Grants talk:IdeaLab/Inspire/Meta/Archive

Promotion

Yes, someone actually bothered to make this.

I am not interested. In the moment I have to see nonsense as the statistic world mab between, I only can put me on my head. People who obviously don't understand history should not do such thing. Unbeleavable. Marcus Cyron (talk) 22:33, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Addressing the wrong issue

20% of contributors being women should show us how inaccessible Wikimedia is to non-technical users. There are so few women editors because the majority of editors are geeks and the majority of geeks are men. Quite simple really. I am well aware that there are many women IT specialists but their numbers are small in comparison with men. If Wikimedia wants to attract more women (or indeed more of any type of person) then it must make it easier to edit. It is still far to much of a pain in the arse to do anything except minor edits unless you can get the toolbar to do what you want it to do or copy and paste useful code from existing pages. The conflict-type discussions on Wikipedia are also a bar to many contributors who don't want to get involved in endless discussions which are 'won' by those with the most experience or those who can spout of policy acronyms. This is more of an issue with en.wikipedia but as a contributor to en.wikibooks it would seem that we have trouble attracting female editors also. I know my comments in no way address the issue being discussed here but I just feel Wikimedia is looking for the wrong solutions.--Xania (talk) 22:51, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Geeky women might well prefer to remain invisible. (See for instance "Geek women don't exist" at GeekFeminism Wiki.) --Pitke (talk) 00:17, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I wholly disagree. It's like lowering the standards in the military only for women. A service should uphold its standards, otherwise, what's the point of the service? Either you can serve, or you can't. Also, I don't think it's right to assume that women need things dumbed down for them. They're plenty capable of editing Wikipedia, it's just that they choose not to. This can be displayed through the 20% of editors that are women that do edit Wikipedia. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jacedc (talk) 01:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Militaries do have affirmative action for women. Affirmative action isn't about lowering standards, it is about removing systemic bias that favours men for the same job with the same abilities and qualifications. In Canada, this means favouring female applicants slightly over men all things being equal. It doesn't lower the standards (they still need to meet all bona fide occupational requirements) but does help overcome systemic bias and help the military reflect the demographics of the citizenry they are defending. Ajraddatz (talk) 05:40, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Even if we assume the premise is correct - that Wikimedia projects are only accessible to geeks, and most geeks are men - it does not follow that making Wikimedia projects less geeky would automatically eliminate the gender imbalance (or imbalance by any other designated group identifier). Only a tiny minority of men are geeky enough to edit on Wikimedia projects, so perhaps dumbing down the interface would just bring in even more men - the less geeky men. Maybe men in general are just more prone than women to work for free. If that is true, then eliminating the gender imbalance would require not only making Wikimedia projects somehow more welcoming to women, but also less welcoming to men. --Teratornis (talk) 04:10, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

No, it just requires making them more welcoming for women. Nobody wants to lower the number of men, rather to access a very under-represented demographic. Ajraddatz (talk) 05:40, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Another way of looking at the situation is that this is primarily about the wikimedia foundation dreaming up an extraneous project to justify its own existence. Overfunded and overstaffed with nothing to actually do, they exist while the encyclopaedia builds itself. Eakleh (talk) 12:25, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

There are quite a few initiatives by the WMF that I would agree fits that criteria; attracting and retaining editors of any kind isn't one of them. Ajraddatz (talk) 15:12, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Ditch "diversity"

Forget "diversity" and instead seek out contributors who know how to think, speak and write in a rational manner, AND which are willing to abide by Wikipedia rules of editing. There is nothing rational about awarding any position to someone because of their gender, ethnicity or sexual preferences.

Anyone who has read many pages of the dispute resolution sections, knows that most of Wikipedia's problems are caused by those who fail to think logically and those who are unwilling to abide by the fundamental Wiki rules of editing. Trying to set up diversity quotas merely begs for more and more of those kinds of problems, because "special" people, who are classified as different from the so-called "privileged" classes, sometimes tend to think they can get away with a lot more than the rest of us, because anyone who suggests they be blocked for cause, is sometimes vilified as "racist," or "homophobic," or "misogynist," or some other idiotic phrase, designed to cut off legitimate debate/discussion on legitimate issues.

We need people of logic and willing to abide by the fundamental rules of editing. Not those who are intent upon using Wikipedia to advance their political agendas, as a soap box and extension of their own spam pages; nothing more. Trying to recruit on diversity grounds will just end up encouraging more NPOV, OR and COI violations. If, for instance, one is editing an article about the history of females gaining the franchise, the only thing that counts is if the statements are supported with WP:RS citations and if there is balance to the article (evidenced by valid WP:RS for various historical positions). The personal feelings of the editor involved, should not be a part of that equation. I don't want to know anything about them other than if they are editing in compliance with the well established wiki rules.

Please don't respond with statements about my failure to be politically correct in my comments. That too, tends to discourage rational and legitimate debate/discussion and thus contrary to goals of rational thinking and writing and well-ordered compliance with editing rules. EditorASC (talk) 22:54, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree (see also wikipedia:Wikipedia:Equality). Jacedc (talk) 01:47, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

If we are primarily concerned about advancing the Wikimedia projects, then we only care about the quality of contributions, and not about who makes them. An edit is an edit; its value is not a function of who made it (see the Genetic fallacy). In that case, if we are concerned about who is editing, we would have to believe there are valuable contributions which could only come from members of a particular group. In turn it should be possible to list examples of edits that only women could make, and not men. Has anyone produced such a list?

On the othe hand, we might not be primarily concerned about the welfare of Wikimedia, but rather we might be concerned about women being left behind in some sort of digital divide. In that case we wouldn't need women to bring anything unique to the Wikimedia projects. We would be looking to recruit them for their own benefit - i.e. because they would learn something useful by editing here.

Given that these two possible motivations for concern over the gender imbalance are completely different, the people who are concerned should clarify which of the two concerns they have. If we're worried about what's best for Wikimedia, then show what women can provide that men cannot. If we're worried about what's best for women, and we believe what's best for women is for them to donate their labor to us, then figure out how to persuade more women to take advantage of whatever opportunity for self-improvement that men are more inclined to take here. --Teratornis (talk) 05:25, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Strongly agree. All the matters is the quality of the edits. If we create different classes of editors this will inevitably damage the ethos of Wikipedia, which is that all we are judged on is our actions as editors. RomanSpa (talk) 11:05, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

You guys don't get it. You're mistaking a push for quality on the level of the entire encyclopedia for a push for better-quality individual edits.

Yes, any individual edit that an editor belonging to an underrepresented minority might make can be made just as well by a white male editor. But you can't look at each edit in isolation.

There are entire swaths of humanity whose interests and knowledge are not being incorporated into our projects. We cannot provide access to the sum total of human knowledge without the assistance of all sectors of society.

If, say, women are not editing in great numbers, how many topics are being undercovered in Wikipedia? How many women's thoughts are missing from Wikiquote? Are women's safety issues being communicated sufficiently in Wikivoyage?

And how does the predominately white male editor corps affect discussion pages on our projects? Is it not conceivable that the homogeneous makeup of the editors involved contributes to a lack of harmony and collaboration when editors not fitting the white male paradigm attempt to communicate with the rest of us?

-- LtPowers (talk) 16:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

As one of "the guys" that doesn't get it: To the contrary, I get it quite well. What you are advocating is to ditch the prohibitions against OR and POV, and replace it with the POV and OR of female wiki editors. That would amount to dispensing special editing privileges for female editors, which if engaged in repeatedly by non-female editors, would get them blocked. This project is a blatant attempt to convert Wikipedia from an online encyclopedia to another political advocacy blog/soapbox.

If you think Wikipedia is deficient in the inclusion of female opinions on notable subjects, all you have to do is include such from WP:RS sources, with proper cite links attached, in appropriate articles.

Judging the quality of any edit, should ALWAYS be made on the basis of the same fundamental editing rules that apply to all Wiki editors, at all times and never upon the basis of the gender of any editor. There is no way to apply affirmative action FOR female editors, without discriminating AGAINST all other editors. Affirmative action violates all the long-standing policies of Wikipedia, especially WP:EQUALITY and WP:NOT [[1]]:

"Wikipedia is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda, advertising and showcasing....Therefore, content hosted in Wikipedia is not for:

"Advocacy, propaganda, or recruitment of any kind: commercial, political, scientific, religious, [emphasis added] national, sports-related, or otherwise. An article can report objectively about such things, as long as an attempt is made to describe the topic from a neutral point of view. You might wish to start a blog or visit a forum if you want to convince people of the merits of your opinions.[2]

"Opinion pieces. Although some topics, particularly those concerning current affairs and politics, may stir passions and tempt people to "climb soapboxes" (for example, passionately advocate their pet point of view), Wikipedia is not the medium for this. [emphasis added] Articles must be balanced to put entries, especially for current events, in a reasonable perspective, and represent a neutral point of view."

It's time to dump this new soap box political agenda and get back to improving the quality of articles by enforcing the long established Wiki rules of editing. EditorASC (talk) 07:55, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

There isn't even a way to "dispense special editing privileges" in a way that addresses the gender gap without serious collateral damage. In addition to the POV issues EditorASC mentions, conferring special privileges based on off-wiki qualifications is going to result in both false positives and false negatives. In the best case scenario, project administrators will declare some editors legitimate females and get it wrong some of the time. That in itself is a disastrous outcome for some of our editors. In the more likely case, we will see a cadre of editors with elevated and out-of-process privileges whose only qualification is political alignment. DPRoberts534 (talk) 00:02, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

The failure to actually being neutral, fair and true to it's own policy

After seeing this Grants:IdeaLab/WikiProject Women-(gender segregation) that's allowed to exist and not even rejected quickly by WMF, I have no confidence on this IdeaLab, if WMF can't be impartial and true to their own policy (wmf:Resolution:Nondiscrimination), then how can people will give their confidence to this IdeaLab?.--AldNonymous^Bicara? 23:20, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. A WikiProject about women would be welcome. A WikiProject that limits its membership to off-wiki criteria is a disaster in the making. It's shockingly irresponsible for WMF to flip the switch on something like this without ensuring that it conforms to the foundation's policies and goals. DPRoberts534 (talk) 23:35, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

And we already have that, so this initiative is not only redundant, it's detrimental. Regards. Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 16:57, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

What's the big fuss?

