[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sun Nov 26 09:09:40 UTC 2006

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>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.
>
We already have some Wikipedians wanting more experts.  This is the 
opposite to what you propose.  Writing about things that you don't care 
about is not easy.  Try doing such an article from scratch.  You can 
find a book and write about what's in there, but your lack of background 
will quickly become apparent.

># 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.
>
Paying people to write articles would be a whole new ballgame, and 
probably very un-wiki..  There would be no more effective way of 
creating a class of vested interests with certain visions of how they 
want the project to look.  We all want better coverage, but at what cost?

Ec