[Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians

Wed Nov 17 23:28:39 UTC 2010

Thanks, Sue.

Obligatory current event tie-in -

Could we get a more multi-ethnic "I am a Wikipedian" campaign going
for the fundraising drive?

As attractive looking as Jimmy is, the community isn't a million
clones of him.  Seeing more of the variety would certainly help
attract attention, I think.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com