Maybe women have just better and/or more important things to do + have less time and are less bored? Their interest may also be in other online activities including where to write and Wiki is not everyone's first choice (same for men and others). Try some brainstorming with the former possibilities in mind.

Re. ideas: Try a sweepstake or pay them to waste their time on Wiki. Sounds silly at first but then again, I don't think a different approach would work; you can't "force" people to do something they don't want and for free.

Good luck, TMCk (talk) 23:50, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely agreed. We can't just forcefully "close the gender gap." What I would like is to see female editors step up and communicate with people. Explain why they edit, why they think most editors aren't women, and explain how they think it should be handled. But we can't just make gender politics more divisive than it already is. If women have a problem with gender disparity in Wikipedia, then women should address that by editing. Everyone has the right to choose if they edit Wikipedia, and those choices are reflected by the "20%" statistic. Most women don't chose to edit Wikipedia, while men do choose. That's just how it is. It can't be that women are ignorant or dumb -- they're fully capable of editing if they wanted to. Jacedc (talk) 02:06, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Maybe women are, on average, less tolerant of having their work deleted. The entire wiki editing model is fundamentally confrontational, hostile, and alienating. You pour your heart and soul into some editing, without any financial reward, and some stranger comes along and obliterates it. You can't rely on normal human relationship-building to find your place. Instead your only defense is to master the complex and abstract rules and guidelines so you can become a kind of Rules lawyer. You see the same thing in real-life situations such as schools and workplaces. The men are constantly ripping each other, and the women have less tolerance for the same kind of criticism, so they tend to avoid confrontations and explicitly challenging other people's beliefs and positions. If the gender imbalance here is a "problem", that means men and women are somehow fundamentally different. But if they are fundamentally different, then the gender imbalance means the Wikimedia projects, by their design, are more interesting to men than to women. (And that would hardly be surprising, considering that these projects were largely designed by men.) --Teratornis (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

So we should lower our standard of quality to cater to those who are "less tolerant of having their work deleted"? Maybe they wouldn't be so intolerant of having their work deleted if their work wasn't deleted, i.e., valuable work. You can "pour your heart out" and have all the passion in the world all day long, but if it's unverifiable, original research, or biased, it can't be kept on Wikipedia because that's the only way to gauge whether or not content is legitimate. And your claim that the only way to circumvent having your work deleted is by being a "rules lawyer" is simply not true: I've contributed to Wikipedia before without knowing any of the rules and the content stayed all the same. Not to mention, the only crucial "rules" you have to know is that

1. Content must be verifiable with reliable sources (i.e. you can't make stuff up)

2. Content must have a neutral point-of-view (i.e. you cannot use biased language)

3. No original research (i.e. the content you add must be attributable to reputable sources)

As long as you understand and abide by those you should have no trouble. If you have a problem with those rules, then by all means propose new ways of making sure Wikipedia content is verifiable and unbiased. Readers of Wikipedia couldn't care less if the original writer "poured their hearts out"; readers of Wikipedia want true, balanced content with encyclopedic value. These things that I mention have nothing to do with gender, just with people. Jacedc (talk) 16:19, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Your devotion to the ideals of verifiability and neutrality are admirable, but unfortunately not all of your fellow editors have the ability to set aside their biases and assess those factors without regard to the person making the edits, or the way the edits are defended on talk pages. No one is suggesting removing those factors as important, but it's also important to recognize that our collaborative processes are inherently biased due to a dominant demographic comprising the majority of collaborators. LtPowers (talk) 16:31, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

You can say that there is a dominant demographic comprising the majority of collaborators (males) but you cannot say that the collaborative process is inherently biased because of that. If a fellow editor doesn't have the ability to set aside their bias, then their edits are not constructive (unless sourced properly and proved neutral through said source). If you object to the reliability of that source, that is to be what is discussed. But you can't complain that people aren't being fair if you can always counter it with verifiability and neutrality. It's very black and white. Besides that, not only males are capable of adding unverifiable and unbalanced content: attracting women would all the same, inevitably, attract more editors who fail to recognize their biases. Jacedc (talk) 17:04, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

They have a choice

Women have a choice just like everyone else. Why is there a need to "close the gap"? Women tend to have bigger social lives, it's been proven that most of Wikipedians are male and that is a natural reflection of society when it comes down to intellectual tasks. I don't believe there is any gender bias other than the one that it's natural to our world. Thanks --Camilo Sanchez (talk) 00:14, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

It's in WikiMedia's interest to make its projects more welcoming to all sorts of users in order to keep and develop its user base. It might also be interested to be the change it wishes to see in the world, i.e. advance feminist ideals by stop treating male as its default (and preferred) member. --Pitke (talk) 00:21, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Camilo. Women can edit Wikipedia if they want to, they don't need to be coddled into doing something they don't naturally do. I understand it may be in the better of interest for Wikimedia to make their experience more welcoming, but if that's the case, do that. Address the issue of the usability of Wikipedia: Don't make gender politics any more divisive than it already is. It's like trying to make Call of Duty more welcoming to women because of the gender disparity... Maybe women just don't like Call of Duty? (I understand that there are plenty of women who play that game, but I'm guessing the gender disparity is probably the same. If not, just think of some other example if you have to.) I'm honestly a little tired of this gender war, Wikimedia does have plenty of users, the gender gap should reflect the gender itself, it shouldn't reflect Wikimedia. The thing here is between genders, not between females and Wikimedia. You're putting the focus on the wrong things. Jacedc (talk) 01:54, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Actually it's not in Wikimedia's interest to become more welcoming to "all sorts" of users. That's the business model of Facebook and Twitter - those sites want to bring in everybody, with the result that the average contribution is dreadful, and the worst contributions are offensive. The flagship Wikimedia project - Wikipedia - is an encyclopedia. The people who belong there are those who read encyclopedias when they were children (waves hand) and were ridiculed for it by their less intellectually inclined peers. And given that few people have been formally trained to write encyclopedias, users have to teach themselves by reading and following the mind-numbingly long and complex rules. It's in Wikimedia's interest to appeal to those types of people, and we do.

In the longer run (>20 years) perhaps we could reduce the dependency on human editors by building or training AIs to edit on Wikimedia projects. For example, if IBM's Watson can beat the best humans at Jeopardy!, we might soon see computers that can write featured articles from scratch with little or no human intervention. That would be one sure way to eliminate gender bias from Wikimedia projects, along with carbon bias. AIs, being tireless, could also work off Wikipedia's enormous technical debt represented by the large and endlessly growing backlogs. The existence of enormous backlogs says we have a much bigger problem than gender imbalance - humans regardless of gender do not enjoy the grunt work necessary to clear those backlogs. --Teratornis (talk) 05:03, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I absolutely agree. Wikimedia is in a crowd with several other internet services that have no business trying to pose as a social network. Wikia is a fantastic example of that right now. Jacedc (talk) 16:23, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

"The people who belong there are those who read encyclopedias when they were children (waves hand) and were ridiculed for it by their less intellectually inclined peers." - I am disgusted by this statement. I'm absolutely one of those people you describe, but the people who belong at Wikipedia are everyone who has knowledge, and ability to contribute that knowledge. Everyone belongs! How can we compile the totality of the world's knowledge without the totality of the world's people? LtPowers (talk) 16:35, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Your absurd claim that intellectual tasks are principally the domain of males -- and that such is a "natural reflection of society" -- is in serious need of a citation. Otherwise, it's just androcentric bias. LtPowers (talk) 16:35, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

"Everyone belongs!" That has to be one of the most biased and arrogant statements I have yet seen in this discussion. You complain about the bias of white males and anyone else that doesn't agree with your outlook, yet you exhibit more devotion to your own bias than anyone here. I have news for you: No one "belongs" in Wikipedia anymore than anyone "belongs" on a police force, on a board of education, on a garbage truck, on a military deployment or an international corporation. It most certainly is not your place to tell anyone else where they belong. That kind of talk is antithetical to the idea that each individual should be free to choose their own paths in life.

What gives you the idea you have some sort of special intelligence, moral code, insight, intuition or any other unique source of alleged authority, that gives you a right to dictate who must belong to what organizations and in what percentages? Wikipedia is the last place on earth that could be suspected of any kind of overt discrimination against anyone. Membership here is totally and completely voluntary!!! That fact alone destroys any basis for starting an absurd "diversity" agenda which will only serve to divide editors and create more incivility than we have now. It is a terrible idea and I think you would be very wise to give it up. EditorASC (talk) 10:00, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh well as long as overt discrimination is the only form of discrimination I guess we're fine then. ASC, do you really think people are free to choose their own paths in life? That social dynamics and opportunity play no role in chosing where people end up going? Yes, membership is voluntary - people volunteer to deal with users who hurl gendered insults at them, or volunteer to deal with discussion venues where the winner is the person who shouts the loudest, or volunteer to deal with users who describe efforts to increase the diversity of the community as "absurd". Oddly enough, many users faced with these things they've volunteered with promptly stop volunteering.

So my questions for you would be; do you believe the "real world" is biased along gender lines, either explicitly or implicitly? Do you believe that Wikipedia's processes exist completely detached from real-world concerns, and people segment away their thought processes to do with the real world when editing Wikipedia? And, do you believe a more diverse community has no substantive advantage in terms of what our content contains? Ironholds (talk) 11:05, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Reply to Ironholds (talk

"ASC, do you really think people are free to choose their own paths in life?"

It depends on how much some have been able to persuade politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in Free-Markets.

Anytime laws/regulations have been imposed, which favor some groups at the expense of other groups (usually labeled with the euphemistic phrase "affirmative action"), then the right of personal choice is reduced or eliminated entirely, by the forcible denial of access to a wealth of opportunities, which are normally prolific in Free-Markets.

Thus, in California for example, Chinese students who frequently had the highest high school GPAs and received the highest SAT test scores, were denied by Govt policy the right to enter the University of California because of the color of their skin. That un-Constitutional (USA Constitution) CA Govt policy was imposed to favor ethnic groups that had a poor history for GPAs and SAT scores, in comparison to Chinese students.

