exploring their
privilege and thinking about these issues for the first time, plus
lurkers. Plus plus plus.

We’ve all got a role to play. And I hope we all want to continue the
work we’ve started

Thanks,
Sue

The New York Times local online section for Fort Greene/Clinton Hill has a feature called Local Locals, in which Myryah Irby stops people on the street and asks them a few questions. Her husband takes a photo. The questions are superb. She jumps from “why are you raising money for cancer at a sidewalk sale” to “how many times have you been in love” and people go with it, they answer her. And she rolls into another question. I couldn’t stop reading these.

In this one she talks to Diane Davis, a borderline homeless transgender HIV positive person, who says at one point that she needs to get her life together. It’s the kind of comment people make as an aside, and most interviewers would let pass. But Irby follows up by asking directly, What do you think you need to do in order to get yourself together? And Davis answers. I would love to see a video of her interviewing people, she must have perfect presence and tone to get them to open up to these questions.

Becca is walking with a cane, and when Irby asks why she gets a hilarious story about an attempt at pole dance aerobics on the subway. Marcelino draws her feet, and as her last question she asks, What question should I ask? He says, Why am I drawing your feet? Pictured at top is Squire, a formerly famous jazz musician who knows everybody.

Each one of these people has a wild history ranging from high level education to stories about the projects. It’s interviewing at its best.

Here’s another example, with Karl, which generated a lot of animosity in the comments from New Yorkers who apparently just wanted restaurant information. It tells you how unused to raw interviews readers are that they balk at these sorts of questions, and consider them unimportant (in a column whose sole stated purpose is to interviews locals). But this, how good is this?

When was the last time you cried?

That’s how you start the interview?

Well the editor of this blog suggested I go beyond the obvious questions.

So that’s a real question?

You can skip whichever questions you’d rather not answer. (Long pause.) OK then, my husband came up with this hypothetical gem: Would you rather have no fingers and no toes, or a penis for a nose?

That’s a really hard one. I’m going to go with the penis nose. It’s more, rather than less. And maybe the girls really like it. It might help me!

*Calming down, wiping keyboard*

They hired Jennifer Preston (@NYT_JenPreston), who started out by asking questions about what people would like to see from the Times on Twitter, balanced with talking about her twins’ prom. Fine, human tweets. She also shared a few social media links that were not so savvy, like 10 Golden Rules of Social Media, which is just a poor concept. The first rule of social media is that there are no rules of social media.

After a month, her account abruptly went cold. I started tweeting around to see what happened, asking Carr and some other Times writers, and just asking the universe at large. Nada.

Today, I got this:

Oh, hai there! Savvy move on her part (or whoever is running the account now), it’s a sign of life without actually writing a tweet.

Why do I care? I have high hopes. An institution like the New York Times needs to be making up their own rules, stretching the limits of what social media conveys and how, and a successful editorial role would be gently pushing people to do more, not less, with the medium. Asking what to do on Twitter is a nice, friendly start, but then it’s time to dive right in. Create a new trend and run with it. If it flops, move on.

Right now what I want is an inside view on what they are doing in there, what conversations are happening. Knock knock, let us in! Because it’s the ongoing development that makes for a conversation, and the meeting of minds that makes for dazzling brainstorms. They’re gestating, fine, but let us see the ideas bouncing around. Are they considering standardizing hashtags for key topics? Let us know. Are they thinking about making a twit pic account for the staff? A Flickr stream that users can submit to? Are they going to start asking readers for ideas on all travel pieces, like the Frugal Travler does when he hits a new town?

Maybe I’ll have idiotic suggestions, maybe most of the suggestions will be throwaways. But not all. Social media is able to connect audience to content producer directly, and as a result we audiences have come to expect direct involvement in the process and the final product. We can’t give great or mediocre feedback without some transparency.

So, maybe our role right now is to ask the Times, What are you doing and how can we help?

Ok, so the image is not the snazziest thing you’ve ever seen, but I don’t even have Photoshop on this computer at work, so I made this with a program called Pixelmator, which is free and has all the basic gadgets and gizmos as Photoshop.

