The gaps in our knowledge of our gaps

Opinion

The gaps in our knowledge of our gaps

Results on gender distribution for Wikipedia editors in 2018 according to the Wikimedia Foundation

What does 9% get you these days? Not much, you might think. That 9% is the proportion of editors who are women according to the 2018 Community Engagement Survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, and by all accounts that 9% gets us a distribution of biographies that is heavily slanted toward males.

But that 9% gets Wikipedia more than you think. It gets dozens of local projects across multiple languages working to address the issue. It got a piece in The New York Times and a peer-reviewed publication or two. It gets widespread attention and concerted community effort online and in real life, and it might just get a coherent strategy, because we have a pretty good idea what the problem is, why it needs to be solved, and we have many creative, dedicated people working on solutions. We've got edit-a-thons, outreach, and people from all backgrounds making friends through their computer screens and shaking hands in real life, coming together to address an issue that they all care about.

That's the value of knowing our gaps. Like an uncomfortable seat in a folding chair in the back of a 12-step program, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing that we have one. But we have some gaps in our gaps. In the same 2018 survey by the Foundation, they measured diversity among our contributors according to four points: gender, age, education and geography. That's not a very diverse diversity. I don't know about you, but there are many things about myself and the people I know, what we're interested in, what we read about, and what we write about that aren't captured by gender, age, education and geography.

How many of our articles on a wide range of subjects are being written without input from the wide range of groups they represent? We don't know the answer. We haven't even asked the question yet.

Some people claim to know Wikipedia's ethnic make up ("mostly white"), but the source of that information is not clear.^[a] Even so, "mostly white" doesn't tell us much in a global context, as if a white guy from Georgia is the same as a white guy from the other Georgia. Admittedly, some geographic regions are more homogeneous than others, and asking about the distribution of African-American or First Nations editors may only make sense in one national context, but that doesn't mean that context isn't important. Some groups like the AfroCROWD are hard at work, reaching out, writing, and teaching others. But without any information on the groups they're trying to reach and represent, in many ways they're working in the dark.

Wikipedia

World

class=notpageimage|

Approximate barycenter of Wikipedia biographies for those born after 1970^[1], and the approximate global center of population as of 2001^[2]^[b]

Perhaps most worrying is that wherever we look for gaps we tend to find them. Beyond the gender gap there's a geography gap. Antarctica has as many articles written about it as almost any country in Africa, with African content including "only about 2.6% of the world’s geotagged Wikipedia articles despite having 14% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s land".^[c] There may be an urban/rural gap as well, at least if our editing population reflects our readership, with one study on Mexico finding that only a quarter of readers lived in rural areas.

There may also be a class gap, at least as far as the speculation of Katherine Maher, as she told Slate:

We don’t actually know much of the background of Wikipedia editors ... But it is true that we tend to assume that folks editing Wikipedia have what we think of as disposable time, and disposable time tends to correlate with higher socio-economic status.

An uneven distribution of editors across socio-economic status has its own implications, since social class is itself unevenly distributed among ethnic groups, urban and rural populations, and educational level. For other measures of diversity among editors, for example across religions or sexual orientation, few if any people have even pointed out that we really don't know, we aren't looking, and few people seem bothered by that.

I reached out to Jonathan Morgan, who unfortunately said that the person who coordinated the Community Engagement Insights Survey is no longer with the Foundation. So it's not clear that we may ever get a definite answer on the rationale behind studying only four-point-diversity. I also reached out to Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, one of the founders of WikiProject Women in Red, and when asked about the importance of editor demographics to WiR, she drew a distinction among gaps, between those in our content, and those in our community:

[W]e are gender-neutral online editing community which does not focus on or care about the editor's gender. "Just write the articles." ... [T]he "content gender gap" is a "people" issue, not a "woman" issue ... Women in Red focuses on the content gender gap. It doesn't focus on or treat editors differently based on their gender. Everyone is welcome to participate in any way that is comfortable for them.

