Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-06/Blog

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Removed from circulation per below. ResMar 14:10, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Note: this isn't the actual blog post

I feel honored to see this Signpost issue draw attention to my post, it's a pleasant surprise! However, I think it should be made clearer that this isn't actually the text that was published on the blog. Hidden in the version history of the page is Resident Mario's note that this is a "down-edited version", which at least involved the removal of several sections with important information, possibly also other meaning-changing edits (I haven't checked yet). This has already led to understandably confusion about important missing content, see Andreas' comment below.

The actual text of the blog post can be found here: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/30/how-many-women-edit-wikipedia/ . I would appreciate it if this Signpost version could a) link directly back to it (this is good practice for syndicated content in general), b) explain that the full version with additional information can be found there, and c) credit ResMar for his edits. The byline should not imply that this is the text that I wrote and published. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

My apologies, Tilman—I wasn't aware that this had been condensed. I've added a clarifying note and will talk with the board about adding links back to all of our republished blogs. I haven't been involved with formatting these, but speaking for myself, you're correct in that linking back to the original content is a best practice (and, incidentally, is probably required as part of the CC license). Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 09:31, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

@Tbayer (WMF): I brought this post in because I thought that it provided important context about an issue that I had hoped we would be able to cover in a manner similar to this one, but never did. However after I did the wikification I came to the conclusion that the post is too lengthy and—honestly—too much of a statistical hedge, to be of sufficient interest for straight re-publication, even with heavy editing that I was also pretty sure you wouldn't like much. I summarized the succinct points in the N&N lead (I wrote that afterwards) and instructed that this wikification be deleted. Because of a failure in coordination it was not deleted before publication, and after publication...I'm very unhappy that this made it into final copy in such an incidental matter.

We don't have procedures in place for removing items post-publication. We ought to. ResMar 13:40, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

UNU-MERIT sample size missing

Is there a reason the sample size for the UNU-MERIT survey isn't indicated? It was well over 50,000 (or around 60,000, if ex-contributors are included, as they were in the other surveys listed). Could this info be added? --Andreas JN466 07:24, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

No particular reason; I've added it to the blog post.

By the way, I took the occasion to create a decent documentation page for that survey last week, collecting information that had been scattered around many places: m:Research:UNU-MERIT Wikipedia survey.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Women editors less active?

The following struck me as odd:

Because they only reach users who visit the site during the time of the survey, these surveys target active users only. And depending on methodology, users with higher edit frequency (which, as some evidence suggests, are more likely to be male) may be more likely to participate as respondents.

It almost seemed to suggest that we should imagine that there are lots of active women editors who just didn't see the survey because they weren't active ... I guess there is a useful point in that though: a gender gap can express itself not just in the numerical difference in male/female editor counts, but also in the numerical difference between male/female edit counts.

If the numbers of male and female editors were the same, but males made 95% of the edits, that would still be an enormous gender gap. Equally so if male contributors edit every day, while female contributors only edit twice a month. Empirical data on this might be useful: if the public wants to understand who edits Wikipedia, it probably makes more sense to count edits rather than editors.

See also the preceding paragraph: many users create accounts without ever editing (for this reason, the 2011/12 editor surveys contained a question on whether the respondent had ever edited Wikipedia, and excluded those who said "no". Without this restriction, female percentages are somewhat higher). This seems to imply then that there are lots of women who register an account but never edit – an interesting fact in itself, but little consolation. --Andreas JN466 07:24, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Interesting idea, but it seems a highly questionable assumption that a user's influence on Wikipedia is proportional to their edit count.

In any case, it's not the question that these surveys asked - rather, they defined a group and then wanted to know the gender ratio among that group. Consider that many studies of gender gaps in other contexts (e.g. certain professions) do the same. Measuring influence or power structures is of course interesting and relevant, but a separate task that needs other methods.

And the chosen survey methodology limits how that group can be defined, e.g. excluding anybody from the community of Wikipedia editors who maybe has made thousands of edits until last week, but just happened to be offline at the time of the survey. I don't think it is "odd" to point that out.

"an interesting fact in itself, but little consolation" - that remark wasn't included for "consolation", but to be transparent about our decision to disregard responses from logged-in users without edits in the results from the 2011/12 surveys. So if you want to criticize us, please criticize us for under-reporting female Wikipedians in this case rather than the opposite ;)

Another aspect that wasn't mentioned and could likely indicate that a different definition of the group of active Wikipedia editors would mean a higher female ratio: The UNU-MERIT researchers [1] also found that

"There are very strong gender-specific differences regarding the Wikipedia user access levels, affecting the size of the shares rather than trends. The overall share of unregistered users among female Wikipedians is significantly higher than the respective share within male Wikipedians (52% vs. 35%). [...] This gender difference is not surprising, and is probably explained by female Wikipedians being more protective of their privacy than male Wikipedians, and thus less likely to register."