In a little more than one century, California went from gradually eliminating all Govt discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, to instituting a new version of State Government ethnicity discrimination, which this time clearly harmed those of Chinese ethnicity. Fortunately, the majority of Californians found such overt Govt racial discrimination to be wrong, so they voted in favor of CA Prop 209 [[2]]. Those who were opposed to equal opportunity for all, regardless of race/ethnicity, tried to get the courts to overturn Prop 209, but fortunately -- for those who believe ALL citizens should not have their opportunities restricted/blocked by Govt policy -- they failed.

Thus, ALL who chose to apply to become students at the University of CA, were free to compete on the basis of their own personal merit, instead of some being forcibly denied such opportunity because of the color of their skin, as was the case before the passage of Prop 209.

Free-Markets facilitate the most choices to the most citizens. The denial of choice is what we get when Govts act to favor some groups at the expense of other groups.

That is why only about 25% of the American population could afford to travel by air, before the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, but after the market interference by the CAB was totally eliminated, more than 75% of that population were able to exercise their choice to travel by air. Same happened when the US Stock Market was deregulated: A massive amount of new citizens could afford to invest in stocks and bonds, once Govt regulation of brokerage fees was eliminated.

The same happened to poor kids in the inner city of Washington, D.C. after the US Govt finally permitted a voucher system in primary education. That voucher system provide parents with massive new choices as to being able to select private schools for their kids, in the same way that only wealthy politicians could afford such Free-Market schools. But, President Obama reversed that new freedom, in response to the demands of American Teachers Unions, so that the parents of poor children in Wash D.C., no longer had Free-Market choices in education, in the same way as did the children of President Obama and . of many politicians in the US Congress.

The ability to choose one's path in life is not an either/or scenario. To the contrary it is a issue of degree. History has proved the limiting of personal choices in life comes almost always from the FORCE of Govt, and never from Free Markets. THAT is why I oppose all efforts to enforce "Affirmative Action" programs. They are nothing more than another way to forcibly DENY freedom of personal choice to many segments of American society, and almost always because they do not possess the preferred race or gender.

Today, females have Laissez-Faire choice to edit, or to not edit, at Wikipedia. If they are "under represented" (another Orwellian Newspeak propaganda phrase), then it is by THEIR CHOICE, and NO ONE has any moral basis for trying to enforce their own opposition to personal free choice exercised by others. EditorASC (talk) 23:02, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

So your position is that discrimination, once not enforced formally by structure, is no longer implicitly enforced either? In other words, to use an analogy, structural racism in the United States ended with the passage of the last civil rights act? Ironholds (talk) 00:10, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Is this another flavor of canvassing?

wikipedia:WP:CANVASS forbids recruiting editors having some identifiable bias to enter an ongoing editing dispute. If only 20% of Wikimedia editors are female, wouldn't eliminating the gender imbalance constitute the largest instance of canvassing in Wikimedia's history? This would require recruiting thousands of new editors specifically on the basis of their gender. For it to not be canvassing, one would have to argue that the new editors would not bring some sort of "female bias" to the projects. But if that is true, then what is the point of recruiting new editors specifically on the basis of gender? This focus on gender seems like a repudiation of what Wikimedia editing is all about - namely, that anyone (regardless of age, sex, national origin, or any other census form classification) can read the rules and usefully contribute. Can someone give an example of a specific constructive edit that could only be made by a woman? --Teratornis (talk) 04:23, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Teratornis. Please take a look at Grants:IdeaLab/How it works particularly "IdeaLab has its own processes and policies". As you'll see, IdeaLab is not English Wikipedia. On Meta, there is no guideline against canvassing -- in fact, we welcome people spreading the word about initiatives that happen here! --Skud (WMF) (talk) 07:27, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Well that's quite a shame considering that what Wikimedia does inherently affects Wikipedia and its policies. The canvassing policy may be worth considering here, anyway. There's no reason not to abide by the canvassing policy. Jacedc (talk) 16:27, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

"For it to not be canvassing, one would have to argue that the new editors would not bring some sort of 'female bias' to the projects. But if that is true, then what is the point of recruiting new editors specifically on the basis of gender?" So, by your logic, any attempt to correct for existing bias is not allowed because it introduces bias in the other direction? How else does one correct for bias if not by introducing the opposite viewpoint? LtPowers (talk) 16:37, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

You are probably thinking that a project to “correct for existing bias” needs canvassing. That is not so. In Wikipedia, efforts are announced in the relevant talk pages including those of Wikiprojects, as it should be; that is not canvassing (by itself, but it can involve canvassing as a separate problem). There is no need to post this unpaid advertisement (the banner) in every WMF project page any more than it is to put that of any Wikiproject. People interested in improving women-specific topics should either simply edit or post their thoughts in the respective WikiProjects, just like any other editor. Wikipedia is also weak on mathematics (pick any university-level book and compare it to what you can find in Wikipedia) and electric machines (we have plenty of articles, but hardly any quality explanation of the physical principles of operation), the places to invite people to improve those articles is likewise, WikiProject Mathematics and WikiProject Engineering, not the whole encyclopedia. Regards. Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 17:10, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

Simple: refer to wikipedia:WP:VERIFY and wikipedia:WP:NPOV. Currently, our editors are only allowed to add content under those policies. By forcing gender equality, you are indeed introducing bias. Sure, it's opposite bias, but it's bias all the same. My point is, we should not be worried about the background of our contributors, but instead only the content of their edits. If their edits fall in line with the aforementioned pillars, then there should be no problem. That's all we should concern ourselves with. If edits don't fall in line with the aforementioned pillars, they are to be swiftly removed. Jacedc (talk) 17:10, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Glad this is happening

Thanks for putting this together. I'm glad it's happening. Sumana Harihareswara 04:45, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Sumanah!!! Great to see you here, and I totally agree. Jane023 (talk) 14:19, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm curious to know why you are glad. Do you believe:

1. The project can actually eliminate gender imbalance on the Wikimedia projects? (can we say snowball?)
2. That there are some constructive edits that only women can make, and not men? (I'd like to see the list of such edits - I suspect it is very short.)
3. That women themselves will benefit from donating their labor to us? (There may be something to this one.)

I'm highly skeptical that this initiative could put a detectable dent in the gender imbalance. People have been trying to address the gender imbalance across the range of STEM fields for decades. That's no reason not to try, but clearly this is a much bigger problem than a Wikimedia problem, and I'm not aware of any STEM field that has figured out how to solve it. It might require some breakthrough in the behavioral sciences. --Teratornis (talk) 05:54, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

There are several areas within STEM that have successfully increased the numbers of women -- in many cases dramatically! For example, just to name two: in the late 1990s to early 2000s, research at CMU by Margolis and Smith raised the number of women studying computer science to around 50%; their work is documented in the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse". More recently, the Python foundation's work has doubled the numbers of women participating in PyCon (a major international Python conference), through following best practices being developed by a number of groups and people in the open source community. Just because you're not aware of successful results at increasing gender diversity doesn't mean they don't exist. There's actually plenty of evidence that there are mechanisms which can effectively increase women's participation in technical fields and communities. The question is, is the Wikipedia community willing to take those steps, or is it going to obstruct them? --Skud (WMF) (talk) 07:36, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't a university, Wikipedia isn't a clubhouse, Wikipedia isn't the Python community. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, its editors choose to edit Wikipedia. The fact that only 20% of editors are women is a reflection on women's choices not to edit Wikipedia, it's not a reflection on Wikipedia itself. You cannot forcefully close the gender gap, either women choose to edit Wikipedia or they don't. Maybe we could point out that whatever percentage of editors are liberals or conservatives, then cater to them based off of the disparity. We could even go so far as to point out that whatever percentage of editors are under the age of 18, or over the age of 50, then cater to them based off of the disparity. Point is, "closing the gender gap" is pointless. If content is neutral like it's supposed to be, there should be no problem with gender disparity, however big that disparity is. Wikimedia should concern itself with giving everyone equal opportunity, not equal result, and as far as I can tell, both females and males are plenty equal in terms of the opportunity to partake Wikimedia projects. There's no bias against women in the Wikipedia editing system that would potentially deter them from editing. The buttons and various guidelines read all the same to both females and males. Jacedc (talk) 16:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

"There's no bias against women in the Wikipedia editing system that would potentially deter them from editing." This is just patently false.

"The fact that only 20% of editors are women is a reflection on women's choices not to edit Wikipedia, it's not a reflection on Wikipedia itself." Absurd. If it's not a reflection on Wikipedia itself, then why do women choose not to edit? Are women less capable encyclopedia editors? Seems unlikely. Are they less interested in contributing their knowledge? Maybe, but I don't see any reason to assume that conclusion. Isn't it possible that it's specifically Wikipedia's collaborative processes and environment to which many women object? LtPowers (talk) 16:43, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

No. Women have the choice to edit. They have the choice not to edit. Males have the choice to edit. They have the choice not to edit. If only 20% of editors are female, it's because the rest of the female population chooses not to edit. Why they choose not to edit is up to them; we shouldn't concern ourselves with the background of our contributors, only the contributions of our contributors. It's simple. And claiming that my statement is "just patently false" is just patently false if you don't explain why you believe it's false. The buttons and policies read all the same to both females and males. What do you suggest, lowering the standards of Wikipedia to cater to minorities? Jacedc (talk) 17:14, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

It's not because of policies. Its about the environment. Wikipedia has a "boy's club" environment with "sailor language" profanities being part of normal discourse. Most women would find both these issues undignified, and off-putting -- more than most men would.OrangesRyellow (talk) 19:01, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

What evidence do you have that "Wikipedia has a 'boy's club' environment with 'sailor language' profanities being part of normal discourse"? Do you have any statistics or analyses of this, or is this just the impression you get and how you "feel" the environment is? If the latter, then with all due respect, I have no reason to put credence in such claims.

You act as if "sailor language" is somehow inherently bad or even exclusive to males (which is, by the way, sexist and stereotyping). Vulgarity and the use of expletives is a fundamental component of human language, something that all people, irrespective of their sex or gender, use. It can be offensive, yes, but to assume that this is a cause of women not joining the Wikipedian ranks is to imply that women are somehow inferior at handling vulgarity (or too superior to respect such barbarism, which is sexist toward men)—an assumption with which I strongly disagree both ideologically and as indicated from my own experience with females. Anyway, the use of vulgarities is a matter of civility if used as an invective, and a matter of propriety if used in common parlance. This has nothing to do with women's rights, so there's no need to cite it as a reason for the lack of women.

