Sue Gardner Q&A on Wikipedia editor age and gender diversity: transcript

Key points

• The average Wikipedia editor is about 25, and Gardner expects a dip in editing in the 30s and 40s, with people returning later in life.
• Outreach to people aged 65 and over found many were not technology-confident enough to edit, so the editing interface is being made easier.
• An audience member said the British Museum behind-the-scenes event drew an older demographic than London meet-ups, and that featured content editors skew middle-aged.
• Gardner would not say everyone should edit Wikipedia, but said everyone could be involved in the projects in some role.
• She cited the book Unlocking the Clubhouse, saying women are more easily put off by social rejection such as a reverted edit, and she described her own first reverted edit.
• She proposed welcoming spaces, mentoring and outreach, noting women make up over half of the campus ambassadors, and expects outreach to diversify the community.

Chapters

1. 0:00Age profile of Wikipedia editors
2. 2:00Easier editing and bias in the community
3. 2:38Should everyone edit Wikipedia?
4. 6:04Question on encouraging women editors
5. 7:49Motivation, first edits and rejection
6. 10:19Mentoring, campus ambassadors and outreach

Full transcript

0:00The average Wikipedia editor is 25 years old and lots of Wikipedia editors obviously are teenagers and even younger. They tend to take different roles depending on the age that they are. There are some editors who obviously they range across all ages, right? There are some editors who are retired because I think retired people have more time to contribute, right? So the New York chapter, for some reason, has an over-representation of older editors relative to the others. But that's a pretty typical mix, I think.

0:38Are you trying to change that? Because surely you want as many people contributing the wisdom of the old, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, there's a couple of factors playing into that, right? I think, Wikipedia has been around not quite ten years, right? So we haven't yet figured out what the life cycle of a Wikipedia looks like. But my expectation is that you edit when you're in graduate school, right? I think that we've seen signs that when people move into their career and they get married and they start having children, some of them fall away from Wikipedia because they're more focused on their career, they have much less time and so forth, right?

1:20So that might be a natural thing is that there's a bit of a trough in your 30s and your 40s. And then what I would expect is that later in life, people will come back to Wikipedia, like going forward, right? Later in life, people will come back as they have more time and when they get retired. And like I said, we do have people self-identifying as wanting to start at it now as they retire. But I think that we've done some outreach to older people, and when I say older, I'm saying sort of 65 plus, and what we find is that a large proportion of just are insufficient, what I would characterize as insufficiently technology-centric, right, to edit now.

2:00And I think that that will change. That will change for two reasons. One is because we're actively engaged in trying to make the editing interface easier to use. We're not pleased that it is as hard to use as it is, right? It's a bad thing. It's a flaw. So we're making it easier to use. But the other thing is that as time goes on, like my mother might never edit, right? But when I'm 70, I probably will continue to edit, you know? So I think over time, Wikipedia editing demographics age will broaden that out. I think one of the discussions we decided yesterday to work on in the unconference session today is about counter-assistemic bias.

2:38Most specifically, gender ratio, but also age ratio as well, and different ethnic groups. And just to clarify, if I didn't say this, obviously, I think everyone should add a Wikipedia. It's only going to be as complete as the people who contribute to it. Okay, this is actually a question, but it's a comment on that. I very much agree with what you're saying. One of the interesting things I thought at the British Museum behind the scenes is that that actually, compared to the London meet-ups, which are quite well attended, but the British Museum behind the scenes brought out of the woodwork a much older demographic.

3:20You know, that was... There were several people... And younger people brought their kids... And there were a lot of people in their 20s, but there were several middle-aged people and retired people and so on. And you don't... You know, they're not going to go to Wikimania. They're not actually going to go to the London meet-up. in great numbers. And it's also true, I think, that the most active editors and the people who do feature content are significantly older than the average. If you go to the featured article candidates, that sort of thing, you're actually very largely talking to a middle-aged audience.

4:00I think that's true. I don't think everyone should edit Wikipedia. I would like to contest the suggestion that everyone should edit Wikipedia in the same way as I don't think everyone should be a university professor.

4:36I think everyone should be a journalist, there are, I think everyone should be involved in the media removal of free culture, but I don't think I'm, I'm a terrible Wikipedia editor. I don't edit Wikipedia, I got it too hard. But the nature of the actual project of Wikipedia is quite a specific piece, as opposed to free culture and making available information freely, or even their own language and so forth, which is a much broader enterprise, and can be much more multifaceted in the ways that you can interrelate with that.

