WikiEN-l February 2011

59 participants
46 discussions

gendergap RFA reform and the RFA drought
by WereSpielChequers 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

Re Stephanie's point "Rfa reform and attempts to streamline desysopping have been largely stonewalled by relatively few people. Thats just one area but one of the longest running ones." Actually that's two very different areas, and one of the most common tactics to stonewall RFA reform is to switch the subject to deadminship. I've been documenting the RFA drought for quite some time now at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month and judging from the last few months, the drought that we've been in since rollback was unbundled in early 2008 has entered a new and drier phase. Yes we've had four admins get through in the last 48 hours, the best flurry since late October. But all four of our new admins have been editing for over three years. RFA may be be broken, but candidates with cleanblock logs, long tenure and lots of manual editing can still usually get through. The questions we need to ask ourselves include: How can we persuade people who started editing 15 months to three years ago to run for adminship? How many more potential candidates are there who first registered three or more years ago? With total editing broadly stable, how long can we maintain a 1% monthly drop in the number of our active admins? It shouldn't surprise anyone that the only admins we have who started editing in 2010 are bots, but only 13 editors who started editing in 2009 are now admins. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&dir=prev&group=… But to get back to the gendergap issue, the good news is that two of our four new admins are female. WereSpielChequers

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IRC general meetings
by phoebe ayers 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

Reminder that an open community meeting is proposed for this Saturday, Feb. 5. on IRC: freednode#wikimedia Please add your agenda items! http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings based on feedback I'd like to move the time down to 1800-1900 UTC (that's 10 am PST). Let me know if you can help moderate. Looking forward to it, Phoebe On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 10:54 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > Back in September we had an open community IRC meeting, where we > introduced the new Trustees and talked about various issues. It was > pretty successful and we discussed afterwards making such "community > meetings" a regular event. > > I'd like to revive this idea :) I've made a proposal for having > community meetings on the first Saturday of the month: > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings > > Which would make the first upcoming meeting on February 5. > > I proposed 17:00UTC as a time, but please discuss good days/times on > the talk page if you are interested in attending; we'll need to rotate > times. > > I envision this as not really a Q&A session like the staff office > hours, but rather as a chance for community members to get together > and talk about important issues in a structured way. To that end, > please add your proposed agenda items to the wiki. It would also be > great to have some volunteers to take notes/moderate. > > Of course this is just an experiment -- but there seemed to be a lot > of interest in having such meetings, so I'd like to try it out. Let me > know what you think and if you'd be interested. > > best, > Phoebe > > -- > * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers > <at> gmail.com * >

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost
by Fred Bauder 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

> so this leaves this proposed council with a responsibility to mediate policy disputes and the authority to decide a deadlock in favor of a strong majority based on strength of arguement and core values > (openness transparency etc) - this would basically end up being a fairly weak system especially if the council members had their own veto in council decisions and the community kept a power of referendum to undo any council mistakes. The only danger i see is some people will no longer be assured of the ability to derail consensus in favor of status quo. Whether or not we want to give them authority to close debate is well debatable but even with that we wouldnt be creating another jimbo but rather an extension of the existing community > governance. As for secret ballots we already elect a much more > powerful and perhaps more dangerous body by secret election and those are the community reps to the board so i think it is a viable and proven system. > Agreed, (not about anonymous voting, but that how we do things, for now) Fred

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost
by Carcharoth 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:06 PM, wiki <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: > 1) the qualities one needs to get anything done in Wikipedia are generally, > tenacity and bullheadedness. Drawing enough attention to the issue and > breaking through the natural apathy and inertia of the wider community is > also essential (and that, frankly, often involved strategic drama-stirring > and a willingness to battle vested-interests). I think that is a short-sighted view. You may get something done in the short term, but you end up not building in infrastructure and culture for the future. Quick fixes to problems don't scale. You need long-term, sustainable systems that work. A bullheaded quick fix might look good, but a few years later you find that the problem has come back and got worse. I would focus on: WP:CHRONIC INCIVILITY (as a subset of WP:RFC/U) WP:LONG-TERM (to pull together long-term issues and see them through) Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost
by Carcharoth 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 4:07 PM, wiki <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: > A leader(ship) would find it easier > to say "thank you, you're right, we should do this, but please could you > tone it down a bit". I thought that is what (some) arbitrators *did* say to you! Maybe the message got garbled in the transmission. But that is the problem. Even if ArbCom says something like that, there is no guarantee that people will listen, or that sometimes subtle points will come across in the rather civil language arbitrators have to use. After all, if the people involved in disputes were the listening sort, there would be less disputes. Carcharoth

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Gender gap mailing list
by Fred Bauder 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

--------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Re: [Internal-l] Gender gap mailing list From: "Erik Moeller" ------------------------------------------------------------------- 2011/1/31 Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>: > I agree with Kat & Phoebe that there's value in a list focused on > outreach in general, and I agree also that gender is a subset of > outreach/welcomingness and so forth. But personally I think there's > sufficient energy and interest in gender to dedicate a list to that > alone. And if there isn't, the list would wither with no harm done. Per the above, I've gone ahead and created: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap I'll leave it to Sue and others to advertise it further, including on public lists, blogs, etc. :-). -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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WikiEN-l February 2011