Lastly, I would consdier your claim that "Most women would find both these issues undignified, and off-putting -- more than most men would" to be itself sexist and prejudicial. On what basis do you have to claim this? What is your evidence that women are so inferior that they are less capable of handling such environments or languages? Or, if the sexism is reversed, why are you implying that men are naturally so brutish and barbaric that the environments they foster are unsuitable for the superior tastes of women? Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your statement, but it sounds awfully sexist to me. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 06:05, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

There have been multiple links above to a vast variety of offensive terms, phrases and users on enwiki alone. Could you give an example, please, of how one would generate a statistical analysis of how offensive a project is? Hand-coding, perhaps? Speaking as a scientist. On "Lastly": so you dispute the idea that there's any gender essentialism-based distinction made by society between people born biologically male or female, then? Ironholds (talk) 06:37, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

The "offensiveness" does not need to be measured, nor do I think it should even be considered. What matters is whether the use of vulgar words negatively impacts the community and what are the root causes of this. Just because someone is offended, that is not valid reason to change policies to accommodate for their feelings. If we did, then the entire community would have to be padded down to permit every fallacy and misinterpreted or mistaken offense which might occur. What needs to be determined, then, is how so-called "'sailor language' profanities" impact the community. More importantly, there needs to be a determination of which vulgarities impact the community, the extent to which they do, and how those vulgarities are used. I think the following questions would be important to consider:

• Was the term used in an encyclopedic manner without any intention of employing the expletive to insult another or apply added emphasis to a given statement? Or was the vulgarity used in an invective manner, and intending to offend or accentuate a statement without due reason?
• Was the issue the issue that of gratuitous vulgarity being used, or was the usage of a singular vulgar term sufficient to disrupt the community?
• Are the objections of those who did not appreciate the vulgarity valid? Are the objections and rationale reasonable, or are they based in the personal views of the individual about vulgarity, such as a vehement dislike for vulgarity without any justification outside of the claim that it's offensive?
• Do these objections justify censorship, or would censorship of these vulgar terms infringe upon the rights of the one who used them?
• Would the censorship of these terms violate the existent policies against censorship on Wikipedia? If so, should these censorship policies be reformed or are they better left in their current iteration?

If it is shown that the usage of vulgarities negatively impacts the community, then perhaps a change in policy should mandate that vulgarities are not allowed and will be censored, either comprehensively and against all vulgarities in all possible uses or only under certain circumstances wherein the usage of the vulgarity was unnecessary and inappropriate. If it is shown that the usage of vulgarities does not meaningfully impact the the community except in only the most egregious of circumstances, however, then perhaps no change should be made in this respect and the freedom of users to use vulgarities as they see fit (within good reason, of course) should be retained or enforced. My point is that simply decrying the use of vulgar language on Wikipedia, or any forum of discourse for that matter, is not a valid reason to consider it a part of the problem. Unless it could be determined that this vulgar language actually detracts from the community and its goals, I don't see why anyone should give credence to the complaint.

I don't understand what you mean by "the idea that there's any gender essentialism-based distinction made by society between people born biologically male or female". If you're willing to clarify, I'm glad to answer. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 08:44, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

This program goes against neutrality, one of the five pillars that support Wikipedia

I agree with Camilo Sanchez and Jacedc in that there is this effort to “close the gap” is unnecessary (refer to § They already have a choice. Everybody (men, women, kids, teenagers, adults, elders, and so on, by any other classification) who reads Wikipedia online can edit it already. Furthermore, I hold, based on the foundation of Wikipedia that this project is counterproductive. Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral encyclopedia. Neutrality is among the 5 points (appropriately called the Five pillars) deemed the most essential and fundamental principles of this encyclopedia. This is one reason of why advertisement has been rejected in Wikipedia (and all of the WMF projects) despite that it would be a huge source of income to the WMF and would enable it to pursue projects which would drastically improve the encyclopedia (such as hiring professional writers for topics with bad covering). I agree that neutrality is more important, and so does the Wikipedia community as stated in its official policy. I don't want to see advertisement on Wikipedia. The banner of this project is unpaid advertisement. Let's make things clear: equality is not neutrality; even the concept of what equality is, is subjective and therefore not neutral.

1. Promoting equality entails selecting a metric as relevant, namely, the metric by which the status of groups (dominance or equality) is to be judged. Selecting such a metric is an act of subjectiveness. If several metrics are selected, this carries the implication that those are the worthy metrics and the others are irrelevant (or at least less relevant), which is just as subjective and hence against neutrality, if not worser.
2. Promoting equality implies the underlying belief that the relevant classes of agents for which such an equality is being pursued ought to rank equal, and furthermore, do so in the selected metric.

In our society, most people don't have a major physical disability. Seeking that 50% of representatives in a congress are people having this condition would be giving an unfair advantage to them, and therefore it is called reverse discrimination. Let's see how this project makes the same mistake: The world population is roughly distributed equally between men and women (see sex ratio, and note the difference between the 7% mentioned there and the >400% implied in the banner) and as mentioned in § They already have a choice, equal opportunities are given to everybody to edit Wikipedia already. These facts coupled with the observation (in the current banner) that “Fewer than 20% of Wikimedia contributors are women” is–coupled with the fact that they have equal editing opportunities–firm evidence (as firm as the source for the percentage is) that less women than men take the opportunity to edit Wikipedia (or collaborate in a WMF project). To hold that in equality of opportunities, and less aptitude, interest, or whatever other factors are involved (but not a difference in sheer numbers, as noted above) by one group to make use of that opportunity, the results must be equal, is an unfortunate byproduct of political correction at its most exaggerate and misapplied form.

This opinion has no place in an organization like the Wikimedia Foundation or a project like Wikipedia, neither does the associated advertisement. There is a huge numbers of Wikipedians (and contributors to other WMF projects) and there is no way that we can agree in advertising any opinion. We can collaborate in the premise that nobody's opinion will stand before that of the rest, hence the policy about neutrality. I don't want to see Wikipedia turn into a soapbox for the current or past WMF executive directors.

As pointed above, we don't need “diverse” contributors either. We need quality content. Wikipedia an the WMF has never cared about the background of the contributors, only about their contributions, as it ought to be. The better evidence for that is that several administrators intentionally keep their identity secret, and that disclosing that information (of any editor, not just administrators) is against policy and is addressed by serious measures.

Regards.

Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 04:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

Good points about neutrality. Another point is that since Wikimedia editors need not reveal their identities, then presumably we already have a way for editors to avoid gender discrimination. If women are not editing here because they are being singled out for some special kind of abuse, then presumably they can avoid this abuse by editing under genderless pseudonyms (like mine). If on the other hand fewer women edit on Wikimedia projects simply because they don't like the inherently rough nature of the place where all our edits can be "mercilessly" edited by anyone else, then it would seem the only way to make the projects more welcoming to people who don't like this merciless editing would be to fundamentally change how these projects work. Instead of the current model, where you edit something and see if it "sticks", we would have to go to a more organized, hierarchical model where editors are given specific tasks under the expert guidance of senior editors who know what will stick. In other words, we would have to edit our content like all the hierarchical corporations out there. It's hard to imagine such a fundamental change would even be possible in a community of globally distributed volunteers, and if it was, it might drive away most of the people who came here because of the way things have been from the start. --Teratornis (talk) 06:15, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree. Well-written comment. :) Jacedc (talk) 16:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I completely agree. I would love to hear your feedback on my post below. Nøkkenbuer (talk) 01:12, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Reading these snarky comments above I truly understand why the campaign is needed

Wow, I must admit that reading the thoughts of people above made me somewhat queasy. Go ahead, read all of these again. Were I a woman, I'd be feeling very much unwelcome. One user actually did feel nice enough to post she's happy about this thing happening, but she was put to her place...

What's my point? A) Too many people (not only women of course) turn away from editing Wikipedia because its communities can be obnoxious (it's the same with my local language Wiki, too). B) This campaign is not trying to "shake one of the pillars that Wikipedia is standing upon", nor trying to encourage any kind of "Canvassing"... it's merely an experiment, designed to see if the community has constructive ideas about making Wikipedia contain more voices so it can embody more aspects of human knowledge.

For the life of me, I can't see what could be so offensive about the campaign. I can, however, see the point how such reactions do highlight the need for good ideas and a better environment for women editing Wikipedia. Alleycat80 (talk) 06:58, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I for one find this campaign offensive because it perpetuates the stereotype that any underrepresentation of women must necessarily involve a community intervention to make participation more accessible to women. Why make people assume that we even want special help to get us to do something maybe we aren't that into in the first place? Such reactions should be expected, since this campaign uses the sort of politicized language that anyone who's been spending time online should realize will draw out both sides of the social justice culture war, so to use the reactions as justification for the campaign is circular reasoning. --Euniana (talk) 15:44, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

If Wikimedia wants to attract more women based off a disparity, then by all means, they should do that. But don't put banners atop every page (Wikimedia needs to stop doing this in general), and don't enforce policies which seek to "exact equality for women." Because that would shake one of the five pillars of Wikipedia. I also still maintain the sentiment that in the past, Wikimedia has never cared about the background of their contributors because that would be counterproductive. To sit there and worry about the gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, etc. of editors presents all nine types of problems and completely goes against the historical nature of Wikimedia, the nature of which has allowed its project to grow beyond the size of any encyclopedia in the history of the world. I strongly support identity concealment on Wikimedia projects (i.e., don't divulge your age, gender, political affiliation, religion, nationality at all.) Jacedc (talk) 16:44, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Firstly, you seem to assume that a handful of comments, many of which may just be trolls and which certainly does not represent the majority of Wikipedia, are an accurate representation of the problem. That is highly fallacious and absurd. Secondly, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to fail to consider why people are acting this way. Some may interpret this campaign as effectively pronouncing that there are too many males, which can be seen as highly offensive to them. Others may interpret this campaign as a concerted effort to fill arbitrary quotas or artificially balance demographics statistics without any discernible benefit, which could be see as pointless and frustrating to them. Simply assuming all the detractors, even the rather crass ones, are therefore misogynists or sexists is to expose your own bias. I don't have experience on other language Wikis, but with English Wikipedia I see at most a passive-aggressive and condescending community, but hardly a sexist or misogynistic one. That would mean a call for greater civility, if anything, and not a balancing of the gender demographics on Wikipedia. I don't know who this other user was, but I doubt people "put her to her place" because she was a woman; rather, they probably criticized her for supporting a campaign which they thought to be deleterious to Wikipedia, and perhaps even offensive.

