Talk:Gender gap strategy 2013

Framing

The gender gap is filled with all of the denied thoughts and emotions held unconsciously in place by fear. The fear of loosing a sense of validity. Most persons are unconscious of the difference between ones self and ones self image. Thus when the self image is threatened by some turn of events or change in social standards a person semi consciously thinks and feels as if ones life is endangered or at stake. Male and female self images are at stake if the gender gap begins to shrink. With out the consciousness with which to distinguish between self and self image the current stand of between the genders will continue.

Men are becoming progressively more violent toward women because of the threat to their self images being caused by women's desire to redefine their self images. Neither are relating to their experience as being the fear of loosing self image. This is because they do not wish to deal with the emotional pain hidden under the self image.

The self image is created out of and through ones own active imagination (image-ination). This self delusion was created unconsciously in order to avoid emotional pain, the pain of feeling inadequate all the way to the pain of self hatred. The self image was created by each of us as reflexively as the hand is reflexively snatched away from the hot stove. Our unconscious imagining into existence a self image may thus be seen as a natural reflex to emotional pain.

Becoming conscious of there being a gender gap and naming it is the first step in waking to the false self we have imagined into existence. The second step is to begin distinguishing between self and self image. This requires defining the true self. If that can be accomplished then we may bench mark our issues against the criteria of what is at stake, the self or the self image.

This second step will meet resistance from the psychology community of behavioral scientists because they depend upon the manipulation of the unconscious self image in order to generate the social behavior which they desire. Their fear is their fear of loosing control.

This same fear will generate resistance from the religious community, academic community and many other less well defined social structures.

The release of self image in preference to the self will happen most effectively through dialogue on the topic. Dialogue which will bring the concepts involved into the consciousness of our entire culture and thus generate a cultural fermentation of ideas around our individual processes of realizing our true selves.

John Allyn, jaddtwo@yahoo.com

Establishing a WMF-affiliated user group

Hello! Over the past few years people dedicated to decreasing the gender gap on Wikimedia Foundation projects have done loads of awesome projects. Right now there is no common WMF affiliated user group for people who would share this common interest. I would like to fix that!

Background

The Wikimedia Foundation has several different categories of affiliated organizations. The simplest to establish is the "user group". See the step by step instructions for getting started- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Step-by-step_user_group_creation_guide

The first step is gathering a group of interested people.

At the Diversity Conference in Berlin in November 2013, a group of users from around the world interested in this topic will be together. This will be an ideal time to promote the group. But we can kick it off now by having interested people show their intent to join and add ideas about the goals of the organization.

Interested in joining a Wikimedia Foundation affiliated user group.

1. FloNight (talk) 23:17, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
2. Siko (talk) 05:00, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
3. --LauraHale (talk) 06:37, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
4. --Lpagola (talk) 16:23, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
5. Jane023 (talk) 08:45, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
6. --Atropine (talk) 04:59, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
7. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 22:07, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

The second step is to develop goals and structure

The structure of the user group can be very lightweight but we need to set up some commonly understood goals. What do we want to accomplish as a group? What kind of activities?

Suggestions for activities

1. Identifying, tagging, tracking, and correcting content that incorrectly displays gender bias
2. Exploring ways to reduce the percentage gap between the number of female contributors vs. male contributors
3. Exploring ways to ease the burden of locating trustworthy sources in order for current contributors to be able to include more content related to notable women and topics related to women in general
4. Exploring ways to make low-threshold "first-edit" contributions fun and rewarding in the hope of attracting more female editors
5. Creating and collecting resources to support the need to address the gender gap directed to skeptical wikipedians and wikimedians
6. Developing and promoting different sorts of wiki-editing social events that are fun and easy for women to attend
7. Creating humorous standardized template(s) for flagging on-wiki interactions which may deter genteel and civilized women from participation (uncouth and aggressive remarks/gender-specific profanity/personal attacks, etc.)

