Research talk:Women and Wikipedia: Contributions in a Collaborative Online Space

Survey work

If you're trying for 50 participants and selecting ten, can you work from a global perspective or narrowly stipulate the work will only focus on say women from the United States? If the total number of surveyed women is 40 from the USA, 4 from Australia, 1 from India, 5 from Spain... you're not going to get anything that isn't more like "Women and Wikipedia: Case studies on Contributions in a Collaborative Online Space" because the scope will not accurately reflect issues. --LauraHale (talk) 22:01, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Comments by WereSpielChequers

Thanks for your proposal, its an important problem and one that I'm glad to see getting attention.

1. If you "want to know why few women contribute to this space, and what implications this holds for writing and, more broadly, the production of knowledge within the Wikipedia community" then you shouldn't just talk to the women who are here, you also need to talk to the women who aren't here.
2. It is worth subdividing the community and looking at different hobbies that overlap. For example Commons is primarily about Photography, does our community there have a similar gender profile to amateur photographers? There have been some interesting conversations about the gender issue amongst our FA writers, and the consensus there was very different than elsewhere.
3. Please can you clarify who you will release your findings to and under what terms. "Sharing them with the Wikimedia Foundation" could meaning anything from publishing them under an open license to releasing the WMF with a copy that is only to be seen by Foundation staff. Wikimedians have an expectation that if you are asking for their time here you are working to a comparably open license, and they certainly need clarity if that isn't so.
4. "I value your privacy and will take every precaution ensure confidentiality." Great, but "I value your privacy and will take every precaution to ensure confidentiality." Would be better.
5. I would not recommend recruiting all your participants via gendergap as that would skew things to those who have been exposed to one particular thread of debates and there maybe an element of Groupthink that applies. Other ways to recruit Female editors include looking at usernames and those who display particular userboxen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:UBX/Userboxes/Life has some examples. Clicking "what links here" on specific userbox pages will get you useful lists like this. Before you contact anyone I'd suggest checking their user contributions just to see if they have recently been here. But don't worry if they haven't edited for a few weeks, about two thirds of editors set an email in their user preferences so a lot of dormant editors will get an email telling them you've posted on their talkpage.
6. Are you researching the English Language Wikipedia? We have over 200 others as well, though I think the gender imbalance is widespread, perhaps universal.

Obviously these are a mix of questions and suggestions, only my third point actually needs resolving for me to support the proposal. But I hope you find the rest useful. WereSpielChequers (talk) 00:04, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the Feedback

Thank you both for reading and responding to my proposal. I'll be happy to clarify in more detail when I have a bit more time, but to answer your third concern, WereSpielChequers, I will make my results available to the entire community on this research page. Participants will be able to read any write-ups in progress so that they have the opportunity to contest or question my representations of them, but as this is an issue that is relevant to the community as a whole, I will happily share any findings under whatever license I can manage (of course, if I publish anything based on this study, I will need to contact the publisher to work out what I can and cannot share--but the raw data will be open). --Lcg04c (talk) 23:09, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but rather than raw data I hope you mean anonymised data.:) WereSpielChequers (talk) 23:06, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Comments by BrianJ34

Here is an interesting comment given by a female user:

“ hmm….why do I think so few women contribute? I think it’s not knowing that they can! I *just* learned a couple weeks ago, from that OpEd Project that you mentioned, that you don’t have to be a professional journalist, employed by the newspaper, to submit an OpEd. I also just realized right now, reading this blog,, “Oh wow, I guess Wikipedia is the same. You mean I don’t have to be a Wikipedia employee to contribute?” Yeah, I had NO idea. I thought they hired people to write everything.

And another reason: we probably assume all the information is there already, so what else is there to contribute? Whenever I look something up on Wikipedia,the information seems to be all there, and complete – short of being a full-fledged textbook on the topic, of course. I think I’ve only every found a couple pages that were incomplete…but I couldn’t contribute because, well, there’s a reason I was looking it up!.

” — Source: [1]

--BrianJ34 (talk) 03:27, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Your project

I'm still not clear on what research question is guiding your project. What hypothesis are you testing? You must be focusing on something more specific that "women's experience". It would be helpful if you shared a general list of interview questions. Newjerseyliz (talk) 23:07, 19 August 2013 (UTC)