(This would need a closer look though on how it applies to actual contributors, and there might be different data from other sources about this.)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

"an interesting fact in itself, but little consolation" - please criticize us for under-reporting female Wikipedians in this case rather than the opposite – I don't think that someone who registers an account and then never edits is in any meaningful way a female Wikipedian :P (and the fact that there are such accounts is indeed no consolation to those wishing to see more balanced participation).

Thanks for that UNU-MERIT quote. It's interesting that (1) more women than men seem to register an account without proceeding to edit and (2) among female contributors, the share of people editing unregistered is higher. Fascinating.

As for edit counts and influence, a numerical preponderance of "edits by males" could be important in two ways: (1) male over-representation in content administration, which might have its own effects on participation (2) male over-representation in the actual content readers read; what we'd have to count there, obviously, is the number of words present in Wikipedia articles today that were written by female and male contributors respectively, rather than the number of edits. Collecting such data might yield interesting information. Regards, Andreas JN466 11:47, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Trend statements

The article says, comparisons are possible for comparable populations, and in this post we present such trend statements for the first time.. I imagined this would look at data for a specific country or language, and describe an apparent development of time. But I've read the article twice now, and I don't see any significant statement on trends in particular populations. Were they left out? --Andreas JN466 07:24, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

@Jayen466: Yes, for some reason the Signpost decided to cut out this and other sections without informing readers that this is a heavily redacted version. As noted above (I took the liberty of posting that note on top), I'm not comfortable to see this text appear under my name here without such a note. You can find the missing content in the original post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/30/how-many-women-edit-wikipedia/

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

what percentage of edits are by women, instead

All of the studies seem to have been trying to measure percentage of all editors who are women, rather than the percentage of all edits that are done by women. Percentage of wikipedia done by women is what matters, right? Wouldn't measuring the latter be more natural, and more important? And it would be relatively easy to implement in a survey that avoids most/all of the biases of volunteer web-surveys: randomly sample from all edits ever, or from all edits in en.wikipedia during 2014, or whatever other defined universe of edits. Take 1000 or some number. There will be fewer editors than edits, say 650 editors, because prolific editors will have multiple edits in the sample. Seek to determine the gender of each editor in the sample. Present results in terms of fraction of edits by women, with +/- 90 percent certainty. Also present results for fraction of Wikipedia impact by women--i.e. weighting by the size of each edit--also with +/- 90 percent certainty.

This general approach is more costly per datum acquired, but it requires a much smaller sample (than in web-surveying) to achieve results of equivalent or significantly better accuracy. There are standard means to determine sample sizes required to get results of any degree of accuracy. All of this is routine methodology. No doubt Tbayer and others understand all of this. So, why not use this approach? Isn't it important to get to some truth on this, what percentage of Wikipedia is women-added?

Note: it is very important to try very hard to get every editor involved to share their gender information (and truthfully) for the results to be valid. So perhaps giving incentive by paying for participation is needed, and/or setting up procedure so editors can be confident the info will be kept confidential, and it is necessary to try hard to track down all of the editors, including those who are no longer active. Where gender of editors for some edits, nonetheless, cannot be ascertained from routine efforts, some further study of the likely bias there should be done, e.g. by applying extraordinary efforts to get some info from a subsample of those difficult-to-reach editors. All of this, too, is routine methodology. --doncram 11:38, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Query: Have any surveys tried to get at the reasons for the gaps?

As a relatively new editor, I was wondering if any surveys have tried to detect gender differences in feelings about the experience of editing? My own personal speculation is that the failure to enforce WP:GF and WP:BITE could be a factor. In the case of some women I know, I would not recommend editing because I know they'd quit after encountering the hostility that certain veteran editors (even certain administrators) display toward editors who are making good-faith edits of controversial articles. This sometimes descends to the level of cyberbullying, as happens in some other online realms. The subculture undoubtedly can be discouraging to many white male editors, but my guess would be -- and it would be interesting to have survey data on this -- that women and underrepresented minority editors would tend to be especially put off by insults, condescension, threats to "show you the door" (this was said to me just today by a veteran editor), etc. I would also speculate that editors from the Global South would be put off by insults and condescension from American or European editors. So my query is: Have surveys tried to get at the reasons for attrition from Wikipedia editing, and especially get at any differences across gender or other lines? Thanks.NightHeron (talk) 17:15, 24 May 2018 (UTC)