For our July newsletter I wanted to create fun, original content, because we’ve really been lacking in that lately. I’ve been so busy with the research and writing of the 2010 books (6! Portland, Seattle, Twin Cities, Berkeley/Oakland…and new this year Silicon Valley and Denver!) that I’ve had little time to write and create new pieces. It was high time for some original editorial content.

Social pressure is a big motivator, we know this, and much of that is self imposed based on observation. In Portland, a prime example is called the Yellow Bin Effect. When bright yellow recycling bins were introduced, people started using them more. Then additional people started using them, and as more people saw them on the curb, that made them recycle more, too. Everybody’s doing it, keeping up with the Jones, eco-guilt, etc, whatever combination it was, it worked.

Now Portland has one of the highest recycling rates in the nation. They’ve even upgraded the yellow bins to large blue roll bins, we’re that good at recycling. You see similar influencing with reusable shopping totes. How much of a scarlet letter is the plastic bag for a certain set?

But not all beacons of green living are going to be curbside and fluorescent. Many of the serious carbon footprint reducing improvements, like increased home insulation, are things you’ll only hear about when the homeowner invites you over for dinner.  So I did a small experiment, and set out with my bike and camera to survey the SE neighborhood for these items:

• Solar panels (photovoltaic or hot water)
• Eco roof
• Community garden
• Rain barrel
• Clothing line
• Compost bin
• Home vegetable garden
• Chicken coop

To my total surprise, the solar panels were the easiest, at a home just around the block. Now, I must pass that house weekly, and I’ve never once looked up and noticed their solar panels. They also had a rain barrel, the only one I saw, but I would have needed to climb into their yard to get the shot. Even with the big PACE flag on the door, I didn’t want to test their hospitality. Finding a community garden was a snap, and it was also gorgeous to photograph. All that lushness!

I snuck some raspberries too. A clothesline was the only thing I never encountered.

It was a good activity for learning about my neighborhood, mostly because it’s not as clearly eco savvy as I expected. So, I created this scavenger hunt for our readers, but the twist is that it also incorporates submitting the photos to our Flickr sustainable living pools for each city. Initially I created those thinking they would take off, but people are reluctant to submit pictures, and I’m struggling with why. They’re happy to approve pictures I request to join the pool though, so I’m plugging away at that.

For fun, I added these scavenge items:

• The coolest bike
• Public art that’s lesser known
• A photo from inside a form of mass transit
• Greywater system

I admit I was particularly pleased with myself for thinking of the transit photo from the inside. And good luck on the greywater system. It’s legal here and many places, but the Office of Sustainable Development has done like, one case study.

Photosharing is such an underutilized social media tool. There’s lots of opportunity there for presenting information about lifestyles through photos, and yet it’s pretty much untouched by all the big green media companies. One of my primary goals is to combine Flickr photos with green living tips, to make us stand out and also because I can’t read one more paragraph about the merits of composting. They’re all the same. And I write these things. But show me a set of five different types of compost bins, and I’ll be curious. Show me five in my neighborhood and I might be compelled to get one.

We’re still working on prizes, but the scavenger hunt will appear in the next newsletter. Would you do it? Can you name any of these things near you now? I’m not sure how much to request of people as far as tagging goes. The city for sure, and the neighborhood seems like a good idea, but is that asking too much?

twitter.com/APStylebook

Murphy’s law application for antigravitatory cats.

It has been a long day! Uncyclopedia, I love you.

But we were saved from Sarah Palin, and it’s Friday, TGIF! Fun fun fun! So instead, here’s an article about a bar…where the booze is vaporized into the room, and that’s your drink, better like gin my friend. And yeah, you do have to wear those jumpsuits. Also: Who knew The Atlantic had a food column?

His best guess of an answer is a sort of citizen journalism, or something yet unnamed. Which is so exciting. What is the solution? It will take us several decades to figure it out, he says. I love this stuff, I love being in the thick of this. What will journalism look like in 30 years? We get to watch it develop (on Twitter and Facebook and iPhones), and I’m just so glad that I’m living through this time of uncertainty and not the solid, newspaper dominated past. I love the NY Times, but can you imagine a world of information coming only print, with the control and time lag? Gah, terrifying.

