[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sun Nov 26 00:06:58 UTC 2006

On 11/25/06, Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> And I don't know that changing the way we work is the way to change
> that -- we have to bring them here first. It seems that they don't
> care much that we exist, or realize that they can edit, or know what
> the policies are that they might object to; if we want these subjects
> covered I would suggest reaching out to the places where enthusiasts
> of these topics share information (magazines, specialty forums, etc)
> and helping them get started, maybe even encouraging them to adapt or
> release material they've already written elsewhere.

I don't fully agree on this point.

I believe that while bringing in people who like X to write about X is
a good start, it will not be enough to produce even coverage.

There will always be subjects which are important but where the
intersection of people who are interested, whom are willing, and whom
are able to write free content will be small.

So in parallel to finding ways to attract a wider spectrum of regular
volunteer contributors, we should also be exploring a number of other
solutions:

# Encouraging our existing volunteers to write about things they don't
care about but which we can generally agree that we ought to cover
well.
## Admittedly, we already do this to an extent but there is certainly
more we can do.

# We're already raising money for the substantial operating costs of
the projects, and there have already been of grants to create for
content on non-wikipedia projects (wikibooks for example). It would be
possible for us to get some folks paid to work full time writing and
improving content where we have insufficient volunteer resources
available.
## This will require having a good picture of what we need done. The
various content projects have done a lot of work which will help us,
but I'm not sure that we have enough lined up to actually go about
hiring people to do the work.

Both of the two options classes I've proposed  are both more
actionable than the vague suggestion to "bring more users of class X"
and I have more confidence that both are more likely to bring about
the desired outcome (better coverage).

So while I'm not opposed to bringing in a broader spectrum of
volunteers, I think should treat such an effort as distinct from an
effort to improve the evenness of our coverage.