Point A is a more of a civility issue, not a women's rights one. I would need some evidence for Point B, unless that's simply your interpretation of this campaign. Even if what you say is true, it's obvious that many Wikipedians are appalled and offended by this initiative. Perhaps it's just a vocal minority, but the vociferous clamor of dissent within this campaign appears to be much higher than those who support it.

I understand that you may support this campaign, and that is your right, but I suspect that your reasons for doing so are based on a misunderstanding of what this campaign attempts to accomplish. The same could be said of me, but if so, then I encourage you to tell me why at my post about this campaign. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 05:54, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Where is the problem?

I really don't understand, women have the same possibilities to be part of the project, there isn't any kind of direct or undirect discrimination. Furthermore, if it's proved that we have a smaller number of women, it's not clear how that reflects on the quality level of what we do. --Carlomartini86 (talk) 08:05, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes I understand where you are coming from. As a woman, I have become one of the go-to people to explain this stuff. Since I felt somewhat responsible, I decided to dig a little deeper and guess what? Turns out you don't have to dig at all to find the gendergap. Name your corner of Wikipedia and I can show it to you in probably a few minutes. I read on fb that someone felt that "ideas are not gendered", but they certainly are. I think 80% of what is written on Wikipedia is written by people who "just feel like writing an article on that one specific thing". Well there are tons of very specific situations that no man will ever wrangle themselves into, let alone have the idea to write about it. Case in point? Take a look at this article: en:Contraceptive implant and the accompanying video piece. I also love the template that has become a snarky insinuation at the top. Jane023 (talk) 14:26, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

As a woman, I have become one of the go-to people to explain this stuff.

The only thing any particular user can “explain” (whether women or men) is how that user feels, but no user is representative of a big group, let alone a group as big as the people of a given sex. To claim that a single user can “explain”, representing around half the world population (or at least a big part of the audience of Wikipedia or WMF projects) is simply incorrect. Political representatives are continuously criticized saying that they don't represent the people they should, even when it's a few thousands; we are here talking of people with years of experience and often Ph. D degrees in this specific area. Even then, governance is more than “explaining” how one involved group feels.

There is policy involved here. I think that you are not making this claim, but I want to make the clarification: no group (selected based on a personal criterion) is entitled to “explain” how policy works more than the rest.

I read on fb that someone felt that "ideas are not gendered", but they certainly are.

This is unsubstantiated opinion. Furthermore, the fact that you have read the contrary on Facebook is completely irrelevant here. You are entitled to your opinion, whether you want it to be based on (the opposite of what) people says on Facebook or another point, but the WMF and Wikipedia must be neutral. See § This program goes against neutrality, one of the five pillars that support Wikipedia and the other arguments made in this talk page.

Well there are tons of very specific situations that no man will ever wrangle themselves into, let alone have the idea to write about it. Case in point?

False. Knowledge doesn't works like that. We don't need to directly experience something in order to have knowledge about it (in general, regardless of sex). Most knowledge is based on observations (and induction based on them) or deductive arguments, not feelings that the discoverer experiences. Just to name some examples: Hendrik Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman never saw their emission/absorption spectral lines be finely split in presence of a magnetic field (see Zeeman effect). And again Albert Einstein never felt the curvature of spacetime. The spacetime in the vicinity of the earth is curved enough to have measurable (not experienced) curvature (All of the satellite navigation systems including GPS, and several experiments like that of Joseph Hafele and that of Richard Keating depend on this). It is through measurements, inductive and deductive reasoning that those parts of physics were developed. We (again, generic we) can't experience directly how a transistor tens of nanometers wide works, but we know it from indirect observation, and we know it so well that we can carefully arrange hundreds of millions to billions of them in devices with more computing power than the entire humanity using pencil and paper, and fingernail-sized storage devices with more storage capacity than a bookshelf.

Physicians routinely handle diseases that they never have experienced, thousands of men graduate as gynecologists, women as urologists, painters paint scenery that they have never experienced, including surrealists ones, historians write about events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, rocket engineers account for forces during launch that they have never felt (most are not astronauts), psychologists write about mental feelings they have never experienced, and treat the associated mental disorders, and so on.

The whole society, including the fact that we are currently using computers in this talk page, depends on the fact that knowledge can be mastered without experiencing in oneself what it entails (see the point about semiconductors above). The assertion that only women can know enough about a handful of topics to write about them, is at best, a misunderstanding of know knowledge works.

Moreover, women are already welcome to edit Wikipedia (or any other WMF project) and there are already projects to improve the coverage of woman-specific topics. Wikipedia has never had anything against women or any other group. I favor that men and women edit in neutrality, not this biased initiative which, as already noted elsewhere in this talk page, implies the viewpoint that there is a sex war and that Wikipedia and the WMF must take a side in it.

Regards. Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 16:51, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

Hi Mario, I must admit I agree with you in theory, but the reality is never so ideal and is in fact quite messy. Just imagine that someone who is very overworked but who has devoted lots of time to Wikimedia projects has asked you as a valued contributor to present the gendergap on Wikipedia in a short speech of 20 minutes in 2 days time. You are willing to comply with the caveat that you have never looked at it before. I am sure that the experience will change your outlook. The problem is so deeply embedded that drastic measures are necessary. With each month that we move forward this gap is getting bigger and bigger. It's your opinion that matters, but your opinion has only been formed in reaction to what you perceive as "nonsense". You haven't spent any time at all considering your corner of the wikiverse and how that corner handles women-specific topics at all. It's one thing to say everyone is welcome to your table, but if you lock the front door there isn't much weight in your invitation at all. Jane023 (talk) 18:39, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

We don't have a gender problem, we have a civility problem

I have said it many times before, the problem we have on the WikiProjects and specifically the English Wikipedia is civility and double standards. When editors are treated like second class citizens regardless of how long they have been on the project and how much they have done, and admins are treated as though they are infallible, it causes problems. People do not want to work in a negative environment no matter how much money they make, let alone as a volunteer project. When people are routinely treated as a throwaway commodity and are under-appreciated, they leave. No matter how much recruiting is done and no matter how much attention is paid to the issues of Gender, ethnic and racial disparity unless someone does something about the underlying problems of civility and admins who are allowed to do whatever they want with impunity, you are not going to fix anything. If you fix those two major problems, and start rebuilding the culture of trust that once existed, you will find things will improve and people will want to edit again. Reguyla (talk) 16:14, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

It's funny you say that because one of the leading causes for editor blocking is being uncivil. Civility problems are met with blocks. Editors aren't treated as second-class citizens (I'm just a regular, casual editor), and admins definitely aren't treated as infallible. Although I will echo what Wikipedia's civility guideline says: Raw text is often ambiguous. Raw text does not have facial expressions, vocal inflections, body language, etc., therefore it's hard to gauge whether or not someone is being hostile. For some people, they interpret a comment as hostile before they interpret it as explanatory. But how else are we to make sure that content is held to a quality standard? How else are we to explain to someone why their edit was undone? Jacedc (talk) 17:22, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I understand what your saying and as a self labelled casual editor you probably just don't see it. When a handful of admins routinely abuse the block tool, are unnecessarily aggressive and provocative in discussions including goading users into confrontations so they can justify blocking them, I see that as a problem. You are right though, editors do get blocked frequently and many of them deserve it. Admins however can pretty much do whatever they want and it takes a month long Arbcom discussion (that nearly always results in no result at all to the admin), to even consider removal of the admin tools. An editor that has hundreds of thousands of edits, years of service to the project and featured content can be tossed out randomly by any admin. Does that seem like a good system to you? As someone who did hundreds of thousands of edits all over the project in various different namespaces I (and others) have seen this problem. I do not recall anything being done or said to the admin that called the whole community "Fucking Morons" for opposing an RFA he submitted on another user. In fact that admin, who has a history of at least borderline abusive behavior with the block tool is applying for the Checkuser and Oversight roles and they will probably get access because the culture on the English Wikipedia allows that conduct with no oversight of admins. That is just one example but I do also admit it is a minority of admins that are the problems. However, when nothing is done about it when they do violate policy, its not encouraging. As long as that sort of conduct is condoned and even encouraged, it is not likely that editors in any demographic are going to stay and edit for extended periods of time. Reguyla (talk) 17:53, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Enough with the feminism already

Maybe women just have less interest in editing and administrating as men. Is this so wrong? There is no objective reason why the ratios of editors and staff should be equal to the general population. Some things men prefer, Some things women prefer. This nonsense should not even be given the light of day or serious proposal and adspace.--Metallurgist (talk) 17:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

You're right, women couldn't possibly be interested in learning things, that's only for men. We're only interested in calories and kittens and lipstick. Now, what do you want in your sandwich? Sophie means wisdom (talk) 17:58, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

That answer is a non-sequitur. Metallurgist talked about editing and being administrators. As pointed already, the buttons, history pages, talk pages, interface in general, policy, guidelines and essays are the same for men and women, so women and men that read Wikipedia have the same opportunity to contribute and yet women as a group taken collectively, chose to not to contribute as much as men do. Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 18:08, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

You think the essays and the interface are the only thing that matter? The attitude and implicit and explicit sexism matter. The sociological variation in how different genders are treated in the outside world, and the fact that Wikipedia reflects the outside world, matters.

A thought experiment: the gender-based wage gap and glass ceiling both exist; would you dispute that? Now, if I claimed that they couldn't exist and maybe women just choose to be paid less than men, because after all, the pay slips are all the same colour and size, would you think that's an adequate explanation for the variation? Ironholds (talk) 18:15, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I basically agree with the title of this thread. As I pointed out above, if civility improves, people will edit. There are lots and lots of well respected female editors in the project. Quite a few are admins, some are not. I could leave a long list of them here but that's not necessary. As has been stated in other venues, I support recruiting more editors, I do not support focusing on one group or another. Do we need more women editing? Sure we do, we also need more military people, more Chinese people and more people from India. There are a lot of subjects that are under represented in Wikipedia including China, Indian and African topics. We need more editors in general, not to skew the results by singling out one or two groups. Regardless, as I have stated above and elsewhere, if there are no changes to the environment and civility, people are just going to play World of Warcraft or hang out with their friends on Facebook instead. We need to drop the editors are expendable, we don't need you mentality. We need editors, they do not need us. That isn't to say we shouldn't block some, but blocking large percentages of the worlds internet simply on the assumption that they might be a vandal someday and have never done one edit is just plain stupid. Reguyla (talk) 18:19, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

The analogy is fundamentally flawed: an employer may offer a lower payment for women than men for the same job, or men may be overall more apt or willing to make higher paying jobs. Wikipedia offers exactly the same for women than men and all editors chose what part of the encyclopedia they edit.

