Knowledge talk:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force/Archive 4

4239:@Montanabw, @Carolmooredc; There has to be some assumption that women editors who have completed five thousand or more edits would be able to go through the RfA vetting process as experienced editors. The point learned from numerous organizations and institutions is that the editors (non-Admin) do not get very far unless they are supported by management (Admin at Knowledge). @Carolmooredc; Unless there are more women admins supporting a growing number of women editors, one risks a catch22 where the new women editors are driven away for the same reason of not enough women supporters. A study by Cotter and Hermsen has stated that: “The popular notion of glass ceiling effects implies that gender (or other) disadvantages are stronger at the top of the hierarchy than at lower levels and that these disadvantages become worse later in a person's career.”(David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen, Seth Ovadia and Reeve Vanneman (2001): The Glass Ceiling Effect. Social Forces, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 655-681 Published by: Oxford University Press.) One research study by Matsa and Miller suggests that a possible remedy to the glass ceiling could be increasing the number of women on corporate boards, which could subsequently lead to increases in the number of women working in top management positions.(David A. Matsa and Amalia R. Miller (2011): Chipping away at the Glass Ceiling: Gender Spillovers in Corporate Leadership. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 2011, 101:3, 635–639.) The priority for dealing with the "glass ceiling" is to get more women admin first at Knowledge, and in that way they can help foster a more helpful environment for attracting more women editors. 4872:@Anne Delong, @Eric Corbett; The question about the value of the stats of a 15% women editor ratio is that they are good enough for Jimmy Wales to use them in his BBC interview last month regarding failing to reach Sue Gardner's gender goals by 2015. The "glass ceiling" issue remains the most confrontational issue because even if Knowledge finds the magic formula to attract more women editors, the business management theory and experience still teaches that if you don't fix the management problem first, then the old management (85% male) will just continue, either knowingly or unknowingly, to drive away the new women editors the same as they have been doing for years and years (long-term systemic bias). Good intentions, even best intentions such as those expressed above of being open-minded and diplomatic, have been shown again and again in business management models to fail if the "glass ceiling" problem is not addressed first. Knowledge continues to fail to attract women editors, and without addressing the "glass ceiling" issue first of getting more women administrators on board, then Knowledge as a whole fails to achieve the gender parity which Jimmy Wales encourages by calling for "doubling down" on the issue of increasing the number of women editing Knowledge. The short section on "Active Nomination of Women Administrators" posted at the top of this Talk section should be added to this WikiProject Page. 4288:@S Philbrick; Yes, the Ethnography book by Jemielniak covers the discussion of the strong application of the principle that business management theory commentary on managers applies by direct analogy to administrators at Knowledge in Chapters 1 and 2 in his new book which you mention. The statistics on women admins is taken as the 15% figure for women editors in general at Knowledge applied without prejudice to women admins as well. Both previous editors responding above have talked about the tough vetting process of RfAs in the past, which I have stated should not be a deterrent in and of itself to nominating strong women editors for admin. The Cotter and Hermson material I quoted above (and all the others writing in business management theory) state that the "glass ceiling" on managers states that experience in the business world teaches over and over that the more that management reflects the policies desired, then the more prevalent do those policies become in the general workplace of employees (editors). That is, for Knowledge, the larger the number of women admins, then business experience in general teaches that more women in the workplace (women editors) follows. 5208:

certain people can sort of rest and vent and collaborate, and ask the questions they feel afraid of asking in public, so they can gain the strength and confidence to go further out, into the invite-only spaces or the very public spaces. I think we’ve seen this in my own experience at Hacker School, and we see that also the invite-only spaces, or spaces where everybody coming in agrees to follow the same rules so it’s a place where you feel safer -- these are like tidepools, places where certain kinds of people and certain kinds of behaviour can be nurtured and grown so that it’s ready to go out into the wider ocean. We can also modify existing spaces. We can set up informal but real contracts or promises with specific people or in specific larger spaces. I’ve done this. I’ve said “Hey, for this conversation – I know in the past we’ve had trouble assuming good faith of each other. Will you try – I will try extra hard to assume good faith of you if you’ll assume good faith of me.” And that actually made things go a lot better.

3212:"Systemic bias" - which I define as the unconscious (or only partially conscious) tendency to view topics about or of interest to people who resemble them (often, though not always white men under 30 who like video games) of generally greater interest and more easy to pass WP:GNG than topics about people who are not like them (women, people of color, historical figures, etc.). Examples abound, I see this frequently in articles about women who are actors or college professors being nominated for AfD and held to a higher standard of notability than, for example, an article about a male sports figure from an obscure sport who perhaps played one season as a pro. I see similar problems with recentism and on topics involving non-white people: I work on articles about Native Americans, where I find rather appalling levels of cluelessness on the part of some editors. I think it's ignorance rather than racism, but it's a dogged insistence that their ignorance is actually correct 647:

Pinterest. More males, in contrast, frequent music-sharing sites such as last.fm, as well as Reddit, a social news website known for its sometimes misogynistic content (HuffPost Women 2012; Williams 2012); contributors to Knowledge are also overwhelmingly male (Lam et al. 2011). Moreover, the professional social network site LinkedIn has attracted almost twice as many males as females. LinkedIn representatives claim that this is because men are better at professional networking than women, at least in some industries (Berkow 2011), whereas women have traditionally focused on maintaining relationships (Fallows 2005; cf. Tannen 1990). Women's greater concerns about privacy and identity disclosure on social network sites (Fogel and Nehmad 2009) may also predispose them to interact with individuals they already know and trust (Muscanell and Guadagno 2012), which Facebook and other social network site facilitate through features such as "friending."

9293:, specifically the section "H2b F-Coverage-Worse", which starts on page 5. The authors performed two different analyses, one generic and one specific to a particular example of a Knowledge topic area. The first one found that topics that were of particularly high interest to female editors were generally less fully covered in Knowledge—the articles were on average significantly shorter than articles on topics primarily of interest to male editors. The second analysis looked at a particular topic area (movies) where prior research had identified movies mainly of interest to males, and movies mainly of interest to females. Again, those primarily of interest to females had shorter articles in Knowledge and vice versa. According to the study authors, Knowledge article length has in prior studies been demonstrated to be a reasonable predictor for article quality. 1438:

all over the world for conferences etc. Why not take some of those funds and have a little experiment. Find an all-girls school and pay them to offer a year long course that requires their students to edit articles. I don't know what the syllabus should entail, but I'm sure something can be put down on paper. My suggestion of using the Philippines is because they speak English and compared to the US/UK, it's pretty darn cheap over there. You could probably get schools over there to do this for less of a stipend then elsewhere. If you want to expand this, do the same thing for an all-boys school and a co-ed school. I'm not a scientist, so I can't speak to control groups etc, but I'm sure someone who is familiar with the scientific method could suggest a way to do this to collect statistics.

4809:

men for them. Knowledge always needs more admins! It's not necessary for an editor to first express interest in being an admin; in fact, often people are approached by one or more other editors, who express confidence in them and suggest that they would make good admins. It's true that "diplomatic" editors have a better chance to be accepted, and maybe that's a good idea, since "speak-and-act first, think later types" can do a lot of damage with the admin tools. Surely, though, there are plenty of calm, rational, experienced female editors who could be nominated. I would like to point out, though, that since becoming an admin earlier this year I actually have done

8779:. What should we do then?" If that is indeed what you meant, my answer would be: "Continue to aggressively recruit women until there is not just one topic where women are in the majority, but approximately 50% of all topics have a female majority, with the other 50% having a male majority." Don't you think that's equitable? And it would still take a long, long, loooooooong time to achieve that. You could even argue that after 13 years of exceptionally high male majorities, Knowledge could do with 13 years of being dominated by women to the same degree, just to balance things out a bit. Now, if I've misunderstood your question, just ignore this post. Cheers. 5519:

identifiable phenomenon (though the causes and solutions are not yet quite so clear). In contrast, the gender bias issue is not the same thing. They are, to be sure, related, but one can have a gender gap without necessarily having a gender bias. Both deserve thoughtful identification of solutions, but the list of solutions are not likely to be exactly the same. If anyone is wondering how dense I must be to ask for examples, please note I am NOT asking for examples of the gender gap—they are ubiquitous. I am asking for example of gender bias, which I believe exists, but I'd like to see the examples before jumping to conclusion regarding solutions.--

1382:

you did a survey you'd find in a short period of time that the majority of editors prefer it. I've read some comments from people saying "wikipedia should be plain white and conservative, flashy headers and images distract the reader" but for me it's the absolute opposite and makes the text far more attractive to read and improves the quality and appearance. I currently use WikiWand or the reader function on Safari for browsing wikipedia. A reader function Brandon like on Safari like a book I think would be a good feature to introduce too. Not quite sure what this has to do with gender gap though!♦

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often advances slowly and in a piecemeal fashion. Elaborate "proofs" are often not available, even if there were, demanding someone else stop whatever they are doing go look them up for you is not particularly helpful. Better to look yourself, or ask them if they know where you can look. Framing the question in terms of "proofs" is also implies that the group's goals can not be validated until every single objection made by male outsiders can be answered to their satisfaction--in other words, it is the pointy way of framing a question that is often objectionable, rather than the question itself.

3788:

neutrality fulfills the needs of the community in the long run. Peer-production communities are settings of voluntary contribution, and emotions play an important role in group dynamics, requiring expression. Relationship-oriented communication has been found to increase contributions and, interestingly, regular editors use this linguistic style more than administrators. Consequently, the tone of group moderators, and more generally the interaction spaces of such communities should be adapted to facilitate both positive exchanges and the venting out of negative emotion in a constructive manner.

486:. It can really be a barrier in developing areas. At least with some email providers there are options to go to a slower html version, but can you load a WP page without the images? The problem with the Foundation is that they don't seem to actually edit themselves, so they don't know when they have broken the functionality. The other problem is the WMF doesn't seem to understand the importance of first impressions--if people can't use it the first time, they're not going to come back, no matter how purty it is. Do you think I will have any reason to go back to WikiWand? Been and done. — 6774:? Instead of bemoaning that I didn't use a gender neutral name originally, I've been coming around to the position of saying "Let's start being female and proud." After all one can keep the generder neutral name and use a female name. Like ] or ] or whatever makes the point. The more there are of us, the more it becomes obvious we are moving to critical mass of females (in addition of course to whatever the numbers are in the next Wikimedia Foundation survey they announce). Imagine the shock if all sorts of respected and even "high power" individuals turned out to be females... ( 10071:

be fair, you already implied by pointing out that 10/57 (17.5%) ~= 3/13 (23.1%) != 13/19 (68.4%). The data I see on the page this is talk for seems to be survey-based rather than declaration, and to really complete this I'd have to see what the data on the number of declared of each sex and undeclared are sitewide, but the data you've presented definitely makes me doubt my former assumption that female editors, perhaps due to harassment, declared their sex less frequently, and therefore bolsters the case from the survey data that the gender gap is as real as people say.

3519:, which may interest you. There are so many novelists and poets and journalists and bloggers whose articles haven't been created yet or need improvement. If you have translation skills, take a look at all the articles about women writers on other language Wikipedias and you'll see that many of them don't have a presence on the English language one. The WP is hours old, so there's no formal invitation template yet, just this note from me to you. If you're up for it, roll up your sleeves and let's launch this WP with vigor. -- 657:

arbitrators, that women object more strenuously to socking than men, and for different reasons: men object because it corrupts the process, but women feel it is a personal breach of trust if the same person uses several identities to talk to them.) Now, in general, Knowledge is quite hostile to all of these concepts. Forming relationships is actively frowned upon in some ways and engenders mistrust (cf. rules against canvassing, meatpuppeting—which also have good justifications of course), and anonymity is a paramount value.

8159:

corporate money making scam and I know that men could get that - it's just that IMO it took a woman, because of her being more likely to be aware of the illness in the first place, to point it out. I am assuming, but certainly could be wrong, that men are more interested in prostate cancer. Let me know what you think because I find it extremely difficult to point out the little ways that I think it may make a difference to have more women here. To have objections to my assumptions helps me to think out my own position.

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clue. Likewise I have been reverted by religious zealots pushing a specific and unwarranted pov, and who came to the rescue? Eric. Some women editors here appear to have been annoyed their edits were reverted but the bottom line is were the reverts justified? Reverting is not bullying. Looking for anti-feminist bias in every revert or AfD is counter-productive. The article/edit has to have merit. Perhaps it would be better to categorise editors by those with clue and those without, I wonder what that ratio would be.

9734:(an article that needs a lot of work) you need something like 15 or 20% of people to agree/sympathize to make change happen. Whatever the number, if we could get even half that number to identify openly here as women, that in itself would make a big change. As some of us using our real names can testify, you can do it and not get killed. So using a handle and the little female symbol in your user name to make it clear might be one way to make that critical mass number be reached. like: User:BigBadBird☥ 9470:

many). Personally I find the first suggestion interesting, but lacking evidence, and the second extremely unlikely but also not proven either way. (Again the emotions research mentioned above provide tangential support to both statements.) So assuming one had a "culture slider" control labelled "male friendly" on one end and "female friendly" on the other, it is not absurd to imagine that the community, or the WMF would operate the slider until equal numbers of male and female editors were present

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like ref or redirect or s or sup or sub or any of the other bits mean? Likely not. Let alone all the bracketing rules. The present UI doesn't explain itself well at all; I have to ask people how to do things all the time, and I've been here for years. Why? Because I never bothered to read and absorb every single guide on the site. I just did what I needed to do. I still don't know how to construct a full proper reference tag, even though I've done it before, because I just had to crib off of others.