5:19No, I think I would accept your nuance, which is like everyone should be involved in the projects. Like, ideologically, I like to imagine a world where everyone could edit Wikipedia, and honestly, if I were sort of trying to draw the line between people who should edit and people who shouldn't edit, you would want to draw it on the basis of seriousness of intent, right, and sort of scholarly orientation and all of those sorts of things. But I think it's also true, you know, that there's lots of roles for people, like the wiki-known kind of roles, right, where they're contributing, they're making like a serious, helpful contribution, like the folks who gave me a cloak on IRC or whatever, right? I mean, they're making a real contribution, they're not editing the editorial materials yet, or they might later.

6:04There was a question about that then? Hi. Excuse yourself. Hi, I'm Fiona slash Panid. I'm a female editor. Thank you! I'm too, yes. I was actually very interested in the blog post that you put up the other day about how to introduce more women, but I did find it slightly worrying saying things like having women-only events, because to me that would serve to make us more of an other on the project than we already are.

6:36So my question was, what from that blog post or what ideas do you have to encourage more women that also make us an inclusive part of the community? No, that's a fantastic question, right? And that blog post that I made was dipping my toe very, very gingerly into the waters of talking about gender on Wikipedia, right? Because I want to be really, really careful because it's a holy war for lots of people. Gender on the internet, gender on Wikipedia, gender in the online community. And I don't particularly want to just fall accidentally into a camp. You know what I mean? I want to be really careful about how I approach it.

7:13But I would say that you need all sorts of measures, you need all sorts of things to help, right? There are women involved in Wikipedia. One of the things that I worry about when I talk about gender in Wikipedia is I worry about creating this impression that there are no women there, right? And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you don't want to make the women who are there feel even more unusual and marked out and like they have to represent their gender, right? So wanting to be conscious of the women who are involved and not trying to pigeonhole or create some kind of reality or some kind of perception of reality around them.

7:49But I do think that what the research shows us and the book that I cited, Unlocking the Clubhouse, which is just a great book, and what it shows us is that... Not all women, but some women benefit from having other women around them, right? So everybody's different. Everybody has different motivations. Everybody has different needs and so forth. And I think the kind of women who would edit Wikipedia without a particular outreach towards them, they are editing, right? So people like Kat Walsh or P.B. Ayers, there's lots of them, right? They are already there.

8:21I think that the people who aren't editing Wikipedia today, whether they be male or female, need different motivations to be appealed to, right? So when I made my first edit, I edited because there was a little text sentence at the top of the page that said, what did it say, Wikipedia needs your help? Is that what it said? It comes and goes, it's sometimes still there. Does anyone know? It used to be. Yeah, so I saw that, and because... But I saw that little link, and I, because for whatever reason, Canadian public service oriented parents, email, like whatever the reason is, I'm the kind of person who responds to requests for help, right?

9:06So that was why I edited. And then I think at some point after I made a couple edits, somebody thanked me, and I responded even more to that, right? It's like, oh, okay, if I'm wanted, then I'm being helpful, right? And one of the things that Unlocking the Clubhouse says is that women are more, how, what is the phrasing? I can't remember. They're more easily dissuaded because social hurts hurt them more, right? And I know that. Like, I edited an extraordinary rendition and I got my edit reverted and I took it very seriously and I felt very rejected by Wikipedia, right?

9:38I just want to say in my experience, that's why promotion female editors go. It's because of the negative reaction that they get from the community. Yeah, and I think there's a negative reaction from the community issue of my first edit was Reversion, and so, well, I don't think that's a human issue. Exactly, exactly. That's a human issue. That's true. Right, but what we find, and again, going back to unlocking the clubhouse, what we find is that women suffer those hurts more acutely, right? So that is one of the reasons cited by lots of people who abandon editing is exactly that, And we may find it's disproportionately, you know, women are overrepresented in the people who cite that as one of the reasons for living, right?

10:19So I think that if there are people, women and other people, who need a more receptive environment, a more welcoming environment, a more inclusive environment, because remember, like, we want them to edit. They don't have to edit. Nobody's making that, right? The least that we can do is create those kinds of spaces for them by starting mentoring programs, doing various kinds of outreach. We're seeing with the Public Policy Initiative, we've developed a new role called the Campus Ambassador, which is folks who do face-to-face mentoring of new occupiers on university campuses.

10:51Women make up more than 50% of the campus ambassadors, right. So we may find, and what I think will happen is, I think that as we start doing outreach, we've never done, the movement has never officially placed, you know, strategic importance on outreach in the past. Things develop very naturally, right. I think as we start placing more emphasis on outreach in general, I think we'll find a natural diversification of a natural body. more women, more older people, more people from the Global South and so forth, just by virtue of reaching.

Source and licence

Recording: File:GLAMWIKI UK Keynote, Sue Gardner, Part 3.ogv by Giota Alevizou, giotita (2010-11-27), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.