Some editors are aggressive, but while they abide to policy, we can't coerce them into being nice. If they are selective regarding to whom they are aggressive, we can't force them to be equally aggressive (or equally nice) to everyone, that's nonsense. Even if such an effort is attempted, there is no reason more to address aggressiveness towards women than there is to address aggressiveness based on any other demographic criterion including race, age, religion, and even level of experience, which is not demographic. By picking a single (or any subset they determine is worthy addressing) of these, the WMF is being impartial, and hence irresponsible.

Also, even if editors were more aggressive to women to men, it's a fallacy to conclude that it's so because they are women. correlation does not imply causation, that's taught in elementary statistic courses (isn't the people who made the studies aware of this elementary result?). If, as some have pointed, women are less willing to go through the same process of being a Wikipedia editor than men, it's no surprise than their edits will more often be against policy (which doesn't distinguishes editors by any demographic criterion) and therefore will be reverted and criticized.

The irresponsible pursuing of supposed “equality” of the WMF should stop. It's not neutral, and there is no objective criterion to determine which groups must be equal and by which metric, I elaborated into this in § This program goes against neutrality, one of the five pillars that support Wikipedia. A change to policy to impose whatever concept of “equality” the WMF people has decided is THE valid one would be disastrous. The WMF is an offspring of Wikipedia and it should oversee Wikipedia, based on it's five pillars, not the WMF staff's political agenda.

AGF is a guideline as it should, because there is no objective measure of what is being “nice” or “aggressive”. Trying to impose any such measure will result in a complete loss of neutrality, and will give administrators yet another tool to deal with users the don't like; they will punish users based on that they are breaking the AGF policy, according to their (the administrator) interpretation, of course. You are free to hold your opinion that “implicit and explicit sexism matter”, and that it's somehow more worthy to fight aggressiveness to a small group of editors than it is to fight the problem of aggressiveness in general (which is, by definition, a bigger problem). but don't make Wikipedia (or WMF) your soapbox for expressing your opinion.

Regards. Mario Castelán Castro (talk, contributions) 18:52, 5 March 2015 (UTC).

@Reguyla, you're right about the civility issue. From my own experience, newbies get bit a lot, and when someone puts time and effort into creating an article only for it to be put up for CSD/PROD/AfD, or to be harshly criticized, it gets discouraging. That's not to say we shouldn't require high quality material, but there's got to be a better way that carries less bite. Then there's the imbalance in political views on certain topics. I've seen cliques of editors with affiliations on outside sites basically own articles and squash any opposing views, then, if someone questions is, a dramafest ensues. The cherry on top is the sysops that admittedly stereotype IP addresses, and the different shared IP templates (which ironically are supposed to encourage AGF) for schools, public terminals, cellular providers, etc come right to their aide. If you want to talk about gender imbalance, lets talk about all of those female school teachers and librarians who get turned away by those "schoolblocks?" (Some argue they can just make an account at home or request an account, but how many do you think actually do that? No, what happens is they see something they want to edit, they click "edit this page" to be greeted with "To edit, please log in," and they sigh and go away.) PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 02:57, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for this project

There's a mass of negativity above (with some exceptions) so, to break the pattern: thank you for this project. It's a good and necessary project to have. The constant stream of "I don't understand why this is happening, equality of outcome just magically happens" comments are a great argument for why it is necessary. Ironholds (talk) 18:19, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Hoorah! Couldn't have put it better. The whole point about intrinsic, insidious, endemic barriers (glass ceiling anyone?) is that they're invisible to those who pass right through them. As a white, anglophone, male I have to make constant efforts to address systemic biases in my own views that come about through naivety or over-optimism about my privilege. Reading this, I was shocked that there are so many Wikipedians that share my 'demographic majority status' but can't see the need for efforts to address the clumsy bluntness of empty egalitarian rhetoric. PatHadley (talk) 18:40, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Although I do not share Ironholds negatively towards the comments, I do support his statements that a lot of good can come out of this project. I see several projects to study the data regarding gender data and a couple focused on improving content for women's issues. I do not deny that the project needs more female editors, but I think it needs more editors in general of all types. Reguyla (talk) 18:45, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree, Ironholds, diversity, as well as other beneficial things like freedom of speech, democracy, transparency, etc. do not "magically happen". They need to be nourished by good people with open minds. 77.125.82.115 20:44, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Above comments moved from previous discussion page

Just noting that we've moved the above general discussion about the campaign and the gender gap to this new page. The main discussion page will be maintained for active participants in the campaign to ask questions, and meta-level discussion can continue on this new page. Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Why is balancing the gender ratio necessary on Wikipedia?

Perhaps I'm just missing the big picture, but I don't see why balancing the gender ratio is necessary on Wikipedia. This site is meant to be a collaborative, concerted effort by all people to compile all human knowledge and information (to an extent) in a single, all-encompassing online encyclopedia. This site is not, or at least I thought to not be, politically or socially partisan; Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a social justice movement supporting any one particular ideology. Having said that, what is Wikipedia really trying to accomplish by demanding a more balanced ratio of male to female editors? How is this going to actually improve the quality or integrity of the site? If anything, I'd argue that it would do just the opposite—not because there would be an increase of female editors, mind you, but because this increase would likely be artificial and said editors may not be as qualified as the males they are intended to replace or balance out.

In particular, one suggestion has been to employ positive discrimination tactics to encourage more female editors. Although I believe that it would be great for more women to participate on Wikipedia, I see no reason for this to occur. Positive discrimination is a faulty concept which attempts to impose discriminatory practices in favor of a given demographic in order to artificially balance a perceived disparity. In this case, a disproportional balance between the number of male and female editors is perceived as a problem, despite how there is no evidence or indication of any problem or issue resulting from this. In my opinion, it appears that the artificial balancing of the sex ratio among Wikipedians is more of a forced equalization for the sake of equalization. In other words, there is no actual benefit with balancing out the sexes of the editors; it is being done solely to make the statistics look less biased. If said statistics are properly analyzed, however, I suspect no actual bias will be found (and no, perceived bias is not a valid justification for action).

Four Questions

My first major issue with this entire initiative (and the accompanying proposals of positive discrimination) is: why does there need to be a balance? Perhaps men are more interested in editing than women, or perhaps some women choose the "male" option to anonymize their identity. Is there really any need to balance out the sexes? Will this actually accomplish anything outside of making the statistics look good? It doesn't seem like the balancing of the genders will actually accomplish anything meaningful. Sure, it may better represent the female demographic, but what does the female offer that a male does not? As far as I'm concerned, what matters is whether or not the editor is qualified, irrespective of their sex or gender (or orientation or ethnicity or religious affiliation, etc.). One could argue that female editors provide a "female perspective", but what exactly does that mean? Logic is logic and knowledge is knowledge, regardless of the agent who expresses it. Whether the logician or informer is male or female (or both) is irrelevant to whether that logic or information is valid, credible, and a worthwhile contribution to Wikipedia. The lack of female editors may be evidence of a lack of interest among females for editing Wikipedia articles, or a lack of opportunities due to reasons outside of Wikipedia, or may simply be a coincidence. Calling attention to this disparity and claiming that it needs to be "fixed", however, implies that there is a problem in the first place. What exactly is this problem? Perhaps more importantly, how is this problem meaningfully impacting Wikipedia?

Secondly, how will this actually improve Wikipedia? Women are just as valuable as men and forcing a balance in demographics will solve nothing; what should matter is the quality of Wikipedia's content, not the sexual identity of its authors. Likewise, what defines a good editor or group of editors is their qualification(s) and contribution(s) to the work, not the sex or balance of sexes within the group. Wikipedia could comprise 95% male editors or 95% female editors and it shouldn't matter so long as they adhere to the same strict work ethic, style, and policies and guidelines as is required from a Wikipedian. One could argue that the benefit of a larger female editorship is the inclusion of a "female perspective", but I have already stated why this point doesn't really hold. Anyway, considering how the majority of Wikipedia articles are either genderless—or unrelated to sex or gender—the only real need for a "female perspective" would be on issues wherein such a perspective is actually important, such as on topics relating to sex and gender or nudity or feminism or women's rights. Outside of that, the only perspective that is needed is a human perspective, no matter the sex or gender of the perceiver.

Thirdly, how is this fair to the male demographic? It assumes that a male majority is inherently a bad thing, despite how the fact of these individuals being male do not (or should not) not impact the quality of their work. Switching out a male for a female of equal work ethic and integrity would solve nothing and only give the illusion of equality, at the expense of an accurate representation of the editorship on Wikipedia. If the majority of editors are male, so what? Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe Wikipedia or its editors systematically discriminate against and prevent females from editing. By enforcing so-called "positive discrimination" practices is thereby discriminating against males, though, by assuming that they are overrepresenting some vague collective male perspective. This sort of policy acts as if the mere presence of a male majority is evidence of some patriarchy, when in reality it's nothing more than a natural consequence of people's activities online. Anyway, isn't this sort of "positive discrimination" demeaning to the females themselves? It treats them as if they are incapable of achieving the same as their male counterparts even within a system which is not systematically oppressing them. By artificially elevating women for the sole purpose of balancing the sex ratio among editors, you're effectively implying that a concerted effort on behalf of males and the system is required to equalize the ratio. Why not let females become Wikipedians whenever they please, like everyone else has done before, male or female, as compared to subsidizing their membership and providing unfair incentives for the sole purpose of increasing the number of female editors?