And I do agree that we don't want some situation where we partition articles with only in-group members writing articles on in-group topics. In fact, quite the opposite, and research has suggested that we get better articles precisely when we have editors with a diversity of perspectives working together on them. It is a people issue, and the more people we have on our issues the better off we are. But if we've got a pretty good idea that diversity is beneficial both to article content and community health, and on that point there seems to be a general agreement, then it seems that the natural next question is, "why aren't we measuring our progress on goals we all fairly well agree we are trying to achieve?"

Well, when I spoke to Isaac Johnson, who is facilitating the current study of reader demographics and looking toward planning a future study on editors, he expressed a sentiment that was echoed by both Rosie and Jonathan, of an apprehensiveness about the subject of group identification, of a feeling that these types of questions may be overly intrusive or alienating. As Issac put it, a concern that we will "end up excluding the very people we're trying to support with this work".

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, in feeling that, in much of the world, most people are fairly secure in their identities, and that sharing who they are and what makes them unique in an anonymous survey wouldn't be overtly threatening. Maybe not. At the end of the day, it's difficult to tell because we haven't had a very robust discussion on the matter as a community. Hopefully this can be an opportunity to do so.

So I'm interested to hear what you think, and from what I'm told, at least a few people from the Foundation are as well. What demographics do you feel are important to your identity and your editing interests? Do you feel that there are any gaps you've personally experienced anecdotally in community and content that we might better address with a greater depth of understanding? Do you think that asking such questions would be overly intrusive, and if so, are there any ways to minimize this? Do you think the cost of intrusiveness is worth the potential benefit? Are you comfortable with some topics but not others? Does it make a difference that it's the Foundation gathering this data as opposed to someone else, and how do you feel about the fact that such data might influence decision making in grant funding or staff?

Is there something else here we're missing entirely? Let us know. Now's your chance, before we start the next survey, and we miss something we didn't know we weren't looking for.

Notes

^ Though it may have been inferred through a geographic over-representation of places such as Western Europe
^ According to the text of the study, the demographic center of world population lies "at the crossroads between China, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan".^[2] According to the text of the study, the global barycenter for Wikipedia biographies for those born after 1970 oscillates between Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Their data examined 11,341 biographies across 25 language Wikipedias.^[1]
Gergaud and colleagues also highlighted what may be a "chronology-gap" in coverage of biographies, with a marked slant toward coverage of recent information. They noted that, out of all biographies that existed in 2015, 60% were for people who were still living at the time.
^ The same study determined that there were as many articles written about Western Europe as the entire rest of the world combined.

References

^ ^a ^b Gergaud, Olivier; Laouenan, Morgane; Wasmer, Etienne (2016). "A Brief History of Human Time: Exploring a database of 'notable people". Sciences Po Economics Discussion Papers, Sciences Po Departement of Economics. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
^ ^a ^b Claude Grasland and Malika Madelin (May 2001). "The unequal distribution of population and wealth in the world" (PDF). Population Et SociétéS. 368. Institut national d'études démographiques: 1–4. ISSN 0184-7783.

