[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sun Nov 26 00:23:48 UTC 2006

On 11/26/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> # 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.
>

Not really. Most wikipedia volunteers are here to write about the
stuff they are interested in.   They are not interested in major work
beyond that. Sometimes the boarders can be bent (so you are interested
in wars? How about the wars of Africa?). Sometimes they cannot be.

Further problems is that sometimes you need particular bits of
knowledge to write about things. Hard to write much about say
Mauritania without being able to read Arabic and french (which is a
pity because the results of the last elections came out on Thursday
and [[Politics of Mauritania]] need uprating).

> # 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.
>

Working with people paid to edit is going to be problematical since
you would likely have to pay them to do more than write.

-- 
geni