While I adore the romantic idea of living in the past and being one of those old fashioned journalists that hunted down and got the story, that brought it out when it wouldn’t have otherwise seen day, one that kicked and scratched and schmoozed stories from people, I abhor the thought of being that reader, putting down my paper and that being that.

But, with so much information from so many people available, without media giants and journalist heroes, will we pool collectively towards a dull median, all watching cat videos?

Shirky teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, which I rediscover and drool over every year or so.

Some big quotes:

“In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.”

And then:

“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail.”

If they really wanted me to feel attended to, they would ask for my feedback on each article and continue tailoring my choices for my future magazines. Pandora does this for music, and Netflix does it for suggested movies in your queue. Why can’t publishers do it for our e-magazines?

Here’s their pitch, which is good: “You can customize your playlist, your wardrobe, your car, AND NOW…your magazine.” And here’s how it works: You pick five titles from the following: Travel + Leisure, Golf, InStyle, Money, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, Time, and Food & Wine. But then you answer “some seemingly random questions” which “seemingly stereotype” the hell out of you in odd ways:

And right there is where they dropped the ball. (That last question makes zero sense. Either one is going to talk your ear off about mankind, but maybe they’re subtly asking if you’re into the DaVinci Code?)

A custom magazine, melding my favorite topics, is a very good idea (it was called Domino, and then it folded). For a major publishing company to offer bits of each of its titles, matched to my personality, is a downright fabulous idea, and one that I would actually pay for. Hear that, falling media giant? I would subscribe!

So, now let’s get into the small print:

1. This is a digital magazine, which you receive 5 copies of, and which is sponsored by the new Lexus 2010 RX, and 2.) “All of the articles contained in MINE previously appeared in Time Inc. or American Express Publishing Corp. publications.”

I currently only subscribe to Real Simple, and I don’t subscribe to those magazines because, well, they’re not all about me. I’m sure there is some tid bit from each that I would be interested in, but I don’t think there’s enough in any of them for me to buy the whole magazine. So what I need Time Inc’s help with is cherry picking articles for me from each of their titles. If they’re going to feed me articles from their archive and not fresh content, the least they can do is make sure I’ll like it. Because I’ve already decided not to read those magazines for a reason.

While I like to think I’m unique, I’ll bet there’s a lot of us with the same education, interests, and income. Articles aimed at 20-somethings who want to spend some money on pretty things must lurk somewhere in each of these titles, there just isn’t enough for me to buy the whole hog. Same goes for other groups: new families, young professionals, the recently divorced, whatever, group us up and make us a Mine Magazine. Grouping us keeps costs down, fine. But that doesn’t get them off the hook for not asking enough questions to begin with. And as a user of Netflix, Pandora, Digg, and other interactive sites, I expect to be able to rate my content and receive suggestions as a result, especially for an online magazine. Everyone else can do it, why can’t our publishers?

My selected titles were Travel + Leisure, InStyle, Money, Food & Wine, and Time. There are guaranteed to be articles in each of these that apply to my type, but I don’t expect to get them based on whether I prefer juggling or celebrity impersonations.

What I’m saying is, make it mine! mine! mine!:

Lauren DiCioccio, available on 20×200:

“I make sculptures and paintings about my anticipatory nostalgia for obsolescing paper media objects. The softness of a read newspaper page and the glossy slickness of a fresh magazine page…When these objects disappear from our culture and assume the homogeneous texture of a back-lit screen, I fear that some of our intimacy with the process of reading will fade.

Fashion magazines are the source materials for my series color codification dot drawings. I make each piece on a sheet of frosted mylar laid over a magazine page. After assigning a color to every letter in the alphabet (numbers are in grayscale, 0=white and 9=black), I apply tiny dots of paint over every character on the page. ”

]]> http://ihavenoideawhatiamdoing.com/2009/04/22/words-as-dots-of-color-anticipating-nostalgia-for-paper-media/feed/ 0