Fourthly, why is an equal representation of sex necessary on Wikipedia? This is not a social justice forum, nor is it a political board to represent women's rights or the suffrage of the female demographic. Wikipedia is first and foremost a site for compiling and verifying the world's information and human knowledge. Even the Manual of Style states as much. Rather than wasting all this time, effort, and funding trying to fix a problem which isn't there, or balancing a disparity which isn't negatively impacting the site, how about we focus our efforts on improving Wikipedia as a whole? Why not focus on initiatives of mass article editing, or citation building, or page creation? Why not encourage more translations and more translation checks, the expansion of articles in other languages, and the continued compilation of human knowledge and information? Is an arbitrary and pointless balancing of the male-to-female ratio really what Wikipedia needs right now? Or is this just another red herring intended to improve the statistical appearance of the site and eliminate perceived bias, while failing to expunge the actual bias littered throughout so many articles?

Criticism of the FAQ

What is the purpose of my posting this? Well, it's certainly not to bitch and complain, nor is it meant to be any sort of dismissal of the issues surrounding women's rights and representation. I understand how systematic bias can occur, as well as how it can be an issue that a certain perspective or opinion is being underrepresented. However, I believe Wikipedia is not approaching this issue in the right way. The FAQ is itself a prime example of how the issue is being improperly handled. According to the FAQ § 2.1, the issue is that "'women's' subjects [are being] under-represented" because there is a lack of women available to contribute to it. This is understandable, but if this is the case then the initiative should be focusing on encouraging more female editors to contribute to said subjects. The current initiative attempts to encourage an overall increase in female editorship, which may be admirable, but ultimately misrepresents the issue. What we need is a greater "female perspective" regarding issues relating to females, not an overall balancing. The latter implies that there is an inherent problem in the abundance of male editors, when the real issue is regarding the lack of female editors with respect to "women's" subjects.

In the FAQ § 2.3, a mere opinion is provided without any worthwhile explanation of exactly what this systematic bias is. The only "citation" is to what appears to be a blog site of little to no actual credibility. The site is virtually unknown and serves more as a platform for the agenda they push than an actual investigation into the systematic bias of Wikipedia and the articles therein. FAQ § 2.4 cites only one example of this purported gender bias. Even then, the so-called "bias" being cited is, in fact, an issue of ignorance about a given topic. The problem there was not the fact that it was being edited by male Wikipedians; rather, it was that these Wikipedians were misinformed and ignorant about the issue. Had they been female, this alone would not have prevented its occurrence, seeing how being female does not give one special knowledge about all things female. Moreover, this particular instance (where the issue of rape and how it works was misunderstood) is one of ignorance which could occur to both males and females. Being female does not grant one authoritative wisdom over how rape works, even if you have been yourself raped.

FAQ § 3 is the only place where an actual explanation into the reasoning behind this initiative is provided (and I'm not surprised): it's a matter of public opinion and reputation. The only "argument" here, if it could even be called as much, is that the female perspective is not being adequately represented (which is what I assume is meant in the quote by Sue Gardner). Like I've already argued above, however, the "female perspective" is as irrelevant as a "male perspective" when pertaining to subjects which do not deal with sex or gender—all that matters is the "human perspective", which reasonably shouldn't differentiate all that much between males and females on topics such as metaphysics, the Uncertainty Principle, or dog food. The only instances wherein an article outside of gender or sex may benefit from a "female perspective" is when the subject is history or a compilation of notable events in a given period of time. Even then, however, I would question whether a "female perspective" is necessary when anyone (including a male) could provide information on female achievements or historical events. I would consider it rather biased for a female to be looking after her own sex by only providing a "female perspective" on events which are not inherently sexual, if anything, just as it would be if a male was only providing androcentric information.

FAQ § 4 is the most egregious section, since it attempts to explain why women are not as active by citing that:

• [ FAQ § 4.1 ] Women have less time due to second shifts and work demands, despite how this is an issue among both sexes;
• [ FAQ § 4.2 ] Women are less confident or assertive, despite how this is demeaning to say and only attempts to excuse a lack of participation, and despite how it even states that it is likely due to women's lack of interest in competitive sparring on the Internet;
• [ FAQ § 4.3 ] Women are less technologically literate than men, despite how this is itself a sexist rationalization that attempts to excuse the lack of participation among women in the Wikipedian community;
• [ FAQ § 4.4 ] Women can't understand the rules, despite how this blatantly sexist statement effectively implies that women are too stupid to qualify for the rigorous demands of Wikipedian editorship, and despite how this high learning curve is one that everyone must face regardless of their sex or gender (myself included, the novice that I am);
• [ FAQ § 4.5 ] The rigorous traits expected of a Wikipedian (or any academic, scholarly person) are detrimental to women, despite how no evidence of this is provided, and despite how this implies that women aren't capable of positively and constructively exhibiting the same sort of professionalism as do males without being seen negatively when there is no evidence that this is the case; and,
• [ FAQ § 4.6 ] Women are targeted for harassment, despite how the statements of the previous section contradict this by virtue of citing the relative anonymity that the Internet provides, despite how the only cited evidence for this harassment is the anecdote of one purported victim who was harassed by trolls (who very well may have not been Wikipedians), and despite how this is obviously a carbon-copy complaint of the controversy surrounding Anita Sarkeesian (FemFreq is even cited as an example of it). Let's just forget how this harassment isn't even systematic, but rather anecdotal and largely rare from the looks of it.

The poor wording and complete disregard for the lack of professionalism of this entire section (let alone the article) aside, I find it pathetic that the FAQ attempts to excuse the lack of female editorship and involvement when this is the responsibility of those very females of whether to participate. The claims are dubious and vague, and the concerns have all the credibility of an uncited stub. Why must we try to find faults in the system when it is the demographic which doesn't appear interested in participating in the community? Rather than attempting to explain the sex ratio disparity by means of the plight of women on a site whose systematic discrimination of women rivals that of feminist rallies, how about we simply encourage more people to participate in editing and improving Wikipedia? Why not call for more female editors on the articles which need it, rather than demanding an arbitrary balancing of some perceived disparity?

The rest of the FAQ is little more than a series of bullet points and links. No elucidation or summary is provided, no cogent arguments or explanations to justify this initiative—just a bunch of random quotes, links, and related information haphazardly sewn together in the attempt of providing some rationale for this structurally flawed endeavor. FAQ § 7 is particularly ridiculous, given that it cites loosely related controversies as if they meant anything. (I'll decline to comment on Anita Sarkeesian's inclusion, which I think belies the controversy surrounding her). FAQ § 9.3 misrepresents the study it cites by attempting to debunk meritocracy as inherently androcentric, despite how the real issue is the underlying bias inherent in employers as a result of said employer's sex and expectations from both males and females.

If you have a problem with the FAQ, why don't YOU edit it?

To put it simply, I do not support this initiative and I think that it is structurally and fatally flawed. I disagree with the premises, methods, and goals of this Inspire IdeaLab, so any edit I think should be made to the FAQ would include the deletion of the entire article. Anyway, I'm not sure where to start when it comes to editing the article, so even if I wanted to improve it I wouldn't know how.

Conclusion

With all due respect to women and females, who I value as equal to their male counterparts and who I support as deserving the same equality of opportunity and treatment as all others, is this really what you need right now? Increased representation on a genderless site whose majority of information doesn't even have to do with your sex or gender, and thus does not need any feminine perspective? If women wish to become more active and represent a greater portion of the Wikipedian userbase, then I strongly encourage more women to join our ranks and help contribute to Wikipedia in some meaningful way. The impetus for this should be the love of knowledge and desire to help contribute to one of the boldest projects in human history, however, and not because you will receive recognition as a privileged minority or funding for simply existing as a female editor. If what is needed for someone to start editing Wikipedia more is incentives, is that really the type of person Wikipedia should be asking for help? Regardless of whether they're female, should we really be trying to artificially balance the demographics simply because they aren't 50/50, and do so by privileging those minority demographics for that very reason? Maybe I'm just an ignoramus, but I'd say we should not.

Overall, I find this initiative to be foolish and pointless, and misleads Wikipedia in an unnecessary direction. I support women's equal rights like any other rational human being, but an artificially forced equal representation of both sexes is a waste of time and resources, especially when no discernible benefit can be gleaned from it. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this initiative, or I'm failing to understand the problem, but from my perspective it just seems like a political stunt on Wikipedia's behalf—one which will accomplish nothing of value with respect to Wikipedia. If a more favorable public opinion is what Wikipedia wants, then so be it, but to masquerade this as some initiative to benefit the Wikipedian community is allocating resources to accomplish a façade.

Thanks for reading,

Nøkkenbuer (talk) 00:36, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

P.S. – Feel free to comment your thoughts, opinions, or objections to my above statements below. Apologies in advance if I have offended anyone, since that was surely not what I meant to accomplish. I want what is best for Wikipedia, and I believe this initiative is not. No disrespect was intended. Any and all feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

Alternative? (Update, 31 March)

After much consideration, I noticed that this lengthy criticism of the Inspire campaign didn't really posit any meaningful alternative. My initial thought was that there needed no alternative, since this entire campaign is fundamentally flawed through and through. That doesn't really follow the Friendly space guidelines, however, in particular Question #7. Anyway, what could really be accomplished by this criticism? The campaign is going nowhere (even if it's going nowhere, or nowhere good), so these lamentations are ultimately ineffectual. So, what could be a proposed alternative?

The only Idea I support which could help redeem this campaign is Cshanesimpson's "Characterization of Editors on Wikipedia", which attempts to better frame the campaign in a more meaningful context by analyzing the full complexity of demographics and their correlations (and possible causal relations). The Idea is to essentially fund a more comprehensive and potent research study of the editors and userbase of the Wikipedia community, which in turn could shed light on how to bring more females (and other minorities) onto Wikipedia as editors. Its approach is to determine the underlying causes of user inactivity, among other things, which could include why female editors are so few and far between. For example, perhaps females edit less because of the layout and learning curve of Wikipedia, or because they wish to give back but there aren't enough means to do so. Thus, due to a lack of avenues through which users could "give back" to the community, females may be less frequent editors. It could also indicate that among the minority of female editors, many of them are very active, which could change the tone of the discussion significantly. Overall, I fully endorse this Idea as a potential solution to many of Wikipedia's woes, as well as a means through which the Inspire campaign could be more accurately defined. If nothing else, this Idea should be endorsed, pursued, funded, and fulfilled as a crucial component of framing future discussions regarding user activity and demographics.