5284:: Interesting questions. Part of the answer lies in the goals of the project itself: to address the gender gap problem. Like everyone else, the members of the group have limited time available for volunteering, and have chosen to put their energies into this area. The question of systemic bias and gender has been addressed extensively by the foundation, not to mention the criticism of Knowledge's gender problem in a number of publications. If you want to know more, you can read the article on 2264:) is that she is actually a man, pretending to be a woman, specifically for the purposes of disruption by voicing anti-feminist opinion on Knowledge as an ostensible female. That's the suggestion, mind, I'm not necessarily endorsing it myself. The initial claim of and evidence for this is on the Wikipediocracy forums, and as far as I understand the consensus there is that we can't link to it, though we can mention its existence and the fact that it can be found with use of a search engine. -- 35: 9317:

at paying attention to detail than men. And then you say that there would be no difference with more women editors. And then you go about insulting people who say there would be a difference. Not only does it come off as inconsistent and unintellegent (to me), but I experience as an example of the disruption that people complain about. And, I don't think it makes Knowledge any better. Maybe you should re-read the entry I wrote above, and figure out why and how you're contributing here.

9109:.) But you couldn't care less whether or not more women are recruited. So you just want the increase to happen "naturally," considering that the present editing environment is healthy and welcoming to a broad mix of people. And you believe those (many women) who have different experiences and opinions on the matter than your own have their heads up their asses and are tilting at windmills. Dude, if this ever was true - and I doubt it - you and your compadres have become some very 7567:. Looks to me as though there's enough material out there; allegedly, per Google books, 10,500 for "gender diversity" organization, which probably means a lot fewer than that, but enough to make a start. Some research affirms its value. Here's one with a qualification: "The overall relationship between the gender diversity of these teams and firm performance was positive, although this favourable effect was present only in firms whose strategies focused on innovation." 7418:

general. If we reach out into other online groups to recruit more women editors, do we want to approach those who are likely to enjoy editing in the current environment (which is somewhat more techie, rule-laden and goal-oriented than social media sites such as Facebook)? There seems little point in recruiting the look-what-I-found-in-my-refrigerator or watch-my-fifty-cute-cat-videos set unless we change the environment to be more like those other sites (I hope not). —

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4/5) = 33/68 (48.5%). Of course, just one vote either way totally skews that number now, but with enough data you could actually come to a pretty confident estimate of the sex ratio of the undeclared editors! Which is important because if half of editors are undeclared and they are (as here) evenly divided, that means it's more like a 2-to-1 ratio of male to female than 84-to-16, turning a seemingly hopeless recruitment problem into one which seems much more doable.

8194:" personally (because anyone who has lived with a disease like that might prefer not to spend any extra time thinking about it), but why not any of the thousands of men who edit here? That pretty much seems to be the problem: if the article is a "feminine" subject, then articles don't get created or expanded. We've got plenty of guys willing to write about men's sports, or cars, or other traditionally "masculine" subjects, but the "feminine" ones get no attention. 5031:

to say that it is acceptable. I have long spoken out for woman's rights, but I would not join this project because it appears that Carol, who seems to be the main spokesperson, sees this as a battle of the women against the men, who have been repeatedly characterized as wild dogs who have staked the territory out to keep females away. That sort of attitude will only force "the men" to dig their heels in and become defensive--And I don't blame them for that.

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arrested for theft, it is unknown whether he beat his wife or not." -- Which implies that there was a good chance he beat his wife. This is absolutely no comparison in this other than trying to drag my name through the absolute dirt by presenting only one side of the story. Off wiki evidence cannot be used for sanctions and it's ridiculous that you're attempting to do so. Oh, and using dots as if to imply that I'm not female is an insult, plain and simple.

8826:, look how far we are away from that. It's not a realistic risk even in the medical field. Meanwhile, we have male majorities of 90/10 or at any rate far greater than 70/30 all over the place. That's the problem to be addressed now, and for the foreseeable future. Humanities articles in particular would benefit from women's involvement. I very much doubt that Knowledge will at any time soon have to worry about having too many female editors. 8563:

greater coverage of subjects that interest people at different stages of life; and so forth. You asked at the start of this section what effect having more female editors would be. My answer is that we would have more and better articles about subjects that typically interest women more than men. Then we could have those articles, even though you (and the thousands of male editors like you) aren't interested in writing them.

1280: 864:, which is more related to user-friendly. But that includes a non-intimidating and pleasing appearance. Of course, the new Beta format is supposed to address those issues. But between old users not wanting to learn it and various bugs still being fixed, that's still being worked on. As a lazy old user, I can't really comment on alternatives myself, except to say if they are an option for those who prefer them, great. 271:

down the content. Sure there are stupid women, not to mention women who pretend to be stupid so people will like them, as well as men who are stupid. Have you ever watched a group of PhD's standing around a stalled car in the faculty parking lot? Expertise in one subject area does not guarantee competence in another. When it comes to user expectations, I suspect that age has a larger influence than gender. —

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long history of uncivil interactions with others comes before ArbCom, it should often be a simple open and shut case. For a variety of reasons (including that policy isn't strong enough in some areas so ArbCom can feel constrained) that sometimes doesn't happen, and this has follow-on repercussions with behavior across the site as uncivil people feel safe to carry on.--] (]) 10:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

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to pick out at a glance which is a classic, and which is a Gothic romance. Architectural Digest has one look and feel, Wired has another. So what is Knowledge's niche? For one, Knowledge has a unique educational mission. So should it look like a coffee table book with glossy pictures and bland text? I hope not. You want to bring people in sure, but then eventually inoculate them with your values, like

9856:

college professors). The corollary, of course, is also the disproportionate extent in the creation of said articles on each of the above topics. A minor athlete in a major league in 1935 will get an article. We recently had to deal with an AfD on a woman actor who was "only a supporting actress" in several films by major studios. Seems roughly equivalent to me, but not to the deletionist crowd.

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get into a fight over an article and the article is locked down but the user or users who caused the problem are not dealt with, which means that the nastiness remains while the ability to contribute does not, which is discouraging for people (and also encourages nastiness, because it works as a way to drive people off from an article which gets locked down for a week who just leave in frustration).

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specialized by gender. Although many sites are male-dominated, women today have more choices of online environments than they did in the past, including social media sites in which they can exercise a degree of control over who reads and comments on their contributions. As discussed further below, users of these social media sites tend to be less anonymous than in earlier text-based forums.

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answer is probably in the last word before the thread was closed: "All this commotion would've been avoided, if all editors had chosen to hide ther RL genders from Knowledge." Knowledge is not ready for women publicly editing as women. And now I shall trundle off and see if I can get someone to bring me a beer, so I do not have to go to the refrigerator for myself. Cheers. —

7368:

im not trying to stereotype anything but to go by what draws people in the most, it has been proven though that a majority of women for example like to clothes shop. We are trying to find more female editors remember? If we can lure some to the projects we have here on Knowledge over time the gap will be filled more. Thank you btw Carolmooredc, for hearing me out on this. -

4402:

feminism-related pages. On these articles, project, and talk pages we see some editors (male and female) distinguishing themselves with solid constructive participation. We see others who are unable to collaborate effectively. In time, I hope to see many of the participants on these pages elevated to Admin, without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, or place of birth.

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argued to be a "female article" - this also hints at the third reason: readership. Fourthly we also need to have in the backs of our minds other wikis, notably Simple and Wikipedias in languages where the paucity of articles is such that the (now almost proverbial) classes of high school children can add a lot of value, especially if they are bilingual. All the best:

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if the putative new female editors will be better, the same or worse than our existing editors. Clearly the proposal to recruit high-school students raised concerns that they would be "less good" editors, for example. Conversely a proposal to recruit female professors might give us many potentially high quality editors, but who will be too busy to edit very often.

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top of infrastructure, I might have kept some of them editing. Of course finding areas that both are a special interest with lots of fans AND have a large pool of articles can be difficult. So we do have to emphasize the broader approach; but when we find pockets of potential editors among some relevant fan base we certainly should go for it. Thanks for your work.

2646:, just say "notice of discussion" with a link and then drop it. Let the drama go to the page in question. Eric, your comments are better on this editor's own talk page than on the project page; I know none of the rest of us have any say in matters here if we disagree with this editor (even if we are female and feminist), but nonetheless, do not confuse the two. 882:[Later note: Also, given that many women are busy doing child and adult care and house work that they tend to get stuck with more, plus their day jobs, a simple and easily learned, well-organized interface (and help and policy sections) also make it more likely they'll take the time to edit and learn the ropes. Knowledge's failings in this area does point out 931:

users now--they can hardly wait 3 hours for a second edit, can they?--but I don't know of any female editors who use it. I suspect it will prove more valuable in attracting retired academics that will be required for the next phase of WP's growth. (And it probably isn't helpful to refer to grown women who are notable enough for their own BLP as "girls"). —

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male Admins included. However, back to our mission: I'm sure that any female editor who could show that she was sanctioned due to her gender could effectively appeal and reverse her block. In fact, if such an event could ever be demonstrated to have occurred, it would be her obligation to other women and to the Project to expose such discrimination.

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gently cajoled/encouraged me back to editing when I've felt like walking away. My whole day was wasted yesterday watching the comments generated by the nonsensical report at AN/I - wouldn't everyone's time be better spent working on content rather than all the forum shopping, slinging of accusations etc that seems to be going on? I know mine would be.

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Or you click on the reference button and it walks you through a little bit of how to properly reference things, with a little description of what a reliable source is and links to anything else which is relevant, as well as a basic window which lets them put in the URL, author name, website name, ect. This would make an enormous difference, I think.

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it be special circumstances, like someone who is harassed telling someone to f#ck off or calling them a "l**p d**k" or something. In short, if it is proved that there is a pattern of sanctioning women more harshly, and editors think that's what's happening and they oppose that sort of thing, they'll say so. It's not some rule imposed from above.

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started as a "proud female" who hardly ever, if ever, used an anonymous or gender free handle. Then I ended up kicking myself for every letting anyone know the truth. But now with this group I'm feeling like, wow, let's just tell the world. Burn the gender free burqa! If others want to join me, great. If they don't, that's their choice.

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author didn't know and just made the assumption. However, if the author assumed the same ratio, that's equivalent to assuming there is no glass ceiling. So one of two things are true based on your summary: Either the author assumes, without evidence that there is no glass ceiling, or the author has no evidence one way or the other.--

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support for newbies (well, all editors, but especially newbies); and organising concerted efforts by editors of both genders to improve our coverage of women and women's topics (sport, anyone; science, anyone?). Each of these strategies can be pursued without dependence on the others, and be either individually or socially supported.

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editors have on Knowledge's content? I cannot say for sure, though I know there will be an impact, because males and females do not have identical interests. You and I no doubt loathe Pinterest and Jenna Marbles, for example, to take some silly examples. But that is really the whole concept behind the corporate movement in

9254:

currently topic banned. One WP area that would be improved for this very reason? Gun violence and gun control related articles. The majority of owners are men, and the majority opposed to their control are men, and the majority of WP editors on this subject are men. This bias is clear when reading WP articles on the subject.

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been and will be more examples of gender bias. I'd like to be part of the effort to identify it and root it out. Yet when I see charges made, and polite requests for evidence, the evidence is often scant, or false positives or "in progress". When those asking for evidence are rudely addressed, who is the bs generator?--

8640:, that a certain level of diversity creates stronger organizations. And more profitable ones because in the business world you can't ignore that cash is king, and if having 100% men on boards would guarantee higher profits, no such initiative would exist, period. Of course you are free to believe differently.-- 8731:

slowly entered the medical profession as physicians and as nurses struggled to be considered professionals rather than just handmaids to the doctors. As it is, Knowledge does not represent my circle of friends when it come to health information, and I really do believe that we need women here to change that.

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mop than male editors. I've followed hundreds of RfA requests, and do not recall that gender is even known in many cases. Does someone have some numbers to back this up? If it is a real issue, I'm on board trying to fix it, but I'd like to see some evidence that it is actually a problem. I do not own a copy of

6804:. When our cells try to fight off an invader, they chop it up into little bits that are self-contained and easy to recognize, and when they spot one that doesn't belong, they present it in a standard way to make clear that something has to be done about it. In the same way, it is important to try to spot an 4113:

September an active drive for the nomination of women for becoming administrators would allow for the evaluation of their background before the end of 2014. The "glass ceiling" limiting the number of women administrators at Knowledge is seen as limiting progress toward gender parity described in the 2014 book

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some images. I don't like the current white box obscuring part of the image but if they moved the grey and white side header to the centre top of image and remove the white bottom and replaced the side header with "contents" it would look a lot better. I've seen a glimpse of your Athena design on The Beatles

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a copy of the movie (directors cut - possibly the wrong version) to see for myself. It is certainly the case at first blush that the GGML acted as a canvassing tool, just as this page did on recent AfD's. However that is not the purpose of the GGML, nor was it the reason the issue it was raised there.