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I think that continuing to analyze other demographic lines among our editors would actually make each representation challenge much easier to solve. For example, we have identified the lack of women editors--but is it totally a lack of women editors, or is it partially due to another factor such as age, income, disposable time, education, and so on which is represented by proxy in women? We don't know 'which' women are editing Wikipedia, and we also don't know which women are not. We don't know who to target because we don't know who the low-hanging fruit are. I'm not even sure we know what really attracts people to Wikipedia in the first place. I dare to say that Wikipedia is one of the most overlooked places on the entire internet. I am very much interested in any research teasing out these factors, and if the WMF designed an opt-in census to answer some of these questions, I would be all over it. We don't just need more women editors or African editors. We need more editors just to maintain and continue to build the content which is already well-represented. Prometheus720 (talk) 02:33, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oral knowledge is almost entirely unrepresented. This does not only affect indigenous knowledge of a myriad of African / South American / Asian population groups but also stuff right in front of the noses of the first world: Areas where knowledge and skills transfer is demonstrative or narrative are barely covered as overview, see e.g. Drumming, a redirect to Drum with no coverage at all of drumming as a performing art, or Scouting, an article describing the organisations with no detail on the skill and knowledge set obtained. --Pgallert (talk) 09:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- @Pgallert: I'm sure you've considered this already, but wouldn't this lead to a scandal when somebody puts in vandalism and sources it to "oral knowledge"? I could see it being extremely offensive if some high school idiot decides to make up shit about some African culture, source it to "oral knowledge", and this is only discovered 5 years later. (Yes, people can already invent fake written sources right now, but at least that can theoretically be checked much faster if it comes under dispute.) SnowFire (talk) 10:42, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - Perhaps there is something to learn from how oral historians deal with this situation. Richard Nevell (talk) 10:56, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - I agree, this sounds like a solved problem--just not a problem which most of us are trained to deal with. I would also defer to folklorists and oral historians and so on to improve how Wikipedia handles this issue. Prometheus720 (talk) 14:14, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jar'Edo Wens would like to have a word with you. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:32, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@SnowFire: The idea is not to reference it generally to "oral sources", but to a specific narrator, occasion, place, and time. See the last reference in Wikipedia:Oral citations experiment/Articles/Otjinene for an example. My main argument is that such reference would in principle be verifiable by going there again and asking, as opposed to gossip which of course exists in oral cultures as well. --Pgallert (talk) 04:29, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Pgallert and Bobbyshabangu: one thing that would help with verification would be to have some sort of depository or depositories of audio or video or transcripts to "prove" verifiability. I like Bobbyshabangu's idea of uploading audio to Commons, but I can see Common's admins having problems with it - e.g. how do they know the 30 minute tape is what it claims to be? Maybe WikiSource would work. Or how about working with a library? Depositing 10 tapes wouldn't be much of a hassle (in theory), but if you got 5,000 tapes it certainly would be. And who to allow to deposit the tapes. This is getting into the area of what oral historians probably have done already and have guidelines, best practices, etc. Maybe have a conference where you (or they) train interviewers over two days, discuss specific problems. Oral histories are actually pretty common. In the US I've seen internet depositories for things like African-American history of Delaware (audio), chemists (mostly video). There's a UK site that has a lot of authors, scientists, and cultural figures. The US government (WPA?) did oral histories of former slaves back in the 1930s (in book form now). So it can be done in a systematic, verifiable way. And don't forget Studs Terkel (radio host, author) Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:27, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Pgallert:. I noticed that although you have done oral citation draft on Otjinene, it didn't get incorporated into the mainspace article. Was there some sort of pushback from the community or other challenges? Or simply because it became low on the priority and kind of forgotten about it? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:08, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@OhanaUnited: One of the conditions of the WMF grant was to restrict this experiment to non-mainspace in order not to be seen as influencing policy. But there is also community reluctance; ~~you're actually the first editor to mention that we should use this reference~~. --Pgallert (talk) 12:01, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Pgallert: I think you misunderstood. I didn't say, recommend or conjecture that the community should use this reference. I merely asked what happened to it. Can you cross out that inaccurate statement? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:42, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your answer already clarifies... but as you wish. --Pgallert (talk) 05:08, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I (being a long-term female editor) have tried repeatedly to engage women of my acquaintance in editing Wikipedia with no success of which I'm aware. This is largely among highly educated, English- & computer-literate women, otherwise covering a fairly broad spectrum of age, geographic location, first language, work sector, &c. There's difficulty in engaging with the technical tools, even among those who act as webmasters on other sites. There's a strong sense that editing is for other people (not necessarily men). There's a belief (not unjustified) that Wikipedia isn't interested in their concerns. There's a sense that it's a toxic environment for women. Probably much more detailed information is needed, but not so much for the relatively few women who succeed in carving a niche here as a long-term editor, but for the many who don't even hit the edit button. Espresso Addict (talk) 13:15, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Espresso Addict: - an interesting comment. I can't think how to do so diplomatically, but perhaps some research into our experienced female editors as to why they felt they were able to participate and if there's any common factors we could use to guide at least initial efforts to expand the demographic? Nosebagbear (talk) 11:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would *love* to see regular demographic analysis done by the Foundation (and/or independent researchers support by the Foundation) and pitched a project like this to research foundations in the UK a few years ago. The idea was to canvas ideas on what to analyse from a broad range of stakeholders and conduct an annual (random) survey that adds new questions that can be pitched to the research team before the annual survey. The important thing is not the breadth of variables from the beginning but rather that we have some important variables that we know already would be useful to track. hfordsa (talk) 07:18, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Hfordsa: what was the reception when you pitched your project to research foundations? Was your having less than 150 edits on the English Wikipedia seen as a disadvantage, or more as a positive thing? When you say that you would love to see "independent researchers support by the Foundation (sic)", would that involve financial support? And if so, how would that work? MPS1992 (talk) 21:57, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not specific to this article, a general observation. The jeremiads (which this article is not, as it has some actual data instead of overwrought ranting) on these gaps ignores what is to me a self-evident point. Wikipedia by its very nature thrives on above-average intelligent, socially-maladjusted people (as I am, anyone who's seen me at a meetup will readily attest) willing to spill reams of ink/electrons. It's a very solitary activity by its nature, involving a lot of working with machines. People come pre-programmed with certain inclinations (belief in pseudo-creationist blank slate nonsense notwithstanding), and the aforementioned traits are unevenly distributed in men/boys. And the way the world works men like me are more likely to have the time and resources to edit, which no amount of policy changes will change.
Now, this is not to argue against outreach, but rather these points. First, outreach that actively alienates the core user base here is simple self-destruction. Treating existing users as fungible dirt, their experience be damned, will backfire. Second, perhaps the world can adjust to us just a bit. Maybe, just maybe, we aren't always the source of the problem, and some other people could loosen up and try things our way. Wikipedia got this far as it is, so why exactly should uninformed outsiders hold us hostage; just maybe those of us who've been around have a few decent ideas which have kept things together. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:31, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I agree entirely. As Ritchie333 has pointed out repeatedly, WiR has largely been the exception to the going narrative that Wikipedia (as much of the internet) is a nasty place with a hostile in-group, and the only way you make it into the in-group is to go through the online hazing afforded to most new contributors. It's frankly the most collaborative place on the project. I think a lot of that has to do with a focus on outreach, and a continuity of culture that continues to support these users once they transition into the "online only" portion of community participation, which is where most of the work takes place. There may be a lot of reasons WiR has successfully fostered this organizational culture that we so often find lacking in the rest of the project, but whatever those reason are, we should be trying to emulate them everywhere else. GMG ^talk 14:38, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@The Blade of the Northern Lights: I see no reason why editing Wikipedia should be a solitary endeavor or why it should look anything like it does today. As an actual new editor, I can agree with GMG that WiR and its associated projects have generally been uplifting and interesting places for me to do my work. That is saying something, given that I originally had no intention of doing much biographical work due to its difficulties. It has energy and movement behind it--much of the rest of enwiki feels old, neglected, and crumbling. The entire website screams 2000s when we are in the 2010s, and soon to be in 2020. This may sound harsh, but if this project was not so useful, it never would have survived. The way it has been managed has been atrocious. Well