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

Yes. Yes yes yes. Their YouTube page, and on Twitter, too.

(Get it, aye + aight=aye-ight! ha. ha ha ha.)

Via ecorazzi

from	abigirl konte <abigirlkont1@gmail.com>
to		abigirl_k@yahoo.com

Hello,
I am lovely and cute,Accomodative,caring,

I’m stoked that someone had a similar idea to my Twitter MJ trend tracking, and executed it better.

By Justin Day and via Uppity Stuff: emptyage, a social media type dude who is now on my blogroll.

Murphy’s law application for antigravitatory cats.

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

A new visual search engine, Spezify, comes out, and what do I do first? C’mon, you’re going to do it too. The real me does appear in the results, though. I can see this being an excellent source of creative inspiration. Whee!

“You in the back: all it takes is a rearrangement of the fist to experience true love.”

So funny. He seems to spend the entire day wandering San Francisco, taking iPhone pictures and writing witty comments.

Bad me, I still haven’t distributed his postcards yet.

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 you’re saying, C, your day! It is 4:44am!

Yes, yes it is.

These are the times when I think, happy 20s, me.

Happy birthday, Fiona!

From Plumpy. Many more rap graphs here.