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OK, to do what I did before, 3/13 = x * 10/57 + (1-x) * 13/19 , so x = 336 / 377 = 89.1% male. Yikes! This better (but still inevitably rough; one vote could change it by 7.5%!) estimate seems to favor the idea that undeclared editors are not much different in sex than the declared ones. Which, to

9661:

There are other questions than coverage, for example quality (accuracy, referencing, balance etc.), collegiality, ratio of mainspace edits to behind the scenes edits, etc. which I do not have enough information to answer - indeed the questions do not provide enough information, because we do not know

9316:

Eric, it's not about coming here to make friends - maybe you do, maybe you don't. It's about coming here to collaborate with people instead of just tear them down, over and over again. You said above (below now) that you are all for rational ways of getting more women editors, because they are better

8328:

yesterday I now see there are whole areas of articles missing or in sorry shape that would more likely exist or be better if he had more female editors. This is completely normal. We'd have more articles on Madagascar if more than 1.5% of the population of that country had internet access (and knew

8126:

in which Waid is very critical of the "breast cancer culture" (and I am as well). While men understand the broader women's issues, I doubt that they'd get this one - actually very few women do either. In fact, I'd love to get Waid's opinions here because IMO she is one of our best editors and would

7946:

The base UI screen needs to have the most necessary things listed under their true names, not as symbols or whatever. It needs to call something a "wikilink", and when you click on it, pop up a window that says "enter article name". And then they enter the article name and POOF, it is in the article!

6414:

Some of this is in regards "civility" in the Terms of Service which technically the Foundation could enforce and I think does when it comes to things like harassment/death threats through the email system, some copyright violations or egregious BLP problems community hasn't dealt with, probably other

6405:

4. I recommend that people who care about this issue work hard to think about how we might improve our ArbCom processes so that more cases can be handled and in a quicker fashion. Barring that, I would say being careful to elect "civility hawks" to the ArbCom would be useful. When a user who has a

5325:

It may also be helpful to realize that the focus of the group seems to be in examining the research and developing strategies based on current understanding, and not on polemics. I probably don't have to remind you that anything based on the scientific method, as contrasted with belief-based systems,

5196:

We need to start treating hospitality as a first class virtue, and see that it is the seed of everything else. Alberto Brandolini said “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” It has a big cost when someone treats others badly. If someone

5030:

I don't think it's best to let it lie at all. Throughout written history women have not been allowed to speak out about their place in society. Now that we have finally arrived at a place where we are able to speak, we no longer need to resort to sneaky tactics, and it mars the feminist perspective

4813:

content creation, because I have to do my own deletions, historymerges, etc., and it all takes time. Also, there's no point in nominating or supporting at RfA someone without the right mix of experience, just because they are female, because RfA is not an election, and you have to give good reasons.

4480:

about it, eh? Where did you get the strange idea that sneakiness is OK? That's exactly the tactic that the antiabortion folks are using as they chip away at women's right to choose. If you are not aware of their tactics you might read our many abortion related articles, written mostly by men, BTW.

3791:

For this aim, the role of female editors is paramount. Indeed our analyses (both automatic and the brief manual analysis of content) provide strong evidence that female editors engage in relationship-oriented speech that is conducive to a positive working environment. Interestingly, this result holds

2731:

Carol, you accused me of being a man just because I disagreed with you. As far as I'm concerned, your little "civility" campaign is just a drama fest, you don't understand wikipedia well enough to actually be very credible here and I am concerned that you are hurting a lot more than you are helping.

2104:

Thanks for the ping. This page is not on my watchlist, so I didn't see your note. Perhaps "fascist regime" is unnecessarily evocative, although that is probably in the eye of the beholder. My point was that the practice of censorship, demagoguery, shouting down, repetition until something sticks, and

1170:

Yeah, the navbox takes up a lot of room, maybe that would make the columns wider. It's nice to be able to put images on the right or left, but then you have to take care not to have them too close together, not sure why they're usually on the right. On the free WordPress blogs, you can't get enough

930:

The text editor is a huge barrier for new users. My first edit took me a huge amount of time to google, and a lot of the instructions I saw online were just plain wrong. It took me 3 hours to figure out how to do the second edit. But the VE is a disaster. I have heard it is being used to train new

592:

I don't have any evidence, Rich, it just seems obvious that it would be a factor. Knowledge feels like a neglected old seaside town. It's still a great place, but there's nowhere to buy good cheese, bread, olive oil or coffee, and when you go to the local pub you have to fight your way through swirly

289:

It seems self-evident that if Knowledge were to look nicer, we'd have more women interested in us, and I think it would increase women editors if we had easy ways to make our articles look good. Not only women, it would attract lots of other people too. The point is that the current lack of design is

9452:

I don't agree. I'm not interested in Rich's item 1 which is a hypothetical thought experiment, but I am interested in item 2, which is a goal worth pursuing. The mere existence of more editors means we will have more hands on deck to improve existing articles many of which are in abyssal shape. Some

9253:

All editors have biases. Some are able to edit for NPOV despite their biases, some are not. In cases where not all parties are able to edit neutrally, this is balanced by having editors on differing sides of a topic working together. I will say this and move on, since it is a subject from which I am

9221:

to help you get your head around it. As for your second question, I can't tell you how it would be different, or what would look different. But I don't think we should just fix the gender gap for the good of the content of an encyclopedia, I think we should fix it for the good of the people who want

9087:

Because a broader mix of editors means a broader mix of experience and opinion, why else? As for women, I really couldn't care less whether or not more women are recruited. I'm here because I think that too many of you have got your heads up your proverbial arses, attacking windmills that are simply

8896:

So your position is that having an editorial body that is 15-16% men has had a negligible effect on WP content, and that a more balanced gender mix would not have much of an effect on content either. OK. So, aside from the fact that you find them often easier to work with, why do you want more women

8614:

And if you find that female editors are proportionately less interested in history or industrial archaeology for instance, let's hear that too, instead of this continual blustering and obfuscation. Is there a gender gap? Quite possibly, but that's not really the issue. The issue is what impact might

7999:

I don't mean blocks and bans. I mean when admins roll in and lock an article or do similar administrative tasks, very frequently it seems very brusque and abrupt, even though it often is not. It also sometimes seems to be a solution to more user-based rather than page-based problems, where two users

7958:

I think that this would all help. And #2 and 3 are fundamentally social issues which are difficult to deal with from a top-down level save by telling people to be nicer - though maybe a little note on the editing page for talk pages to remind people to be civil, polite, assume good faith, and not to

7933:

I think the biggest barrier to editing Knowledge for people is nothing more than simple intimidation. They're scared by the site, the discussions, the tone, the user interface, and everything else. It isn't just women, either - I know tons of men who are more than good enough with technology to edit

7697:

Someone asked if any males were subscribed to the GGML - I am not but I have read it all up to a certain date. I can't remember much except I think a discussion about a "rape scene" in Bladerunner, I think it was. I checked the talk page discussions which were interminable, and eventually acquired

7656:

is a very common occurrence in childbirth and discussed in every non-surgical pregnancy book on earth -- but I'll say even the research literature on that subject is sparse enough to make me think it also reflects gender bias. If men had periods, menstrual cramps would have been eliminated long ago

7367:

I made my very first edit here and already got slammed by three editors and you wonder why people with new ideas are reluctant to edit here? Im thinking larger picture here, of course all women don't like certain things just as much as guys don't all like manly things that is not my point at all and

6432:

This issue doesn't affect only women. It also affects people of ethnic or racial minorities whose user names or pages, editing interests or comments make that clear and who thus may end being treated more uncivility than otherwise. And it affects older people, experts, academics, etc. who don't have

6250:

It's not that I have anything against women-only groups: when you discreetly observe women-only gatherings, you can palpably feel their relief and delight at discourse that can more freely encompass what males are prevented from understanding by their gender. But there's a problem if you want to use

6014:

Judging by the contributions here from men like Rich, Tony, and Andreas, you would want a forum where you can benefit from male participation. You would also want to be very accessible to the wider public, where your new members are more likely to come from, and who might lurk a bit before deciding

5712:

Echoing Nikkimaria, "I find aspects of this project insulting to women" and what SagaciousPhil has to say. There is nothing about this project that would make me want to join. It needs critical friends but as dissent results in a trip to ANI it isn't likely to get them. Perhaps the vociferous should

5373:

You misrepresent the issue. If a charge of "entrenched sexism" is made – nothing to do with the gender gap per se – then it is not unreasonable to ask for some evidence in support of said claim. Unless you're attempting to dishonestly push a feminist agenda of course. This project would do better to

5207:

The slides and notes from that session are up. And one of them is to think carefully about what we do in super-public spaces versus how we act in invite-only space or quite private spaces, and to think about what those spaces are. I think of the spaces that are more secret or private as places where

4720:

One thing to consider, and this connects with what Eric was asking, is that there are quite a few male editors who happily work on biographies and other articles about women, and by supporting and recognizing their efforts we may be contributing to closing the content gap in the interim, while still

3873:

In terms of subjects studied, we are on more slippery ground. More girls study psychology than boys, and more girls (in the UK at least) go into law. However one has to take a subject at university, and choices are not always made purely on interest. Questions such as "Would you read a psychology

3534:

Great. Linked to it on main page under Wikiprojects. As you can see under our To Do list, there are a bunch of different lists of women's bios in all categories that need creating or updating from stub. You may be able to find some more writers there. Maybe someday I (or someone else) will integrate

3352:

The community will reverse an obviously unfair sanction, using whatever evidence there is, be it some admin saying "I'm blocking this stupid female/Arab/African-American" or be it someone getting a six month block for doing something that individuals normally get a 2 day block for, especially should

3300:

Systemic bias/double standards do not necessarily show in specific language which can be used at evidence. They tend to show in numbers which have to be collected. One woman sharing anecdotes can lead to a number of women sharing them, a start in the evidence collection process. Unless of course the

3181:

The things that drive off female editors from wikipedia are some of the same things that keep a lot of women in the real world from reaching their potential. I will note that many these same behaviors drive off male editors as well. If we solve these problems, it will be a great thing. However, I

2064:

I think the use of "fascist regime" is unnecessarily evocative. There are many examples of task forces which have the bulk of contributions from a small number of participants, and many where a single voice is omnipresent. That reality doesn't automatically make it worthy of your description. I urge

1920:

Hey guys! Can I join your circle jerk? I see this is a section where no member of the GGTF has posted, and I'm not one either, so let's keep it that way! I would like to appoint myself Minister of Male Asshattedness, what we can do to support the group is to act like absolute infantile fuckheads

1437:

What happened to being bold? In any case, one way of closing the gender gap is obviously to increase the number of female editors. The WMF is a fundraising machine, and apparently has funds to pay developers to create features that the community seemingly doesn't want, send staff and board members

668:

But if you look at the examples the Handbook mentions, it is also worthwhile to note that, quite apart from anonymity and the patterns of social interaction, the sites where men are most dominant – Knowledge and Reddit – are very, very dry and text-based. The sites where women predominate look quite

9911:

I've only had one article at AfD, an obscure article about a 17th-century nun and guess who came to the rescue, Eric and several other editors who I know are men. I didn't think omg this is a man trying to remove women from the encyclopedia, I was upset because it was obviously someone who hadn't a

9855:

I see gender gap issues the most on the drama boards such as AfD, with a tendency to view biography topics involving women as more trivial and those involving men less so. (the classic "Scottish footballers" or "Sri Lankan cricketeers" criteria for notability, versus, say women actors or writers or

9832:

How does anyone know how frequently women edit if nobody knows who they are? I rather like the idea of not identifying as male or female. I think editors should be judged on what they produce not their gender. I don't want any little symbols after my name. What will happen when this critical number

9469:

I am also more interested in item 2. But item 1 should also be in out minds, because there are suggestions that changing the culture of Knowledge is required to preferentially attract more female editors. There are also suggestions that these changes will drive away males (maybe just a few, maybe

9393:

which has been a point of much discussion at ANI today, last month, and elsewhere the last month would have stuck; and if you kept it up you'd have been site banned by now. Getting more women and academics and older people and serious editors in here is half the job; keeping them means dealing with

9192:

In addition to more articles of interest to women, there would be more representation of women's POV on certain topics. Granted, not all women think the same way on all topics (just as men don't), but there are some topics where there is definitely a significant difference between how men and women

9153:

I'm also supportive of initiatives to encourage older people to contribute. I attended an interesting session at Wikimania 2012 talking about such initiatives. One of the claimed explanations of the gender gap is that females tend to have less free time. If we target retired people, we get a triple

9104:

Ignoring the personal attack, your arguments don't add up. You say the percentage of women editors on Knowledge has no effect on its content. But you also say you want a broader mix of editors (more women would make a broader mix) because they bring "a broader mix of experience and opinion" - which

8801:

However the assertion is often made that males and females bring "different" things to article writing, and the conclusion somehow drawn that we need an equal (or broadly similar) number of males and females working together to produce the ideal product. (I'm sure there are also different views.)