Suggestions for the organization's goals or mission

1. Establish relations and collaborations with other groups or organizations working on women advancement
2. Building awareness on the gender gap in both the Wikimedia movement and the outside world
3. (add here)

Suggestions for structure of the organization

1. A quite horizontal structure with few bureaucracy
2. (add here)

The third step is to set up a wiki page for the group

LATER

The fourth step is to apply for recognition

LATER

The fifth step is to "go"!

LATER

Well, so much for NPOV

"'Playboy is feminist, look at all the money she earns!' - how do we tackle these contributors who call themselves feminists (sex-positive feminists)"

So I suppose there's an ideological litmus test for Wikipedia contribution, one that's opposed to heresies like sex-positive feminism, and views them as a problem to be "tackled". Way to go, Wikipedia gender warriors! Don't let little things like NPOV get in the way of your POV-pusing project. Iamcuriousblue (talk) 07:18, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I am actually offended it also (I don't think Playboy is feminist per se, but I can identify with sex positive feminism). I just ignored it and looked at other things, but I appreciate you mentioning you were finding it a little odd. Even if your delivery of it was more sarcastic than helpful. SarahStierch (talk) 16:18, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I have the same reaction looking at this (and commented previously). I'm all for gender equality, but no way am I going to accept that censorship is a women's issue. This specifically includes the so-called "friendly space" policy [1] as a means of imposing bans on content at conferences. I don't believe I'm alone in regarding freedom of expression as the absolute most straightforward and fundamental of the rights, the place where one has to start when coming up with any other right. You have to understand though, that if I actually believed that women were intrinsically driven to impose censorship, then I would have to oppose, say, the election of any women to government. Of course, I don't, because that assertion is absurd, but I want to underline that to me the issue is that fundamental. I recognize that there are legal limits to what Wikipedia can cover, for example, child porn; but I also believe that if we actually allowed people to see the photographic evidence of the brutal truth of child prostitution, we would make people so mad that they would actually do something to stop it rather than just letting their eyes glaze over when they read the debatable allegations in an article. (I feel exactly the same way about the jihadist videos that ISIS has been putting out) But there's no doubt in my mind that access to ordinary legal pornography is both feasible and beneficial,^[2][3] and I would think that encyclopedic review of porn, clarifying and demystifying it and allowing us to empathize with the women who actually make it and what their perspective is, should be even more beneficial. Wnt (talk) 01:45, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

First, private entities can make their own rules. My problem is the rules are too vague. "Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue or talks." " Harassment also includes sexual images in public spaces,..." Need to be more specific about content and obvious intent. These vague statements certainly rule out any number of medical or artistic uses.

On the other hand, we wouldn't want to see posters and fliers advertising Wikimedia/Pedias which showed giant breasts and said "Edit and you'll get more of this" (which they could claim is gender neutral since for women it means bigger breasts!) Or "Don't be a limp dick, edit wikipedia" with appropriate imagery. Yet you know in the name of "no censorship" some perverted guys would love to do that, if they thought they could get away with it. (Mine might use "limp dick" in some other fashion; naughty me.) Carolmooredc (talk) 16:06, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Progress?

I guess it didn't get too far. Was too bogged down in article issues at the time to pay attention. But now focusing on en.Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force which might be a model for a larger one, since there are a lot of English speakers on the list.

Yes, of course we're getting push back already. But the fact women haven't given up is the important point! I'm making up an en.Wikipedia invite list now for our gendergap invite template and starting to keep track of just who is who in a off wiki data base since the sexegenarian filled up memory files make it hard to easily access info. :-) So the invites should becoming in soon. Or beat me to it and start inviting women :-)

Of course, later looking at the list of projects under Gender gap I wonder if [WikiWomen Collaborative]] doesn't fit the bill. 108.18.69.14 14:56, 28 July 2014 (UTC) AKA User:Carolmooredc ([4] at En.Wiki)