This has just been a real Week About Gender for me and I am TIRED of places being such goddamn cowards about how to fix it. If you think gender shouldn't be a unique predictor and barrier to entry then DO A PROJECT ON WHY IT IS instead of constantly whapping us in the face with ish like this as if WE all, who have to constantly negotiate with YOUR perceptions of it, are the ones who aren't aware of gender my god
I don't see a single thing in this piece about "teaching women how to become editors" about teaching your existing editors to stop being asshats to women and moderating awful experiences in gender-adjacent topics. Let's get out of kindergarten if you want to act like an authority on it.
@grimalkina Hi. I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation, sometimes on gender diversity-related work. May I share some context about that work with you?
@brainwane I'm happy to hear about and amplify good work and good projects and support individuals. It's also unlikely to change my overall view of messaging strategies from orgs like this given the outcomes the female scientists in my life have directly experienced because of this project.
I worked at Wikimedia Foundation 2011-2014. During that time, I know we pursued a multipronged approach on the gender gap, including work towards improving the on-site environment for women, and studying the reasons why, as you put it, gender is a unique predictor and barrier to entry.
@grimalkina I'm reflecting on your criticism that the "we'd like women to edit more" messaging did not directly include information about work that the Foundation and movement are doing to make the environment less unwelcoming.
I know that work is happening (such as the Universal Code of Conduct which I helped work towards https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2021/new-wikimedia-code-of-conduct/ ), and I agree that the Foundation could do better to frontload information about that work because of the concerns you mention.
@brainwane Thanks for sharing! And thank you for this work.
You've shared work from over a decade ago. Did any resulting policy changes at the org result in a directly measured improvement to any of these statistics?
Something I’d be particularly interested to learn is to what extent there has been systematic review of biographies of women removed on notability grounds. Which if any Wikipedias have done that? (I mean operational/ administrative review more than research.)
At a minimum, it seems likely that some of those people will clearly meet the criteria after a few years.
@JMMaok@brainwane my wife is quite erroneously listed in a famous man's wikipedia entry (aka giving him credit for her work and career which he had nothing to do with), & ofc she isn't to the level of being granted one herself. I can tell you offhand every female scientist in my family and friend groups is like, it's not remotely worth the effort trying to correct the records on women in science on wikipedia. In 2024, why is this org that still has these EGREGIOUS stats telling US anything.
For starters, can we document the error on the "Talk" tab of the article, to correct the record and remove and correct the erroneous info? If we can bring facts, with receipts & documentation, this should be corrected.
I can help put {{Citation needed|date=March 2024}} in the text of the article where the erroneous assertion is made.
Can you please tell us the name of the article, so it can be fixed?
@grimalkina I'm diving into https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap now to answer your question but it might take a while; I also believe it's likely that improvement happened on Wikimedia projects other than English Wikipedia (e.g. Arabic Wikipedia) which would still be important but would be less relevant to the specific experience you're most concerned with
@grimalkina every time I've tried to edit Wikipedia, even for like, grammatical cleanup, I have to fight a whole nerd war about it. Not Worth Bothering.
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