8064:

This "male privilege" thing is something I don't get at all. But here's one simple question the answer to which may help the mad-dog male editors such as myself. Assuming the claimed 16% of female editors is somewhere in the right ballpark, what effect has that had on WP's content? Or what would be

7544:

affects a quarter of pregnant women (also known as half the mothers interested in providing contraction-by-contraction replays of their own birth experiences at baby showers, from my observation ;-) and is a prime driver of epidural anesthesia. So that's a medical complication happening in about a

7166:

I only started editing because someone had created an article about me and separately about the peace group I was in plus I did one about a friend. A few years later one of the two workshops I did was for a group with a special interest and 12 people showed. If I'd been more experienced and more on

6393:

1. I think the WMF can do little directly. It would be pretty difficult for them to get directly involved in banning uncivil users, and hard for them to do a good job of it. One reason for this is that extreme cases are quite easy and the community does a good job of bans. The difficult cases are

5518:

One challenge is that many of the contributors conflate systemic bias and gender gap. That confusion is starkly noticeable in the title - note "WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force" as if gender gap were a specific case of systemic bias. It isn't. The gender gap is an easily

4759:

Hey, Eric, be fair now! There are millions of articles, and innumerable excellent authors and famous politicians to write about; nobody can possibly work on all of the ones that might be of interest. Anyway, it's not a contest. And thank you for working on those ones you mentioned, while the rest

4324:

I asked if a quote from the book supported the claim. You said "Yes" but your explanation equates to "No". if female admins are in the same ratio as editors, then almost by definition there is no glass ceiling. However, I'm not ready to leap to that conclusion, because, if I read you correctly, the

4266:

Sorry but I cannot let the "glass ceiling" remark go without comment. I am well aware of the gender gap, and know many of the reasons for the disparity in numbers of editors. However, I don't recall ever seeing any discussion about the notion that female editors have any more difficulty getting the

2283:

a female, my name is Danielle and the proof for anything of 'disruption' has been seriously lacking in any context. They used my freakin' edit count on pages I edit the most as proof of my 'disruption' and you mentioning the accusation is much like presenting a biased and non-contexual view. "A man

2193:. There is a gap and, yes, it could probably be narrowed. I doubt it will get to 50:50, for a variety of behavioural reasons that also account, for example, for the alleged reverse gap at Facebook. What I'm seeing on my odd visit here, though, and in the spewings of related material on pages that I 1570:

There are already groups of students who edit/create articles as a part of coursework every year. I've seen them around sometimes, usually when then their newbie work ends up in AfD. I suspect a dedicated editor could hook up with the prof in one of those courses and get the students to take some

1260:

The sidebar is a work in progress - we want to pull "meta" information into it (things like infoboxes) and do things like include galleries and other ways to surface additional content as well as possible contribution vectors. The question about moving all the images into that side bar has come up

1131:

Winter, yeah there's a test page, fake notifications (I hope, otherwise Oliver Keyes has been talking about me), the drop down boxes are nice, collapsed language box, nice fonts or whatever, the margins are a little narrow, but I expanded my screen to almost full view and it was better, nice having

341:

Format is important, sure, but "look nicer" is a fairly nebulous goal. This is about "branding", what you want something to convey by looking at the appearance. Think of the cover of a dead-tree book. It's pretty easy to tell genre at a glance. You don't have to read all the titles on a bookcase

9892:

Getting women here in the first place is difficult. Keeping them here if they work on political/economic articles where there are a lot of aggressive guys is something else. I work on those, so I've seen a lot of it. Those who work in calmer waters (and I do work in those types of articles happily

9693:

be closer to 25% (just a guess, of course). Now, presuming that the number of male editors continued to be about the same, that would mean that the number of women editors would need to at least triple, or maybe quadruple if my guess is off. This would be a huge increase in the number of overall

8745:

I had the pleasure of meeting a significant number of the WikiProject Medicine people in London, and it is certainly true that there was a more even gender balance in the group I met. Of course it does not follow that the project at large is better balanced, but the indications from research are

8730:

Farmbrough, I am very concerned about our health related articles in general, and I feel that we'd see a big change in the way that many issues related to health are handled in our articles if we had 50/50 women here. I'm old enough to have watched the change that occurred in health care as women

8635:

decides to actively recruit more editors interested in Madagascar articles because of the Madagascar Gap, that's fine with me. Editors who try to edit articles about Madagascar are often not familiar with Knowledge's culture and can be run off. Now, what exact impact will encouraging more female

7855:

and yet another editor stated that, in effect, "big content producers have ra right to be as uncivil as they like" and those who aren't big content providers have no right to complain. In response I put up a home-made "Wikibreak" box on my user page. It's a polite way of saying "I'm too aggravated

7721:

When I read through it looking for diffs I also found a lot of proposals (some of which later came to fruition) and personal anecdotes that were fascinating and I copied to files. Haven't decided what, if anything, to do about the latter, anyway. Perhaps quote in an essay. Just another item for a

7136:

Im not talking about single editors though, I am talking about getting female editors to join projects based on what they like to do. it has been shown that women like certain things more than guys do and other things that normally guys would think "That's crazy" women have the same interest in as

6193:

I totally agree with Andreas above. There's nothing wrong with a gender organizing task per se; it becomes problematic when it takes the form of a WikiProject. Start your own message board like Wikipediocracy, Zoloft at WPO has published a very helpful beginner's guide as part of a thread there if

5684:

Just a couple of general thoughts/replies: The reasons I don't post here or AN/I etc are primarily because I would rather be working on content; I do find many comments here to be insulting to women and several make me ashamed to admit being female, especially posts that I feel are tendentious and

5633:

As a female editor, Neotarf, I find aspects of this project insulting to women. I also think that it can be difficult, even pointless, to raise viewpoints that differ from the strongest voice(s) here - and at the moment those voices are established members of this project, not "interlopers" as has

5311:

If someone does not understand the systemic bias, or does not think the gender gap is a problem, you would think they would find another area to contribute, instead of trolling this group. Are math groups constantly distracted by individuals demanding to have the concept of integers explained, and

4808:

One of the things I like about Knowledge is that there is no real limit on how many people can participate. This is the same with Administrators. It's not like the "glass ceiling" in a company, where there are only a certain number of positions available and women are competing head-to-head with

4657:

You could well be right. I suppose by "privilege" is meant the fact that I'm male? I've never thought of that as much of a privilege, but regardless, I never cease to be amazed by the conclusions drawn from some pretty dubious research. Is there a gender gap here on WP? Quite possibly. What is it?

4140:

I'm not all the familiar with the process so it's always good to link to relevant policy page. I get impression individuals first have to make it known they want to be admins. Right now we have a problem with just getting women to stick with editing, so admin is a big step. There probably are some

3861:

My concern here is that we do not know the base distributions in, for example, interest. If we did we could correlate these with Knowledge coverage, and see if the distribution of each gender editors is concomitant with their interests (and even answer the basic question "Is the average Knowledge

3787:

We find that higher-status editors promote a neutral, impersonal and more formal conversation tone in Knowledge. They “rule with reason”, and maintain a mildly positive tone – a crucial aspect to the good functioning of the collaborative project. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether administrator

3707:

By the way, returning to the Emotions under discussion paper, I don't think it matters if the male pool included some female editors who chose not to identify as female. All it would have done would have been to make the males appear slightly more relationship-oriented than they really are. ;) The

3703:

That (latter) paper was linked in my blog post. :P Speaking of figures, I am currently trying to find out what the gender split was in the July 2012 WMF editor survey. To this day, I don't think the figure has been reported (in the April 2011 editor survey, it was 8.5%). If I've missed it and it's

3608:

A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators

3281:

I doubt that things would be any different if we were to pay male mediators here. Hiring female mediators gets back to the affirmative action question. At any rate, I've seen some male mediators fall flat on their male faces here, and male-on-male incivility is more the rule than the exception --

3226:

The problem is NOT: A) the interface. For chrissake, women routinely learn customized database programs and a host of other technological skills. Knowledge is not that complicated to edit. B) the topics: we don't need pink ponies and magic unicorns. Or fashion. That's really condescending

3196:

Bullying and harassment. My own experience is that seldom is it gender-directed (I have a gender ambiguous user name, often those who attack me assume I am male). However, the trolls, the bullies, the POV-pushers, the tendentious editors, and the flat-out crazies all seem to have mastered ways to

3152:

Not sure what you mean by "problem". In other words Commons help could list a few sites that list celebrities contact people, assuming it doesn't already, since I haven't looked. And assuming there are such, which I assume :-). It's no different than asking anyone else for permission to use their

2197:

watchlist, is talk more about civility and meta-comments offering alleged proofs etc than resolving the gap itself. We have projects that cover civility and what is evident from this very thread is that one of the few potentially constructive, workable proposals that I've seen in my skimmings here

2005:

did it but the edit summary says they were restoring something. From Milowent's message, it looks like they did it the original hatting but why do so anyway? It just looks like censorship and I don't see the need for it. Tony1's message, certainly, has value; so too does everything up to the point

1965:

Every time I come into contact with a newbie, I write something encouraging on their page. It bounces back very positively when they haven't already experienced brash rudeness. So it becomes self-therapy, if you like. Does everyone on this page encourage a newbie at least once a week? Some of them

1589:

I'm was thinking the group could propose the WMF coordinate this. I'm not qualified to build a study, but they can afford to pay someone who is qualified to commission a study and examine the results. Just for kicks, it wouldn't hurt to write an abstract of what you want to test. I'll look into

1381:

and I really think the big background image with the title at the top on it is the way to go at least. What I saw of the "Winter" design though IMO it looked bland and unappealing. I'd like to see the new skin introduced following the design of WikiWand as much as possible. I'm pretty sure then if

1372:

Agree that it would be great if we could modernise the look on here like WikiWand. I really think white text on a dark background as a border makes the text in the article stand out more. I preferred the original wikiwand look with the white font on picture but they had problems with visibility on

656:

So women online place more importance than men on spending time with people congenial to them, prefer to avoid people who are not, and like to form more meaningful personal relationships than men. (Incidentally, one take-away from Wikimania was that two people told me, based on their experience as

9997:

the statistics hold up, it allows you a method to assess what proportion of the undeclared editors in aggregate (weighted by participation) are female. To run the math, if x is the proportion of male editors, you've measured 2/4 = x * 2/11 + (100% - x) * 4/5 --- therefore x = (2/4 - 4/5)/(2/11 -

9884:

For women like me stuck with female names because we didn't know better than to use an anonymous gender neutral handle, it would be great to see more evidence of women. I'd basically given up on trying to figure it out and started calling all editors "he" until there was some clear sign they were

9583:

More (proportionately) "missing" female biographies than male biographies (e.g. a large gendered selection from Chambers Dictionary of Biography we were missing 247 female biographies and 847 male biographies, however this was 11% of the female selection and 5% of the male selection). Again from

9533:

Research shows (but not as convincingly as we would like) that "female edited" subjects are less well covered than "male edited" subjects. The disparity is not always huge, and there could be other explanations for some of it. The vast majority of subjects are treated as gender neutral, and are

8099:

But what would those articles be? The female editors I've worked with have been interested in stuff as wide ranging as industrial archaeology, coal mining, medieval history, mythology, transport ... the list goes on. I myself have written on some might consider to be girlie topics such as nursery

7941:

1) A better editing UI. The UI right now is not very good at all. The basic UI it gives you is a bunch of symbols; I'd imagine most people don't even realize that there is a drop-down menu. Many folks may not realize what Wiki Markup means, and even if they do, are they likely to know what things

6852:

But women shouldn't keep complaining others (male or female) call them he if they do not identify as a woman in their user names. And if it sometimes takes editors a couple times to remember, be patient. There are a lot of editors out there and it can be hard to keep straight who's female and who

6848:

OK, the Xe individual, I got it now ;-). (Using such gender free descriptions another option.) But of course since Knowledge is a fairly free site, people can choose whether to identify their sex or gender. And they can encourage or discourage others from doing so. All I know is that I personally

6781:

Women editors should not take offense if they give no indication they are women in their user names and then are called guys. Editors are not mind readers and we can't go to the talk pages and histories of every posting editor and figure it out. After getting tired of writing s/he, and him/her, I

6754:

Much is often made in Arbcom discussions about consensus and community norms, and these discussions often result in getting closer to solving thorny community problems, but in this case the discussion was not allowed to play out. For any female editors who are concerned about being harassed, the

5230:

I heard Sumana's speech at the time she made it. I was particularly taken by the notion of hospitality, and that has changed the way I look at some of our written and unwritten conventions. That said, we might have differing opinions on who the bs generators are. I am 100% certain that there have

4218:

Anyway, I just remembered that as far as the "To Do" list goes, we already have "actively recruit women editors and administrators" under "Affirmative Action measures". And as I've proposed before and may work on soon, if we have a page that fleshes out various proposal, those who want to can get

4159:

We very much need more female admins. They do need to be suitable and willing; and perhaps there's a privacy/pressure issue in nominating onwiki without first seeking their agreement. I wonder whether it could be done via the email facility, or if email is not enabled, by a cautious note on their

3877:

So there is the difficulty in establishing areas of interest. We may (again as an isolated datum) draw on the Wikifashion experience to show that topic probably is relevant to the gender mix editing a particular article. And this is indeed supported somewhat by the PLOS article mentioned above.

3795:

These results have implications also for the gender gap issue. Together with the finding of that women tend to interact preferentially with other women, our results suggest that being able to involve more women and to give them more space in the community would also result in a virtuous cycle of

3671:

Interestingly this paper, which is on the talk page contributions of editors with over 100 article talk page contributions supports the claim that the difference between admin and non admin gender ratios is negligible, and, if anything there are a bigger percentage of female admins than of female

2749:

In any case, people who don't want to work on civility issues don't have to. And frankly I am coming to agree with those who said we need to go off wiki, but not on the Gender gap itself, just the civility issue. I can see also that Editor Retention has some of the same problems with the civility

470:

It doesn't have to be either or. We can have the Experience while looking up the factual detail. I've been around these discussions for years, with people telling us we had to use tiny thumbnail images, that they always had to go on the top right, that we can't have columns or shorter lines. It's

396:

I disagree. The best look is the one that makes you say "Wow! I want to read, write and taste this, and I need to know the name of that colour for my bedroom wall." A good design pulls you in. Knowledge looks dull. It's hard to read (the lines are too long, for one thing) and almost impossible to

270:

The gender-based arguments for design choices I am less impressed with. Unless there is some clear study cited, too often these claims are just an excuse to reinforce negative stereotypes of women. How many times do you see "gender gap" used as a stand-in for "stupid user", as an excuse to dumb

167:

Just a note that this topic was discussed thoroughly with a variety of opinions at the Wikimedia Foundation Gender Gap email list in March of 2011. Some people thought it was fine, other that Knowledge just needs a male wikipe-tan as well. Others thought the most offensive ones should be removed.

10034:

It seems clear that there is a clear difference in the articles male and female editors focus on, with male (and undetermined) editors nominating nearly 5 times as many articles about male subjects than about female subjects, and female editors nominating more than 2 times as many articles about

8927:

Where on earth has anyone said you hate all women? The point is, you spend a lot of time making statements and asking questions that indicate you think this task force is bogus. Here's what you wrote on your own talk page about it: "Yes, my fundamental objection is to all these conclusions being

8879:

Very little would be my answer. What are the topics that would be of more interest to females than males? But let's not misunderstand, I'm in no way against increasing the number of female editors if that can be done in a rational way, just as I'd like to see a lot more older editors. In fact my

6750:

In case anyone doesn't know, the ANI case was about the anti-gender group who have been disrupting the discussions here. Several of these people have made public statements that the group should not exist at all. The anti-gender project group made a proposal to ban Carol, which failed. I then

6686:

If all the individuals unhappy with certain individual's behavior explained that nicely at their talk page, maybe they would reform. I know people have felt free to complain to me so often that it just became harassment and I had to ban them, often repeatedly. However, I think we can do it in a

5906:

What about Wikiproject Disability or Wikiproject LGBT where there is a strong affirmative action view on bringing in more editors from those groupings as well as on supporting articles about, among other agendas, laws regarding hiring, special facilities, etc? Are they also to be politicized and

5688:

have nothing but contempt for women", I'll put my hand up and state (yet again): Eric is terrific to work with and he has most certainly never treated me with contempt. He has always treated me with nothing but the greatest respect. He has gone out of his way to be helpful, considerate and often

3814:

Together with the finding of that women tend to interact preferentially with other women, our results suggest that being able to involve more women and to give them more space in the community would also result in a virtuous cycle of female participation, through the creation of a communication

1740:

I think the members of this group can archive using whatever method they agree upon. Many other groups from time to time will vary from automatic archiving to remove threads (contentious or otherwise) they don't want around, or bring back old discussions, its not like its impossible to find the

998:

Oh plenty of gals are Nobels and plenty of guy Nobels tell off-color locker room jokes when they think they're in private. It's just one of those things. Also the female Laureates also tell off-color tales from time to time and some of both the males and females harbor gender biases of various

8558:

Eric, your rational reason was what I expected: "Because it doesn't much interest me, why else?" Now, do you think that men and women, on average, might have somewhat different interests? And therefore that if you had more women, you might see more articles written on subjects that typically

8554:

I'm fundamentally paid to contribute to Bugzilla, and mainspace contributions are almost completely prohibited (staff are allowed to revert vandalism or software errors if we encounter it in the course of job duties, and that's about it. Writing articles on the clock gives the legal team a bad

8360:

I meant if we had more editors from Madagascar, we'd have more articles on Madagascar. But I laughed at your proposed interpretation of my comment. And frankly, I do want you to create articles on topics that don't interest you. I believe you should be forced to create one for every time you

7417:

I really believe that treating people who are members of a group as though they are all the same is the wrong approach, but even if it were appropriate, we should consider that the small percentage of women who flourish in the current Knowledge editing environment may not be typical of women in

7349:

Uh. Way to stereotype. The first post just basically assumes that any female editor interested in Anime is going to only be interested in Sailor Moon or that of course women will be more interested in little ponies or something like that. I think it's a better idea to not assume that women will

7076:

It's important to say "females" and "males", if we do not want to exclude younger editors. That is part of the reason I have chosen to use those terms exclusively on these pages. They also apply more ubiquitously to articles "Anne of Green Gables" is in no way a "women's article" but I can be

6397:

2. The Foundation could help us by doing more studies on what causes people to leave the community. I think what is often lacking is the empirical evidence needed to convince some fence-sitters how much damage some people are doing. If you write 3 featured articles but chase away through your

5860:

Reserve the right to determine who can or cannot join, based on people's Knowledge contributions and/or scholarly/journalistic work done elsewhere. The audience should never be the people who are the problem, because they just waste your energy; it should be scholars, journalists and interested

5856:

Slim has the right idea – I'd honestly take it off-wiki. Create a blog/forum for the GGTF analogous to Wikipediocracy, inform scholars and journalists, publicise why you're taking that step (a link to the current status of this talk page will suffice ...), and make the forum publicly viewable.

5089:

OK, since you insist (to your detriment) on prolonging this thread... Let's be honest. You were not making a "joke". You backtracked and called it a joke when you were challenged. That kind of dishonest battleground behavior is damaging to this Project. If you can't control yourself, please

3319:

If I understand you, this is again a promotion of affirmative action solutions. Are you saying that statistical evidence -- "numbers which have to be collected" -- would tell the community to reverse the sanction of an individual editor for behavior not referenced or even known to those in the

3248:

I agree that the interface, while a problem for some, is not the main problem. The main problem is once women get past all the other issues that keep them from editing, women have a far lower tolerance for incivility and game playing than guys, many of whom may see it as sport; more women value

910:

This saddens me, to see such outright sexism on our own Gender Gap page. What's the point? Boys like to edit in a smelly locker room with pinups on the wall while girls like everything neatly in its place with lace curtains and potpourri? How can we promote closing the Gap when we perpetuate

681:

frequented by women, and the average bachelor's flat shows less evidence of aesthetic ambition than the average single woman's place. Obviously, we are always talking bell curves here, with plenty of men and women found at either extreme, but the averages are not in the same place on the scale.

9072:

do you want a broader mix of editors? What differentiates your desire for a broader mix from mine? I think the quality of the encyclopedia will be improved by having more women editors. You think there will be virtually no change. So why do care one way or another whether or not more women are

8562:

I think that this is a generally true statement. I think it can also be generalized: greater gender diversity means greater coverage of subjects that interest different genders; greater geographical diversity means greater coverage of different parts of the world; greater age diversity means

7951:

2) People need to be less bitey towards newbies. This is a major issue, especially on established articles. I understand the frustration of dealing with a newbie, but people need to be nicer. People need to be more willing to note that users are not being civil and bring it up and deal with it

6833:

but it got panned pretty universally as soon as I suggested it). Sex could indeed be pushed to the back burner. The question is, does suppressing sex identification suppress sexism, or contribute to it by false assumptions or a failure to take diversity into account? I certainly don't know.

5733:

My sense is that Teahouse is very useful as an institution for getting people up to speed as content writers at WP, helping them to learn the ropes the culture. Perhaps this project could study whether the gender mix of participants there varies significantly from 85:15 and, if it does, try to

4440:

to Rich Farmbrough: a study showing if they identify as female (before or after becoming Admins), what kind of tasks they take on, which tasks they most engage in and why, would be interesting. I'm wondering if it would show they largely do not identify as female and lay low and get along with

4186:

RfA can be a cesspool. I've been on wiki 8 years and seldom if ever had any interest in getting the mop. If you have ever been in the least controversial, every enemy you have made on wiki will show up to oppose you. That said, some women have sailed through RfA, such as my friend User:Dana

4112:

If each subscriber to this WikiProject nominates their best choice of a women editor for becoming an administrator, then this would help address an important part of the recent call by Jimmy Wales for "doubling down" on the issue of the gender gap during this calendar year. During the month of

1962:

The WMF doesn't really know what to do about the gender gap. Me, I'm convinced that a multipronged strategy is needed for several parts of the "pipeline": attracting more women to press the save button for the first time (which Lila T believes is the hardest bit); promoting a culture of social

8173:

Speaking as a male dog I don't give prostate cancer a second thought, it'll either kill me or it won't. Breast cancer has a cosmetic and social element to it though. My wife had three operations to rebuild her breast to make her look "normal" again. I don't need anyone telling me that I don't

7113:

Women have as widely varied interests as men do. There is no need to pigeonhole a particular editor or try to guess what will interest her. If you want to encourage new women editors to stay around and be productive, the same things work as do for men editors: Greet them, invite them to the

4910:

It does in many people's eyes, which is why I regard Jimmy Wales as one of the most toxic influences on WP. He's got no idea about writing an encyclopedia, and instead chooses to concentrate on trying to build some kind of hopeless Ayn Rand inspired Utopia. WP would be better off without him.

1551:

its been a long time since I've used the scientific method, but what about getting a pool of students to edit. Have half use identifiable gender names, and the other half unidentifiable (thus assumed to be male?). Unleash them on the encyclopedia and start collecting data. It would be very

1314:

One of the obstacles is the way we handle images. I have no technical knowledge or vocabulary, so I don't even know how to describe this properly or what questions to ask you. But basically when we try to introduce those grey block quotes, the images won't allow us to place them where we want

660:

As for avoiding people who aren't congenial, Knowledge articles, like waterholes, attract species of editors with opposing agendas who have to somehow coexist, despite the tension between them, in order to work here. It's stressful. Writing on any mildly contentious topic in Knowledge you are

264:

The navigation panel is a nice touch; too often the contents box of a Knowledge article gets in the way of the text, or the image formatting. It doesn't work as well for the "colors" article, as people are more likely to want to skim and scan a list-type article quickly in order to see if it

8158:

Eric I was misunderstood, as I knew I would be just as soon as I read my post. I know you are capable of understanding. What I am getting at is that most men would not make the additions to the breast cancer article that Waid did about Pink Ribbon awareness. The Pink Ribbon awareness is a

3792:

also for female administrators, who diverge significantly from male administrators by being more relationship-oriented. By increasing the diversity of leadership styles and by promoting an atmosphere of openness and concern for others, women leaders play a pivotal role in such online spaces.

680:

It's clear that men don't care much about desktop aesthetics if there is function, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting that women do. If you look at other parts of life, pubs, bars, tea places, coffee houses etc. attractive mainly to men look different from those mainly

650:

Crocco, Cramer, and Meier (2008) argue that the move toward web-based computing has had an equalizing effect on gendered technology use. If equality is defined as equal in principle access, women in the United States have caught up with men. At the same time, the web is becoming increasingly

646:

Recently, women have come to outnumber men in some social media domains. They use social network sites such as Facebook more often and more actively than men (Brenner 2012), and female users predominate on the microblogging site Twitter, the consumer review site Yelp, and the online pinboard

3982:(a good first approximation for many phenomena), and applying it to male and female cohorts of the human population, with the X axis being "Propensity to contribute to Knowledge" it would be interesting to see the separation in standard deviations required for the outcomes that are observed. 1691:

That's right. That's why when a discussion has been archived, the appropriate way to continue an archived discussion is to start a new thread with a link to the previous discussion, not to dismantle the archive or "unarchive" things. The "confusing index trail" was started when the archived

7568: 6728:

I think that's an excellent suggestion. If Carolmooredc keeps her suggested references in her own user space, there will be no need for discussion or consensus. I think that such links provide a good way to encourage editors to share without concern about their efforts being judged here.

5060:. My focus was - and is - "We seem to forget that humans have both an upper brain (the cerebrum) which is relatively rational and a lower brain (the brainstem and cerebellum) that deals with automatic and unconscious functions." AKA "rationality", which seemed lacking in those discussions. 1925:

like we want to undermine the GGTF, and in doing so, we'll raise such a ruckus that women editors will come roaring into Knowledge in droves. I mean it worked a little bit when we cleverly put all women novelists into their category, and kept the real "novelists" (the males) separate, and

1759:

It depends is best answer. If it's something short that actually might be prematurely closed like Two Kinds wanted to put back in, I don't think it's a big deal to cut and paste. If it's an older closed thread that has a new angle, definitely brand new thread that links to old one is best.

3119:

People have to be more proactive in contacting these peoples' publicity representatives, at least some of whom would prefer having a nice photo than some of those that end up on the page. Maybe there could be a page on commons (linked here) that would explain how to find and contact their

2605:

again. I'm a member of this project and this task force, which makes it my business, specifically per that link. Carol's starting this section was appropriate for this project, this task force, and this page. Your contribution above serves no useful purpose, and does harm. Please stop it.

4401:

Let's not revert to stale affirmative action knee-jerk solutions which alienate more of the public than they empower. I propose a different approach. First off, it's not female admins we need, but gender-aware, neutral admins. Second, there are many eyes on this talk page and the other

6251:

such forums to speed up the glacially slow transfer of power from men to women. One of the ironies of the gender gap is that getting men on board is simply a faster way to proceed. We all know that the way to do this is to convince them that more equitable gender relations are in their

6711:

I think it would help a lot if people would try not to say anything that's predictably provocative, or at least not unnecessarily so. I'm not trying to stifle discussion, but it would be good to keep the tone inclusive and welcoming. A second thing that would help is not responding to

5734:

understand why. Actual solution of the gender gap starts with understanding what it is that helps people who drive-by edit stop and stay and become active volunteers, and working to improve the gender mix of newcomers. Teahouse might be an important tool for this. As of now: no data.

8775:, correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand you, the question you are asking is this: "If there were gender parity on medical topics now or at some point in the future, further increases in overall female participation after that would lead to a new gender gap on medical topics, 7023:

Its a start, using social media sites such as facebook and twitter would also be beneficial to get new editors in. As for older editors facebook would be better for that as new studies show that most middle aged women and men use the site as opposed to teens and college students. -

2704:

I'm not even in this thread. I don't like to poke at him, though I have been pretty fed up with his constant disruptions in the past and had to comment, foolishly thinking maybe he'd get the point. Please be careful about ascribing motives before they build urban legends. Thanks.

2259:

there is proposal to ban Titanium Dragon and Tutelary, and a suggestion was made that we be informed here. Titanium Dragon commented here a bit, and the reason to ban him seems incidental to our charter, but Tutelary is a project member, and among the suggested reasons for banning

6570:

The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes. They do not, however, have any authority over article content or editor conduct, or any other special powers.

8577:

In general and in my own experience I don't really find that males and females have radically different interests so far as encyclopedia articles are concerned. The bottom line for me is that the diversity debate is poorly framed, none less so than this gender diversity issue.

2788:

You argue from the position of logical fallacies. "Be nice to Carol" is not "civility," and not wanting to join your clique does not mean that an individual has no interest in the topic. But off-wiki would probably be the only way to avoid the troll-fest this page has become.

9947:

as a reasonably large, important, and stable set, and as a fair first approximation of who did most of the work of editing the article (sometimes the nominator is not the main editor, but more often than not they are). I looked at the nominator's user page, user name, and the

1158:

I'm seeing a right-hand column that's empty for most of the article (except for the navigation box at the top) so that in sections with images there are 3–5 words per line. I'm assuming it's not meant to look that way. I'd expect the images to run down the right-hand column.

8197:

A few years ago, I tried to work on some officially feminine articles for a while, after reading that the gender imbalance among editors was screwing up article content. I found that the research was largely correct: basic articles on non-sexual "feminine" subjects, like

7350:

automatically want to edit only a few topics - a surprise, but many women have quite varied interests. Are they supposed to only edit soap operas, fashion topics and food? Follow Anne Delong's advice ... and quit trying to figure out places to pigeonhole women editors.

471:

killing us. We need fresh eyes, good design. I just wish the Foundation wouldn't put so many of its eggs in the big baskets (Visual Editor, Flow), because it means the more obvious things are perhaps being overlooked. Speed is another issue – pages are so slow to load.

8343:

I answered her question. If she or anyone else wants me to create articles on topics that doen't interest me then money will have to change hands. And quite frankly your implied suggestion that more female editors = more articles on Madagascar is way beyond ludicrous.

6564:

I think that possibility had been discussed before, but first time an example shown. (Though at some point later I remembered I had taken it on a few years back for a while on another Wikiproject, but later resigned and did same thing in non-official capacity to avoid

1417:

If people have a serious proposal - especially one controversial to the list or the community - they should create a section and not just put it on the main page so we can discuss if we want it to go past the proposal stage. Perhaps the author could explain it here?

9939:- do male and female editors actually edit different articles? Would there actually be anything different in the focus of the Knowledge if we had more female editors? Do women actually write proportionately more articles about women? I think that's worthy of study. 7400:

I knew an editor here left now that used to only be here because she loved to edit anime and manga related articles, not everyone here has to edit everything or join 10 different wikiprojects, sticking with what you like to edit I feel is a draw for people here. -

8821:

If at any point in the future Knowledge were to have something like a 70/30 majority of female editors in the medical field, that might be a potential concern (I think anything within the range of 60/40–40/60 is unlikely to be very significant content-wise). But

6751:

offered to make a formal ban proposal the next day, in order to give the anti-project group time to consider whether they would agree to stay away from the project voluntarily. However the thread had been closed, and has now been closed twice by the same admin.

7779:

Hmmm, I thought SaidOnWP might be a plant to trap us, but seeing recent quotes, looks like it's for real. I'll still just bookmark it and peek from time to time. The other one seems a good way to get out positive info about positive efforts. Ada Initiative's

5108:

Lesson in human psychology: sneaky people don't announce their sneaky plans on public spots where people who love to jump on every single thing they say are going to jump all over their sneaky plot. They do it in private emails, etc. Geeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzz....

2745:

I'm pretty sure I just wrote "he". In any case I'm not a mind reader about who is and who is not a man or woman when they use gender neutral names; and I usually don't go to user pages to figure it out, since often there is no evidence there one way or the

4658:

Nobody really knows. What effect does it have on WP's content? Again, nobody really knows. Not a very good basis for launching a crusade the primary purpose of which appears to be to alienate every male editor by imposing a series of affirmative actions.

9394:

the problem that drives so many away - incivility, be it stupid and ignorant or bloated with intellectual superiority, and everything in between. Unless of course you learned self-control, in which case you'd be happily editing away like everyone else.

570:

That blog post was fine as a call to arms but evidence it ain't. The support for "Number 1" is a comment left on another blog, that agrees the interface is not great - but from a woman who has edited and created pages, and does not seem intimidated by

9236:

I'm obviously not here to make friends, I leave that kind of stuff to Facebook. But I'd really, really, like to know how WP's content would be improved if the supposed gender gap was addressed, given that many (most) editors don't reveal their gender.

5981:

I have seen other Knowledge language groups that user Facebook quite effectively, and you would not have to exclude men from a FB group. If Knowledge is not able to provide you with a space where you are able to do what you need to do, simply move on.

408:

It depends on what you want it for. Do you want an Experience or do you need to look up some factual detail. If you solve the first problem without considering the second, you have just forgotten your mission. Which IMHO is the problem of both the

7583:

I think it's also possible to get some progress by asking WikiProjects. I mean, I'm not even a member here (I honestly don't think about these issues much) nor do I edit about video games, but after seeing a surprising news report I posted a thread

6398:

incivility 10 potentially great editors who would have written 30 featured articles, then you are a net loss to the project. I think that's often the case with some of these characters, but we have no way at the moment to empirically demonstrate it.

6991: 3704:

available somewhere, please let me know. As far as I can tell, at Wikimania 2013 only the 16.1% figure from Shaw & Hill was reported (which is based on the 12.64% figure from the 2010 UNU survey, revised upwards based on assumed sampling bias).

7937:

I think that if you make the whole experience more user friendly, you'll see the gender gap close. Likewise, it will encourage a broader diversity of people in general to edit, which is good for other reasons. I think a few things need to happen:

3030: 9888:

But it's mostly about building a critical mass of editors and administrators who will just say no to disruptive bullying behavior and thus support more collaborative editing. And this isn't just my idea, see this thread on from EditorRetention

9618:

Umm, I don't think anyone is suggesting that 50/50 be achieved by killing male editors and replacing them with female editors. So it would result in an increase in topics that receive less coverage on account of Q1, not necessarily the second.

886:

in more anarchistically organized sites. Not that top down ones like Facebook, where women do abound, are necessarily easier, and of course many think they trick and manipulate users for profit. Hopefully some geniuses will fix it all someday!

3252:

The double standards you talk about in number two also apply to number one. Having naively registered with my name, I have seen dozens of examples of males saying nasty things that were ignored while I got trashed for things that editors only

664:

In short, despite successful initiatives like edit-a-thons that emphasise the communal aspects of contributing by like-minded people acting without the cover of anonymity, the deck is in many ways stacked against equal gender participation on

6394:

people who go around causing disruption and abusing people but who have some kind of support network and produce good content. In these cases, community opinion often ends up divided. It would be hard for the Foundation to know what to do.

5252: 6965: 1552:

interesting to take a group of male editors and give them female names and see how that compares to male editors with male names. Also interesting would be female editors with feminine names compared to female editors with masculine names.

8711:

has probably changed this somewhat. Indeed the figure I cited about healthy eating indicates a general male indifference to health compared to women. This may well be one of the reasons men die years younger than women. All the best:

6448: 5427:

Let's face a couple of facts here Neotarf. If you had made that completely baseless comment about anyone else you would now be blocked, or at least warned. The fact that you remain free to propagate such lies here tells its own story.

3262:

said a study of wikipedia showed that "female editors are more likely to get blocked indefinitely". (Haven't had a chance to identify and read it yet. Listing of dozens of relevant research/article/links almost ready for prime time.)

2686:

This is not the right forum and not the right parties. CMDC and Corbett are both people who just like to poke at each other, it will not resolve the serious, legitimate issues that this task force was originally supposed to address.

9970:

I would say that's highly indicative of the fact that yes, women do write more articles about women, at least proportionately, and possibly absolutely. There are more to go through, and I would welcome help going through the others.

9759:

It's also an open secret that there are men here posting as women. If someone wants to use the female pronoun, I don't have any problem with that, but when you get into gender statistics, that can become a little more controversial.

2892:

There have been a lot of references to a discussion where there were many ideas thrown around, including the idea of needing the consensus of 2 male editors to revert a woman. Anyone know where this discussion can be found? Grognard

7042:

problem over there, vandal central! I'm sorry Carol, I think this person is trying to troll the forum too. (Anyone who says "females" - really?) and football-related articles having "half its fanbase" Naah. We're being trolled.

5543:; the articles cited there should point you to more concrete examples. Or you might try talking privately to some female editors, they might be willing to say more offline than in a hostile editing environment such as this page. — 2342: 7274:

I have, but they're just one-off studies. As I'm sure you'll be aware, as the experienced editor that you are, that only review articles are appropriate to draw any conclusions from. Do you have any links to such review articles?

5197:

is ruining the hospitality of a place by using their liberty in a certain way, we need to stop making excuses, and start on the path of exclusion. If we exclude no one explicitly, we are just excluding a lot of people implicitly.

1352:

I've added an image above Andreas' text box above, not sure if this is the formatting problem that is meant. But surely the MediaWiki markup is a mature product--would creating a beta with one or two small changes be so complex?

1711:

So if Two Kinds of Pork still wants to talk about a specific topic thread, they should start a new thread that says something like "I still have things to say about this recently closed topic ". Otherwise, mass reversions like

6997:

Great. Every little bit helps. And hopefully as some of the younger women mature, go to college, and get into the heavier duty issues of economics/politics/history/science, etc. they'll become kick ass editors on those topics.

9562:

analyses of two other domains – Nobel Prize winners, and recipients of the Academy Award for Best Actor/Actress – we found that the average length of articles about female subjects is comparable to that of articles about male

4368:

I may be wrong, but I believe research shows a greater percentage of female admins than female editors. Someone could do the sums on Arbitrators, since the numbers are low, if the genders are common knowledge. All the best:

9833:

is reached? Will editors suddenly start writing "articles of interest to women"? Perhaps women who don't identify are quite happy with things as they are. Who knows? I don't, but I do think all this speculation is pointless.

8259:

I'm not a medical expert, and I appreciate that many people come to WP for accurate medical information. So why would you expect me to fiddle about with medical topics? What exactly are you trying to pin the blame on me for?

5914:

have a double standard view on those projects Vis-à-vis this one. So will they be taking on those projects' "political agenda" next and demanding they only work very narrowly on projects and articles approved by the three of

3085: 2020:

I don't know who hatted it but it's time to archive it. Milowent was very naughty taking the mocking fun of the six previous messages to their natural conclusion. Where's the wet noodle? And why is Sitush posting here when

2165:

She's not "in charge". No one is. It's a volunteer project. She posts a lot. Sometimes people do what she says, especially when they think it worthwhile. Sometimes they don't. At least some of us have been contributing to

6152:

So do they allow transgendered individuals who identify as female to join? What if they haven't come out to their family on Facebook yet and don't want to? If this is some sort of non-trans thing, I am easily against it.

