[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

Wed Nov 17 21:35:21 UTC 2010

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any
> African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in
> a European country without African population, so everything seemed to
> me quite normal for a long time.
>
> I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans,
> but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with
> university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are
> African Americans and present US president is almost, too.
>
> What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively white?
>
> Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we
> solve to get more contributors.

I ask myself the same question whenever I go to teach the incoming
classes of computer science students here at my university. Although
this is California, and we are close to having no ethnic majority in
the state as a whole,*  the university population doesn't neatly
mirror state demographics;** and the CS classes, anecdotally speaking,
mirror it much less so. (It would be easy to claim that this is true
nationwide, though the data*** doesn't actually back that up). And
anyway, we know that formal education is a poor proxy for being a
Wikipedian, or even for computer culture as a whole. You could
probably just as helpfully look at the demographics of Silicon
Valley,**** or any other big tech center in the U.S., and wonder why
it was skewed white.

I've only personally met a couple of black Americans in my time going
around the U.S. meeting Wikipedians, which again is totally anecdotal,
but considering that I've met a few hundred American Wikipedians in
total would seem to argue for a low rate of participation. But then
again, the people I've met at Wikimania and elsewhere are highly
self-selected, and don't necessarily match our actual editor base with
any certainty (I think about the black editor I met once at a small
meetup who had never been to any sort of meetup before, or as far as I
know since). I think the truth is that we just don't know, the same
way that we just don't know exactly how many women participate or why.

We *do* know -- both anecdotally and statistically, based on the
readership to editorship conversion rates -- that all Wikipedians are
outliers: we are all unusual in some way. It is not common to both
want to participate in a wiki project and then to expend significant
amounts of time doing so, and we more or less know the general reasons
why someone does become a Wikipedian. These motivations, from what I
can tell, cut across nationality and gender and all other possible
categories: and I've been wondering if we've been going about this
diversity discussion rather the wrong way for a long time -- if we
should focus not on why so few people out of the general population
participate, but rather who is likely to make a good Wikipedian and
how we can encourage them, in all circumstances.*****

-- phoebe

p.s. race in America, as you can gather from reading the Wikipedia
article below, is far from a dichotomy: I'd frame this question rather
as what's our overall diversity, in terms of ethnicity and class and
gender, with an eye to how we succeed or fail at being welcoming and
representative; and how we address topical systemic bias overall.

* http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po40.htm
** http://statfinder.ucop.edu/library/tables/table_106.aspx
*** http://elliottback.com/wp/black-diversity-in-it-and-computer-science/,
data from here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf07308/pdf/tab13.pdf;
compare to national demographics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Racial_makeup_of_the_U.S._population
**** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County,_California#Demographics
***** Things like university outreach programs do exactly this.

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *