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Proposals for more female editors

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Please link to the rationale(s) for and/or against at the end of each proposal to help reduce the Gender gap

Knowledge generation

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  • Study other online communities that have successfully addressed gender imbalances.[1]
  • Gather empirical data to further guide our understanding of the Wikipedia gender gap, and monitor any improvements in this gap, as a result of different campaigns.

Recruiting women directly

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  • Ask chapters to compete to nurture the greatest number of female administrators.[2]
  • Use academic e-lists (H-WOMEN, GoddessScholars, H-FOLK, etc) to get experts to contribute. (Links would be nie - can't find GS)
  • Female celebrities such as Oprah could ask their audiences to try editing. This was suggested by Peter Sagal during the February 5, 2011 Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me National Public Radio quiz show (end of panel round two.)

Making wikis more welcoming to women

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Encyclopedia improvements

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  • Improve general articles to show women's contributions in fields typically construed as masculine (e.g. economics).
    • The newly developing Women's History WikiProject on enWP has plans for a related portal at some point as well.[5]
  • Improve gender differences in languages which are reflected in the Wikipedia interface for that language and would make women feel more welcome if they were improved.
  • Remove WP:NOTHOWTO because it is used to argue against topic notability but is not well respected.[6] (This would also remove a pointless exclusion which overlaps with subjects of traditional interest to women -- e.g. recipes -- and information which is known to be used asymmetrically to disadvantage women economically -- e.g., brake repair.)
  • Demote Wikipe-tan from English Wikipedia mascot to WikiProject Anime mascot, replacing her with Puzzly.[7] (partly done)
  • Improve ease of use of the Wikipedia interface
  • Add a gender issues or systemic bias noticeboard.[10]
  • Many universities were at one time only for males and then went through a transition to provide en:Mixed-sex education. It might be interesting and fun and insightful as part of any university outreach effort to look through university archives for published information about this transition, and practically any schools' women's studies department will have scholarly information on this topic. As of June 2012 there are almost no Wikipedia articles for specific universities on this topic. Start them at your school!
    • Note: This is covered briefly for Cambridge University which has gone from all (full) colleges being all men until 1948, to all being co-ed except three all-women colleges.

Reforming rules relating to sexually explicit images

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  • Correcting existing entries that are offensive to most people, not just women, and review/edit information, pictures, or drawings that exploit women, regardless of the the gender of who posted them

Do one of the following:

  1. Enact the Principle of Least Astonishment into a policy - images with a sexual context should only appear in articles/categories that also have a sexual context.
    How would this work in articles about sexually explicit topics? It's hard to legislate what is and is not astonishing in that case.
  2. Enact the Necessity Test into a policy - would a non-sexual image do a worse job at illustrating the article? If so, include a sexual image. If not, don't.

A possible focus of this effort is En:Wikipedia:Sexual content a proposed policy linked from En:Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.

Women on Wikipedia Week

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Please see Women on Wikipedia Week. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:27, 11 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mentoring and the help desk

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Promote the help desk and the mentor program better, by making them more visible where newbies look. Mentors could be generalists and WikiProjects could offer mentor lists for editors who prefer mentors who are specialists. That would encourage editors to stay.

Proportion of admins to editors

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Part of the problem is the short shrift admins fairly often give to what editors say (sometimes represented by TLDR but often by misunderstanding), and, sexism aside, that may be a result of admins trying to accomplish their work on a lot of pages (articles, etc.), resulting in abbreviating communications, so they're not as explanatory as they should be, offputting newbies. A solution is to grow the ratio of administrators to editors. That can make editing more comfortable and productive, and that in turn can lead to an increase in editors.

Clarity of messages posted to users and pages

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Standard messages, especially some for issues the first time they arise, could be clearer as to why something is an issue, both with respect to why a policy exists and with respect to the page or user in question. That should increase retention of active editors, which helps recruitment of new editors.

A technically more sophisticated approach could be for templates to generate either of two wordings according to the software's determination of whether a user is a newbie.

Explaining to first-timers misusing Wikipedia why it's a problem

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Some new editors, probably including numerous women, are abusive, albeit without intending to be. These include those writing publicity for clients. Many public relations people are women. People working for clients may expect that our policies are what they'd expect for any other place and may assume that Wikipedia, famous for welcoming everyone's contributions, operates almost like a free advertising medium, so they don't read the policies. That's similar to people installing software without reading the license or opening an email account without reading the terms, and that's probably true of almost all people who install software or open email accounts. (Try asking someone if they "have a license to use Windows.") The temptation is to chase these people off, but maybe that's a mistake. Maybe, when we're nominating their article for deletion or tagging it for editing because of nonnotability, conflict of interest, or whatnot, being clearer in explaining why would help.

WP:NOSÉQUÉ

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All the WP:NOSÉQUÉ prevent women to edit, vbecause they are not used to using shortcuts in internet, like if wikipedia was a forum.

WP:NOSEQUÉ es el mayor insulto que se puede decir en una discusión a otro usuario sin romper la Wikipetiqueta (versión maligna del Inciamor). Un administrador (también llamado comúnmente bibliotecario) de Wikipedia no podrá bloquearte ni llamarte la atención por usarlo. Pero este recurso es un arma de doble filo y estos administradores, u otros usuarios con más de 100 ediciones en artículos, no dudarán es contestar con un número potencialmente superior.

También forma parte de dicha Wikipetiqueta la premisa de todo parágrafo escrito en una discusión debe contener al menos una de estas referencias para que el azul del enlace resalte y no sea muy monótono leerlo.

Source: http://inciclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/WP:NOS%C3%89QU%C3%89

Translation

WP:I don't know what is the greatest insult, what can you say in a discussion with another user, without breaking the Wikipedia Etiquette (malignant version of encyclopedia:without love) An administrator (also commonly called a librarian)of Wikipedia can not block you or call to your attention for using it. But this recourse is a double-edged sword, and these administrators, or other users with over 100 edits in articles, would no doubt answer with a potentially superior number (attitude).

It also forms a part of the so called Wikipedia Etiquette the premise that all paragraphs written in a discussion, must contain at least one of these references to the blue highlighted link and must not be too monotonous to read.

Thanks for the translation! Does it also mean "not dry"? That's what Google Translate told me, away from my bookshelf.
It could mean "I didn't dry (it)", but it wouldn't be spelled correctly (as far as I'm aware, you can't have two é's in the same word.) Soap

[This section has not yet been posted to the Gendergap list]

Supporting women via their economic disadvantages

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  • Less javascript for mobile devices.[11] (This is potentially in tension with WYSIWYG editing on high-end devices; which would also support beginning editors. There is no reason we can't disable the javascript toolbar on low-end devices and enable WYSISYG on high-end systems, as far as I can tell.)
  • Support a multilateral tax haven treaty in the US Senate and any other countries and organizations that might still be opposing one.[12] (there is a detailed discussion of this proposal on the talk page with multiple objections -- note that this might prevent Wikimedia UK (? it is a charity and a chapter) from attaining charitable status unless the advocacy could be off-loaded to chapters. Note on note, WMF has a very stringent requirement on the political work chapters can do.)

Supporting women via their greater de facto child care responsibilities

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  • After November, 2011, the Aurix "Speech Training Aid" patent will have expired, but reading tutor only systems are already unencumbered.
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