6058:

The problem with the Gendergap list is that it has zero public impact beyond the group of people subscribed to it. Same with Facebook groups, in my experience. They're good for networking, but useless for publicity work.

3881:

Secondly we need to take into account Baron-Cohen's systematising-empathising scale. All encyclopaedias systematise, but Knowledge more than most, because we embrace NPOV, avoid COI, ban Original Research and Synthesis.

1947:

I would appreciate restoration by anyone willing to do so, because I find myself unable to engage in editing when faced with such offensive tactics. Now I know what it feels like to have my voice silenced, and it feels

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43% of boys were interested in "atoms and molecules" compared with 23% of girls, "What we should eat to be healthy" interested 53% of girls and 36 % of boys. While this is at high school age, it is a at least a datum.

1347: 1273: 98: 8290:" personally...but why not any of the thousands of men who edit here?") I am asking a non-finger-pointing question: You have worked on a lot of articles on a range of topics. Why aren't you working on articles like 4594:

I'm rather saddened by this gender war, as until quite recently I never gave a second thought as to whether an editor was male or female. Now it seems I'm obliged to though, even if they don't self-identify as female.

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Famously? Really? What a bloody joke. This task force, with you effectively in charge, is a practically fascist regime at present. Why not comment on the substance of the thread instead of acting like a goading prat?-

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can point you to the diff, as it was he who made the accusation. Once upon a time that would have been regarded as a personal attack, but obviously the rules have changed since Jimbo's "moral ambitiousness" campaign.

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Too many assumptions. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, and it was a difficult time. I frankly resent the idea that I don't get it. Some of us unwanted "male dogs" are actually married to women.

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million births each year in the US alone–but it's a red link at Knowledge. I kind of think that if we had not just more women, but specifically more mothers as editors, that we would have an article on that by now.

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One has to exercise extreme care handling the conclusions of research papers, especially where the authors (usually in common with the matrix community) assume that they have a background knowledge. Take for example

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editors lacked gender labels then it wouldn't matter. Now, that could be done - whatever machinery identifies editor sex as a preference could be shut off. Editors could be recruited to say s/he (my wacky idea was

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civility and honest collaboration, as various studies show. So your number 1 is an excellent argument for stronger enforcement of civility in general and a robust mediation effort (with paid mediators if necessary).

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boomer, if they have managed to stay under the radar or keep an extremely positive tone. I'm not one of those people (sometimes I get curious to do an RfA just to see what would happen, but who needs that drama?)

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In order to address the gender gap we need to understand it, and it seems to me we lack the raw data to establish the most basic facts. Without these we risk following folklore, and responding with folk remedies.

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were or took as insults. I also got two major blocks for things that guys usually would get short ones for and only interventions by the community in one case and Admins and Arbitrator in another, shortened them. A

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Watching to see if Knowledge will join the mainstream on this issue. And the whole world is reporting on the personalities who are holding it back. Are these guys trying to become "famous fringe editors"? Geez...

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SPECIFICO wrote: "I doubt that things would be any different if we were to pay male mediators here. Hiring female mediators gets back to the affirmative action question." I didn't say anything about the sex of the

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See my comment to SPHILBRICK above. Also remember we are loosing editors, so focussing out attention on recruiting specifically female editors may result in faster (total) wastage of male editors. All the best:

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1. Suppose it transpires at some point that on medical articles we have reached parity. Continuing to close the gender gap on Knowledge as a whole will create a new gender gap on medical topics. What should we

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As for the teahouse that approach works sometimes, I joined Knowledge though wanting to find out something on something I liked, when I started editing I just started editing, the draw was an interest I saw. -

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Yes, in fairness, I notice that there are some decent people here who have tried to point out the excesses. The "effective leadership" is as much due to the volume of her postings and is sort of referred to in

6462:– an Australian Laureate Fellow, no less – contacted me last year concerning the very incomplete state of WP articles on women mathematicians. I've been a bit lazy about it, unfortunately. You might also find 6360: 4282: 9439: 9423: 5782:

Hello, I'm not a member of the GGTF, but if anyone is wanting an article to keep an eye on which is being threatened with serious amounts of misogynistic content, it would be useful if people could watchlist

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I actually feel a bit physically ill about what people have done with this group; every time I see something else in the history it gets worse. It appears one editor edited the project page to include that

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The problem of males reacting in hostility to things they think women are thinking at this project seems to be a bigger problem than my joke about recruiting women editors, written as a nervous reaction to

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The coverage of male subjects would improve somewhat, the coverage of female subjects would increase, asymptomatically to the coverage of male subjects, the coverage of neutral subject would increase most

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better covered than either "male" or "female" subjects. Also the more important subjects (Nobel laureates, and I think Academy Award winners were tested?) received equal coverage regardless of gender.

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conclusions from that paper (I mean the five paragraphs or so at the end, rather than the short paragraph that is part of the abstract) are really worth reading. I thought they put it very well. Cheers,

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3. The English Knowledge community can beef up policies in various ways to make it clearer that "producing good content" does not give one a free pass to abuse, insult, or harass others through uncivil

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I can think of one obvious difference if Knowledge editors were 50% women. Taking into account that there are some females "lurking" under gender-nonspecific usernames, perhaps the current percentage

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I never said that the percentage of women editors on WP has no effect on its content, it may or it may not. I simply ask for some evidence of what that impact actually is, not pie-in-the sky dreaming.

8740: 8609: 7797: 7445: 7377: 7358: 7062:. As for bronies yeah there are going to be vandals out there just as much as there could possibly be some good editors out there, its an easy fix, block the vandals keep the good editors around =). - 6588: 6304: 4396: 3630: 9906: 7484: 6675: 6322: 5648:

So, Nikkimaria, what direction do you think the project should take, and is there anything specifically that would make you want to participate? (And BTW, I hope you pick up the mop again some day.) —

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and I have now read chapters 1 and 2. I don't see any mention of a glass ceiling. Unfortunately the version is not searchable so it is possible I missed it. Can you give me a more specific location?--

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I'm a man, and and I find the issue of gun control in the USA to be incomprehensible. I imagine that the majority of those males you're talking about live in Backwoods, Backwood County, but I don't.

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In the example given above, and with these assumptions, we would be potentially driving down the quality of medical content, in order to, let us say, improve the quality of articles on Linux distros.

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This is a fairly stunning .5 difference in mean. Of course it could just as easily be difference in SD, if the male SD is 1.1 times the female, for example, or most likely a combination of the two.

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Of course there is also an "option 3", where we recruit as many female editors as we currently have male editors, and in the process recruit proportionately or disproportionately more male editors.

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went through a phase of calling everyone she/her. I got tired of the complaints from the guys. So assuming its a "he" unless a woman is willing to spell it out just became the easiest thing to do.

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I've just started reading "Jimbo" Wales talk page the last couple months and there are discussions there that clarify a lot of issues that have been rather mysterious to me. Two current ones are:

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You sure were fast to make assumptions, though. It is clear that this is your little queen beehive and anyone not wanting to be a submissive worker bee for The Queen is expected to go elsewhere.

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contains the information they are looking for. I had occasion to consult that article a few weeks ago looking for the code for a font color, and the Knowledge is clearly superior for that purpose.

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and disgusted to edit much any more." Creating perhaps more positive boxes is an option for all of us. Maybe I'll make it more positive tomorrow. (Like making one for hiring trained mediators.)

6933: 6816:, and not the admins you are talking about, so the question is, can you pick out something similar that expresses what is different about them? There's also, always, the question of whether you 6280: 6241: 3048: 2964: 2329: 2154: 2114: 2076: 940: 792: 435:

The remarks were meant to be about Media viewer, but apparently my experience with VE was so harrowing that it has damaged my ability to process anything that comes out of the Development team. —

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for instance, the fact that she was female was hardly in my mind. The important thing was that she is one of the most widely read authors in the world, male or female. I'd also like to mention

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is there evidence that design issues contributes to the gender gap? If so, I couldn't agree more with SV. Why spend money on big projects that no one is asking for? Low hanging fruit indeed.

6094: 2989: 2015: 1979: 324: 6951: 6108: 2207: 2179: 1249:: (Putting my comment here, so as not to mess with the other indentions) Winter is a series of design experiments aimed at modernizing the interface. There's a lot going on there (it has a 8031: 7623: 2980:

on 5 July without prior discussion, and it was removed a few weeks later by CMDC, apparently again without discussion. The proposal was without merit, and it merits no further discussion.--

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Some people think "pigeon hole", I think entry points to a long and winding road with many many branches as one follows one interests as one learns and grows and develops new interests.

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The coverage of male subjects would decrease (comapred with female subjects), the coverage of female subjects would increase, the coverage of neutral subject would decrease very slightly

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experience has been that female editors are often much easier to work with, not because they can be browbeaten – which they can't – but because they tend to be more thorough than males.

7968: 3825:"virtuous cycle of female participation" - How do we know it would be virtuous? We have problem editors of both genders, while we want more editors, we do not want more problem editors. 3099:

but a nice head-shot in the infobox. This of course is partly due to our restrictions on fair use images of living people. Perhaps we could change this to be slightly more permissive?

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the box with similar topics above the fold. Downside: talk page is not nested, so no way to respond to specific comments; I don't really like the right-hand column, can't explain why. —

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Just out of curiosity, I have heard of something called "vector skins" or somesuch that is (maybe) supposed to change the appearance of...something or other. Know anything about that? —

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I'm tired and I'm fed up with these repeated accusations that I'm some kind of monster misogynist. Can you can find any evidence at all to support the accusation that I hate all women?

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Carol, if you're worried about your resources page being edited inappropriately, you can keep it in your user space and post a link to the task force page. That would solve that issue.

3445:. (Replace the dot.) Does this raise some questions about the use of video as a RS? Or about adding some of this information to articles about specific videos mentioned in the series? — 301:

Is there a way to edit article sections from that interface? I can see an edit link for the whole article under the WikiWand menu, that takes you to the standard Knowledge editor... --

8798:

That is a fair response if we consider "gender gap" to be a civil rights matter. Just as we now have in mainstream society a preponderance of women in psychology and law for example.

8118:(not sure where to put this but I'll just squeeze it in here) In my opinion, yes, it would change WP if we had more women editors. I'll give just one example. Without woman editor 3923: 883: 9361:

To your questions: Assuming the claimed 16% of female editors is somewhere in the right ballpark, what effect has that had on WP's content? Or what would be different if it was 50%?

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when they turn up in my watchlist, but there's relatively little collaboration, and often a surfeit of men willing to criticize. (One of the nice things about editing articles like

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I've realized that what I wrote above is ambiguous, so just to be clear, when I said "people are asked to sign in via Facebook," I meant that women.com was asking people to do that.

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men. Seeing we are focusing on getting more female editors to Knowledge I think we should work off what we have, this is what social websites use to draw new users in, the stats. -

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I'd prefer to see the alleged facts supported by some reliable evidence, rather than this interminable grandstanding based on false preconceptions. Your mileage may vary of course.

7923: 7504: 7784:- is pretty ironic in light of various goings on lately. "What the... Feminism! is going on!"??? Well, one doesn't have to adopt a label to do the right thing, that's for sure. 7585: 6770:"All this commotion would've been avoided, if all editors had chosen to hide ther RL genders from Knowledge." My eyes rolled at that one. The only way we are safe is if we wear a 6497: 1261:

before but the problem is that images inserted into the content are typically associated with text that's near them; pulling them out doesn't allow for us to keep them in context.

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The sooner the misconceived "Task Force" (why not "Project", instead of a military-inspired term that implies official status?) is disbanded, the sooner harmony will be restored.

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women who would like it and we should find a way to support that. But such affirmative action steps do invite back lash so we have to be careful how we do it. Others' thoughts?

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We would have more articles of interest to women. That's pretty straight forward, given that it is a volunteer project and we edit those articles each of us is interested in.

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3) This especially includes admins, who are the most intimidating people for newbies to deal with. They need to come down and seem a lot less heavy-handed than they often do.

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comments here left me with a couple of questions. I would be grateful if anyone could point her to my talk page/email link, or point me to her contact details. All the best:

6167:

Ah, so they've changed it, but not sure how often the average FB user keeps checking and rechecking those parameters once they're set up. And women.com is still women only. —

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Is there anything the Foundation can do to help us develop new tools reasonably quickly with the current interface, so that we can approximate some of the WikiWand features?

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HI Rich, in line responses - I hope you don't take offense (feel free to move down if you do). Can you provide links for this research? I'd be interested in checking it out

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And how would you suggest enforcing such a proposal? Frankly I think I'm one of the few here who's actually not seeing everything through the prism of some feminist agenda.

7974:

Good suggestions overall, in tune with a lot of the research and opinion by people supporting closing the gap. I assume you mean Admins should give gentler blocks and bans?

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Why don't you present it to them yourself if you think they may be interested. I posted it here as an FYI for consideration by the women, in the context of their project. —

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Agreed, I also feel we should be targeting towards younger mid teen - college aged editors as it will pump new fresh ideas into Knowledge more with a younger generation. -

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And since the invitees come from Facebook accounts, where you must choose between "male" or "female", you cannot join women.com if your gender is ambiguous or anonymous. —

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This is a singularly poor place to try out "jokes", the response to which which is culturally conditioned and can only foment misunderstanding and needless distractions.