meaning, it seems, but atrociously executed. The onboarding process is terrible. Sure, you can learn from the tutorials how to do basic editing tasks, but if you want REAL help, you can use this strange talk page system that no other website uses to ask questions at TH or the pump, or you can spend HOURS reading pages of bureaucratic nonsense. Even then, many types of tasks really are not explained well, such as the proper use of HotCat or how to write a good Shortdesc. The adoption process is awful--I actually found someone who works well but he is terribly busy. Wikiprojects as a whole are designed so poorly that many have members lists hundreds long, but fewer than 10 active users. Wikiproject X isn't even that innovative conceptually--it's really just bringing Wikipedia more into line with modern standards of design and usability. WiR to me represents the baseline of what Wikipedia should be in most places. In an optimal world, WiR would get a B grade. Totally acceptable, but not the cutting edge. Instead, it is the cutting edge. And that is disappointing to me, deeply. I have read through the last several RfAs, and you know what? They are atrocious. The way people are treated during those thoroughly turned me off of pursuing that path. Character assassination is the best way to describe it. I'm not interested in that. I see rampant deletionism and inclusionism battles, a lack of translation support tools (I have gripes about the beta feature), a focus on template-editing instead of being bold, and a horrible onboarding process which almost seems designed more to inflate the egos of the people who have gone through it than to actually help people edit. I do not think that alienating the tiny group of editors who have been here for a long time is a particularly serious threat given the enormity of the potential recruits out there. Forget policy changes. What really needs to happen is that WMF needs to invest time and resources into making editing significantly easier, and it needs to be bold and start teching up. Many of the gadgets we rely on as a community need to be formally part of the editing process. Rater, HotCat, PetScan, and so on--these tools need more buy-in in the site design. Frankly many of the gadgets should be opt-out rather than opt-in. So much of the work on Wikipedia could be semi-automated--we could be having scripts do article assessments, short descriptions, categorizing, adding to Wikiprojects, sending dynamic notifications to project members--the works. That has nothing to do with women specifically, but that's ok. In combination with outreach, cleaning up the editing process should do wonders. Just my two cents. Prometheus720 (talk) 07:29, 23 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In generalities I don't think we're actually terribly far apart on a lot of things. Wikipedia is way hard to edit, and minus my abnormal (thanks ASD...) focus I probably wouldn't have figured it out. It is byzantine to break into, and often unnecessarily so. (Seemingly paradoxically I think it's partly from entrenched unwillingness to ease users in; I was the one who touched off what became ACTRIAL, and I ended up vindicated beyond even the measures I thought I'd be) Giving people a chance to figure things out is essential; as a specific example I remember when a small discussion made HotCat on by default, and because no one tried to train new users it went horribly wrong. And yes, RfA is generally a disaster (albeit one I got through unscathed, for reasons I don't quite get) and WikiProjects (MILHIST aside) are mostly worthless. I have no idea how to fix these problems, but they are real.
That said, for all the issues we have, I do believe those of us who've put out what's here (and in my case, to be brutally honest I pissed away a few years of my life doing so; my own fault, Wikipedia was only a medium) deserve better than to be cast as interchangeable jerkoffs who've accidentally stumbled into making a great resource for the world. All too often external coverage of Wikipedia does just that, to say nothing of the bile directed at us here (my most recent favorite was an invitation to commit suicide, thankfully I seem to be one of the few people who can see the humor in it instead of blaming some societal ill). As many people as there are who legitimately could be excellent assets, from my personal experience I remain thoroughly unconvinced that we're always the problem; the oft-repeated Randy cliche aside, self-styled experts have done plenty to make a mess of things (look here if you dare). Conversely, I'm hardly a prolific content creator, but what I have done is way outside the stereotype outsiders seem to want to shoehorn current Wikipedia editors into. And, at least in my experience, research is by its nature solitary; I hunt down material, read through it, and have to work very hard to collate it into something useful. I wish it was more social, that'd do me some world of good not to be the lonely dilettante at the library/screen, but that's how it's always gone for me.
This article does a good job of explaining the usefulness of outreach, to be sure, and I've helped with it at a few events. It's actually a lot of fun IRL, at least for me. Easier editing would make it much more attractive to so many of the people I've worked with. And at the same time, saying "we need to clean house, so join us and never mind the experience of everyone who's already here" strikes me as a very... odd... way of trying to get someone interested. I certainly wouldn't want to join some effort in which the front consisted of exuberant praise for newcomers and loud bitching about the long-term participants. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 07:53, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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