[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

Wed Nov 17 22:40:33 UTC 2010

On 17 November 2010 13:35, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Oh gosh, I want to jump in here too, super-fast. Good question, Milos :-)

I think the answer to this question is complicated, but known/knowable.

Essentially I think it's fairly obvious that US Wikimedians are
disproportionately male and disproportionately white -- like Phoebe,
that's definitely been my own anecdotal experience in meeting
Wikipedians, and although the people we meet face-to-face may not be
perfectly representative of all Wikipedians, we don't have any reason
to think the actual US Wikimedia editor population is dramatically
different from the people we happen to meet.

I would attribute the maleness and whiteness mostly to the
tech-centricity of the Wikimedia community. We know it's a
tech-centric group, presumably because editors were in the beginning
early adopter types, and continuing because the editing interface is
still relatively non-user-friendly.

And we know that the tech community in general (in the United States)
skews male, white and Asian ... And that that is self-reinforcing over
time. In fact, this research
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_14383730?nclick_check=1&forced=true
found that blacks, Latinos and women are losing ground in (Silicon
Valley) tech, not gaining it.

I would expect that all the factors that skew tech community
demographics, have a big overlap with the factors that skew Wikimedia
community demographics. There's lots of good research and thinking
about that. (For example, the book Unlocking the Clubhouse has lots of
good thinking about gender, and some about African-Americans and
Latino-Americans.) There is lots of available information.

> 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.*****

I agree with Phoebe. Wikimedians are unusual in many ways. There's
probably no point in Wikimedia trying to recruit general-population
"women" or "African-Americans" or "Latino-Americans." We are likelier
to succeed if we aim to recruit women, African-Americans and
Latino-Americans who share some of the common Wikimedia
characteristics -- like, a base level of good comfort with technology,
a passion for learning, love of language/words/text, unusually high
intelligence, a good base level of self-confidence, sufficient leisure
time and inclination to volunteer, and so forth.

My two cents, written fast :-)
Sue