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is that she is actually a man, pretending to be a woman, specifically for the purposes of disruption by voicing anti-feminist opinion on Knowledge as an ostensible female.

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None that I know of, although, (pardon my saying so) but I have heard some private speculation about her ladyship, Catherine de Burgh, not that I believe it, of course. —

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2. a) Can you explain what "representing your circle of friends" means, b) and why women are needed to do that and c) if "more women" is sufficient as well as necessary.

8704:, reflecting the societal bias. Of course breast cancer is not a solely female illness, just as heart disease is not the male illness popular culture makes it out to be. 5251:

which presents lots of evidence. Your post made me realize we'll just have to go through section by section and then you can study the "evidence" yourself. So see above

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are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles.

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so I'll let you off for this one. But if you find female editors are just as interested as men in editing playboy playmate articles, I'd like to hear more about this.--

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A final issue is the way some individuals are intersecting with women's issues elsewhere on the project. What would you think if someone who was notorious for dropping

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I think the rest of this discussion should be at ANI. ANI notices in general should be short and neutral, not trying to influence others to take a particular position.

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a repository of knowledge, and should combine readability with ease of use. The best look is one that you don't notice, because it immediately facilitates your task. —

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Looks like mainly for phones. Wonder when they're going to fix the Signpost, it's completely unreadable on cellphone unless you go to it from a link on a user page. —

8214:-related articles have not been very much fun, but benefit from regular attention to keep out spammy pictures of the see-me-at-my-wedding sort. I enjoyed working on 7934:

Knowledge, at least on a basic level. But even I, who have been around for nearly a decade now, don't really know all the UI tricks. And I've made over 3,000 edits!

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knows this place better than anyone else. She would probably be best suited for talking to WMF. I've no idea if she or anyone else would be interested in the post.

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cultural stereotypes and slurs? A more productive effort would be to beef up articles about girls who've won Nobel prizes, academic honors, and national elections.

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GGML is archived openly, so anyone who wants to can go and read it. If I do decide to revisit it and re-read the entire archive I may consider compiling a digest.

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Why don't you read some of the previous threads. Or ask the project members, if there are any left you haven't alienated. This stuff has already been discussed. —

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So the figures are an unsupported extrapolation from rather dodgey data. WP is not comparable to business management, as the gender of most editors is undisclosed.

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interaction as opposed to some of the negative types that women too often end up being subjected to. I'm still waiting for a detailed study of those interactions!

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The edit I linked to was on the project page, not the talk page, so it would not normally be archived. However, an archived discussion about the idea can be found

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Perhaps a mowed lawn and some geraniums in the window would send a message to drifters that this neighborhood is watched, and there are easier pickings elsewhere.

8190:

Yes, you might well know more about breast cancer's psychosocial effects than I do, but you still didn't write the article. Why not? Well, not exactly "why not

5168:. (Note: I think there have been enough complaints here about this sort of thing and I gave plenty of advanced warning this would be necessary if it didn't stop. 3301:

place where they are shared is so overwhelmed with people opposed to women sharing their stories, hectoring and challenging women that most women are driven out.

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Ok, provide funds for educational institutions to have classes devoted to wiki editing. No paid editing, as the students aren't getting paid, yet earning credit.

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I agree that the last few paragraphs of that paper are worth discussing, so I'm posting them here. They speak to some of the issues people have mentioned above:

2219:, you've publicly said you want the project closed down. How are people who would like to do something constructive here supposed to take you seriously? Geez... 5191:

has been pointed out to me in this context, in particular her statement that if you do not specifically exclude some people, you will exclude others by default.

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It's status is that we are in development to make it a beta feature, which will be opt-in (probably for a long time) before we talk about making it permanent.--

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turned off, and was really unhappy about losing some of those features when I disabled it, I have started to see some improvements in the old image functions. —

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and she explicitly says " Edits, statements, or other contributions made from this account are my own, and may not reflect the views of the Foundation." FYI.

4743:, one of the most important figures in 20th-century British history. Where were the members of this project then, when there was work that needed to be done? 4735:

Quite. I'd bet that I've done far more work on biographies of females than many of the most vociferous anti-male commentators here have done. When working on

2994:

Indeed, it was just condescending nonsense of the "let's get more women on wikipedia if we have pink pages" variety, possibly planted just to stir up drama.

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I'm just brainstorming. I realize paid editing is a touchy subject. But I think that is more a case of paying to write specfic articles, not random content.

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complaining that they have been rudely addressed unless the group re-diverts their energy to engaging with repeated demands for explanations of square roots?

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AfD's are a big area and I had to quit the Feminist alert for a while cause it was taking up too much time. So more women editors would help in that regard.

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Rather few editors actually create content, and hardly any of them decent content. But again, what are these topics that only women would be interested in?

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What is your opinion, Eric. Assuming the 15/85 ratio is correct, what effect has that had on content? What would be different if the mix was roughly 50/50?

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Being paid a salary is irrelevant to her question, too bad so sad you and I aren't paid. We're goddamn chumps! But to the point at issue, after creating

2804:

I really don't see a need for all these personal attacks but since everything I say to you seems to piss you off, I won't say anything to you any more, OK?

6340:

Women.com could indeed be a good way to recruit women editors. I don't think it is proposed as a forum to replace this one/GGML - please advise if anyone

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RfA is a popularity contest though, and it would be relatively easy for a project such as this one to force a nomination through regardless of its merits.

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so forth seems to be the order of the day here. I've still got no idea why the thread was hatted. No-one seems to have given a good reason for doing so. -

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related articles or football related articles where half of it's fanbase is female. This I my idea, promote the projects that females show interest in. -

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female subjects than about male subjects. I don't know if I would go as far as using that to determine genders of undetermined literature bio FA editors

7610:, which I have now started. My mind is rather blown right now about how this illustrates the effect of the gender gap on wikipedia. Its not an article 6546: 4420:

The WMF isn't really concerned about editors though, they're easily replaceable. So let's turn the question on its head. What are the topics that female

3068:. The only discussion of it was maybe 6 weeks after the removal. You can find those somewhere in the archive. If you want further details, why not go to 1655:

Go to archives, cut out the item, put it back here. Slim Virgin should feel free to archive the rest that haven't been discussed since being unarchived.

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is that nobody works on it, so nobody tells you that you should be doing more, while they sit on the sidelines.) I've considered other articles, like

5045:

First of all, the "we" gives me the impression you are a woman. First time I knew it. I don't see any indication on your user page, unless I missed it.

3731:

I remember there was a problem with the 2012 survey and the banner not showing. People were complaining that they hadn't been able to respond in time.

3858:(Later in the post, she also made some generic points about welcoming people and identifying barriers which I think would command universal support.) 2279:

That's a rather hearty accusation and a pointy section title, so where's the proof? You mean the Wikipediocracy post where they freakin' doxxed me? I

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I'm interested in the concept that design is responsible for the gender gap. I have seen no evidence for this, can you point me to it? All the best:

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issues I can't think of off hand. But he explains why it would be difficult for the Foundation to enforce terms of service on relentless incivility.

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If male editors can throw the word "c*nt" around loosely and defend it, why can't females engage in a little provocative analysis of why they do it?

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and in first pass didn't see anything. But a little unfocused right now if anyone else wants to look. I did see complaints on the talk page of the

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I am advised that a big gap in the attractiveness of Knowledge as far as celebrities are concerned is the lack of images. Not lots an lots, a la

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Slim archived a bunch of threads, and archived a thread I was interested in. I undid her action because I dont know how to undo just one section.

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notes that he is an Admin so has the same powers to block or indefinitely ban users as other admins. He's only use it once. What self-control!!

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This part is also worth quoting at length, as it has to do with how you set up spaces (like this one) so that people can participate positively:

2642:

OK people, EVERYONE DROP THE STICK. This is not going to get anyone anywhere. Carol: Your posting is one thing, but your commentary violates

7513:. At least half of those are common surgical procedures with distinct histories, and easily qualify for separate articles. We have a stub at 5540: 5391: 3855:

Anne Delong made the point that simply because the means of two distributions are not identical, it doesn't mean that they are not very close.

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much to do in this taskforce, it's strange and regrettable to see people arguing. Could we drop the negativity and support each other, please?

674: 6373:" for a technical fix that would make it easier to ban users from one's talk page. It got a number of comments. He then added more thoughts -" 5713:

spend their not inconsiderable energy and time writing or improving an article, that's what I should be doing but I really can't be bothered.

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I don't exactly see you rushing in with a lot of diffs to prove your point, Eric. On the other hand, my link pretty much speaks for itself. —

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doesn't look so good because the images are too small, but I like the font, though I'd prefer it a bit smaller and the lines of text shorter.

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So women are by default more civil than men? That's a petty bold statement. Do you have any proof, other than conjecture that this is true?

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Anne: I think there probably are more women than current numbers, though they may not edit as frequently. The interesting thing is that in

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There is a gender gap, and that is the whole issue, this group doesn't like it, and wants to increase participation by female editors. If

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I can see that there has been a bit of warring over inclusion of some of the messages above but I'm struggling to find when it was hatted.

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Many Wikipedians would consider the proposal that child labor in Global South nations be “exploited” in such a fashion offensive. I’m sure

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It's a clearly unreasonable non sequitur of a question in response to a neutral notice of a discussion on another project page. What does

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That's a relief! I would not have cast my vote for you. There are several able candidates whose names come to mind if we go that route.

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Are you now suggesting that the reasons male and female editors join are different? I thought we were all here to build an encyclopedia?

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at every opportunity suddenly showed up at Barack Obama's BLP to make "polite requests for evidence" of racism? A quick look at current

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That method would create a confusing index trail and could result in misdirecting editors who are searching for discussion on the topic.

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and would suggest not a lot. As for civility, it is odd that editors who consider themselves "civil" can only see incivility in others.

712:, this hits the nail on the head in so many ways. It would be great if it could be posted as an essay, or on the task force page here. 9218: 8684:

It is fairly well established that "men's diseases" are a bit of a medical ghetto (or they were about 10 years ago). See for example

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No, im saying that I am sure guys join Knowledge for many of the same reasons females do so it would be beneficial to ask guys too. -

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difference with a project they can hector it down to a tiny scope they are comfortable with -- or even out of existence, if necessary?

5255:. Gathering and presenting evidence is something I take seriously myself. So feel free to report on what you see in this first round! 4027:=100 article talk page edits on English Knowledge, required SD for male and female editors, assuming normal distribution with same SD. 3441:. Here is "Damsel in Distress: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games", well worth watching even if you don't edit in video topics: 1455:

Paid editing on topics is still frowned upon at Knowledge and those admitting they are paid often find their editing options limited.

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is not a surgical procedure either. I wonder what other topics suffer due to the "86/14" gap; its a fascinating question. I saved

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consider departing the Project and leaving the work to those of us who have come here to collaborate on this important initiative.

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You mean elect an ambassador or minister of communications? Set quantitative goals, per the methodology of RS studies? Possibly.

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that medical contributors are more likely to be female than the average contributor is. Tow follow-up questions then come to mind:

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interests, whether we're talking about a wiki, the economy, corporations, or indeed men's own pscyhological well-being in the end.

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Nor do men want to see a small number of women drowning out thousands of other women editors who could help support this Project.

5492:. I somehow ended up with this page watchlisted after I posted some Signpost-related content here. So, what are you doing here. — 3948:

that blog entries would update us, based on WMF assertions there. I see I hadn't listed any, so just searched the blog again for

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editors, and therefore an acceleration of the rate of content creation, no matter what topics the women decided to write about. —

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from a prod recently; a 1992 romance novel that was a bestseller. Romance novels may be light fiction, but they are very popular

4953:- this project can muster maybe half a dozen !votes at AfD, maybe it would do better at RfA, but I don't see why. All the best: 3822:"would also result in a" - this is not something that can be deduced at all. There is no evidence given that homophily attracts. 8279:

is a social movement, not a medical one, and articles about babies and early education and marriage are also not medical topics.

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Welcome =). Then we should ask ourselves "Why did I join Knowledge?" if you can answer that then it might inspire some ideas. -

5753:", In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. New York, NY, USA: ACM, CSCW '13, p. 839–848. 5248: 3945: 3907: 7199:

Perhaps. But how likely would you think the answer to be that "I thought there were were too few female editors on Knowledge"?

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I've spoken to many female editors offline, and pretty much all of them find aspects of this project to be insulting to women.

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practically bound to come up against the very sort of people whom you might most avoid associating with in your private life.

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There are potentially two different questions here: Let me rephrase, then I will try to provide what answer I can to each.

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appropriately. I suspect a lot of the nastiness would go away if a very small fraction of users were reprimanded or banned.

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who might be willing to update us. Hi Brandon, we're talking about WikiWand, design and how it might affect the gender gap.

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for responding. Privilege is a hard thing to get, especially when you benefit from it (and you don't want to be). Here's a

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Time to throw in the towel Eric. What with "I was just joking" on one side and invisibility on the other, we're screwed.

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Rich: Since you are interested in research I want to make sure you've seen the two dozen Knowledge-oriented studies at the

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