For those of you critical of this campaign, but interested in improving Wikipedia and potentially improving this campaign in the process, I strongly recommend checking the Idea linked above out. You can also see my (very long) criticism and discussion of the Idea in its Discussion talk page. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 00:38, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you greatly for your endorsement! While I strongly support many of the current projects in development and see a lot of value in these pursuits, I also think we need to better characterize our community in order to create more effective interventions. We're scratching the surface, but I think we can dig deeper into describing our community and the behaviors of our editors. The potential for anonymity (to some extent) on Wikipedia is a great draw for some editors, but also prevents us from knowing "who" these editors are and why they edit. I hope that we can continue to build upon the initial research on gender disparities, as I think the topic is incredibly fascinating and valuable for the sustainability of Wikipedia as a knowledge-building and sharing community. Cshanesimpson (talk) 14:21, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

20% of contributors are female?

I understand the idea of trying to diversify opinions, but how do we know only 20% of the contributors at Wikipedia are female? There are a lot of contributors whom we have no idea what gender they are. Furthermore, there's quite a large number of petty vandals/test editors I've seen whom are blatantly females based on what they're writing, and the real percentage of vandalism/test edits coming from young girls might even exceed 50%. I'm not saying all girls are vandals, I'm just questioning how it is possible to have so few female contributors when there's many more female vandals. PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 02:34, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree that the 20% statistic is not really valid because there can be no determination of the actual gender of the editors, since one could simply lie or conceal their gender or mark based on gender identity and not their gender with respect to their biological sex. I do not think that it's correct to claim that someone could be "blatantly females based on what they're writing", since this falsely assumes that females write about things that males either do not or probably would not. Likewise, I don't see your rationale for claiming that "the real percentage of vandalism/test edits coming from young girls might even exceed 50%" or to assert that more than 20% of article vandals are females. Do you have evidence of this? –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 07:30, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Um, I'm sorry, but when someone comes and writes their own female name on Wikipedia, or when someone goes on a vandalism spree naming all but one (female) member of the cheerleading squad in articles saying how much she loves her team mates, that's pretty blatantly a female vandalizing the wiki, and that stuff happens FREQUENTLY. There's also a good chance that people who write ♥ on pages like wp:Gymnastics or "I love (male name) with all my heart" are female, but you could argue that one will never know that for sure. Take this into consideration, and the unknown gender of the people calling people, animals, and things "gay" or "stupid," maliciously changing numbers, blanking pages, writing random characters into pages, redirecting pages to Harry Potter themed names, and deliberately inserting factual inaccuracies, it's quite plausible to think that there are more female vandals than male vandals. But that is why I say "might," because we don't really know. PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 00:55, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

You're right, we'll never know, so why surface it? Also, you're questioning how it is possible to have "so few female contributors when there's many more female vandals"- have you considered the possibility that the threshold for being able to hit "edit" and type nonsense is a lot lower than the threshold for being able to tolerate the culture of Wikipedia? Ironholds (talk) 14:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Why do you assume that these edits are being honest, or that they are necessarily indicative of a female editor? Trolls are abundant, and they like to vandalize. Some may be sexist, or wish to pose as females precisely to breed the sort of sentiments you now express. Now, I'm not saying this is the case, but I am trying to illustrate how your argument isn't really valid, seeing as my aforementioned guess is about as substantiated as yours. Unless you have some evidence to substantiate your claims, I find it difficult to give any credence to them. You may be right, but mere anecdotes and unverified claims aren't sufficient to prove that. You're correct that we don't know, however, and I must agree with Ironholds in this respect: since we do not know, there's no point in discussing it unless there is evidence to support it. Guessing without a single shred of evidence will only reflect poorly on the guesser, since it could be misinterpreted as malicious while offering nothing really valuable in return. There's not really any point in entertaining this any further unless some evidence is given. Anyway, I personally think it doesn't matter which sex or gender is doing the vandalism. Vandalism is a problem, and identifying the sex or gender of the vandal is as pointless and irrelevant as determining the race of the farmer who grew your vegetables when deciding which veggies to eat. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 12:05, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

R U Kidding?!

One of the proposals is "End Sexism and Intolerance on Wikipedia" and yet the first one at the top of the page features a picture (twice the size of any other) of a barely clad woman. This appears to be lost cause. Mannanan51 (talk) 18:34, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

First, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but some clarification could help. If you're referring to one of the Ideas, that is user-generated content which is not endorsed by Wikipedia. Secondly, I don't think mere nudity qualifies as sexism or intolerance in any form. –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 15:03, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Rule 14. Mannanan51 (talk) 17:34, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

...of what? –Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 18:06, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Inspire Campaign Closed: Next Steps

Thank you for contributing great ideas, providing feedback, and helping to maintain a friendly space during the Inspire Campaign!

The committee is reviewing all open grant proposals and funding decisions will be announced April 30, 2015. See the schedule for more details.

There are still a lot of innovative ideas that don't need funding and/or could use additional support finding project leaders and mentors. We'd love to see those ideas move forward so please keep developing them. We are committed to funding gender gap-related work year-round through all our grantmaking programs.

To create and browse new ideas, head to the main IdeaLab page!

Questions? Contact us at grants(at)wikimedia.org.

Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Scope of this campaign

This campaign has some strange problems. Harassment is already considered unacceptable behaviour on Wikimedia projects. I'm not sure what codes of conduct or some of the other non-substantive proposals here would do to change that. The issue, as identified by the study done by SuSa, is that existing methods of resolving these conflicts are not working as well as they should. Great! So let's focus on that, instead of broadly on harassment in general.

Along these lines, the solution is already well known. At a local wiki level, adding the functionality of reporting a page or revision to administrators has been established in the study as a method of better dealing with harassment. At the global level, establishing a dispute resolution committee for smaller projects will help resolve conflicts on projects with few contributors and no ArbCom. So why is staff time and money being devoted to a month of proposals which might lead to more (useful) proposals instead of implementing what we already know to work? Ajraddatz (talk) 18:49, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Ajraddatz, I agree with you that the two things you mention above would be beneficial. A dispute resolution committee could indeed stop many antagonistic situations from developing into attacks and harassment (this would make a for a great IdeaLab proposal). And better reporting tools could also put admins in a better place to address problems at an early stage. But I disagree that those two things alone would represent a solution to the problem. Most harassment experts agree that solutions should be multi-faceted - a combination of better technical tools and better social processes. There is a danger in the "one (or two) tools for all problems" approach.

The process of supporting community proposal "brainstorming" is beneficial for several reasons - contributors have deep experience with the problem, and often have solutions that haven't been discussed before. And second, any efforts to change practices or policy need to be explored and discussed in detail before implemented - this is a divisive issue, and quick, unilateral changes have the potential to be very disruptive. Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

The issue is that this has been discussed to death before. Now, I agree that general discussion about a topic isn't a bad thing. You're right that it can generate new ideas and help gain momentum for solutions which are widely seen as able to work. But one of the strange problems with this campaign is how it is structured - a) around harassment and b) in a way that requires participants to accept that harassment is a problem. Already today, I have seen comments and proposals removed because they do not fit within the scope of the campaign; i.e. they think that harassment is already not acceptable on Wikimedia sites and that it is not an independent problem. How can this be brainstorming when any ideas that you disagree with are removed? And why focus on harassment, when we could focus on the positive topic of respective and responsible interactions instead?

Ultimately, while brainstorming is useful, I don't think this campaign is doing a very good job of it. I am failing to see why the WMF should be paying staff to police these pages, when they could be spending the money developing the technical framework for a better, more integrated reporting system. Or working with community volunteers to establish a dispute resolution committee. The brainstorming has happened on these; there's only so much time you can spend sitting around talking before you stand up and do something. And on some of these ideas, we're at over a decade of discussion already. Ajraddatz (talk) 20:42, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Ajraddatz, While there have been good suggestion and ideas in the past including those that you mention, I've been following discussion about harassment for quite a long time on Wikipedia English and Meta, and I'm not clear that any ideas has been proposed in a detailed way that it could be immediately taken forward and adopted. I read a number of them during the Gender Gap Inspire Campaign last year, and while some of them had merit many of them did not have a detailed plan that was actionable. I'm hopeful that another call for ideas will bring in more ideas or that people will work on are their old ideas to make them more actionable. Sydney Poore/FloNight (talk) 20:47, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Blaming the victim

It's discouraging to see that the most popular "ideas" thus far in this month's Inspire campaign are the ones that say we shouldn't be so sensitive and should just get some sleep and exercise and reconsider why we're so offended.

It takes a special kind of entitlement to take up space in a campaign designed specifically to fight harassment to say that harassment isn't really a problem. Funcrunch (talk) 14:01, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

All of those proposals are dealing with appropriate responses to actions which are not harassment. Whenever you go down this road, the "victim class" ultimately gets extended to anyone who is on the receiving end of a negative comment, whether or not it is actually harassment. For example, I could decide I am offended by how you call me entitled above - but is it harassment? No. Yet this type of offence and reaction has already been seen on at least one of the proposals, where a user suggested they would ignore another because his comment was slightly rude. "Harassment prevention" very quickly becomes "removing ideas that I don't like", and in an environment where harassment is already totally unacceptable, I can see where many of these counter-proposals are coming from.

For this campaign to be done better, two things are needed. First, it needs to address how we systemically deal with harassment. The SuSa study only looks at individual experiences and responses, without looking at how the social institutions we set up deal with those cases. And there is almost certainly room for improvement there - but no effort was made to do the basic groundwork for that. If there were specific institutional problems that could be identified and pointed to as saying "here is how we currently deal with harassment, and it isn't working because ..." then this would go much further than it currently does with the scope of "harassment is a big problem, how do we fix it". What exactly is broken? Second, I think the bigger problem here isn't harassment, but negative interactions more generally. Scrap this campaign, and create one for fostering positive interactions and discouraging negative ones. Anyone who has seen a content debate knows that the loudest, meanest person usually wins the debate. They rudely dissect the other arguments and keep pushing until their way is the only way. This isn't harassment in any way, but it certainly is not a positive interaction - just like you calling anyone who opposes this entitled. If we could try and fix the overall culture of how we discuss with each-other, then that would be far more useful than trying to address a vague problem while providing no indication of how much of a problem it actually is beyond the individual experience. Ajraddatz (talk) 17:38, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Note: I've gone ahead and made a proposal for the first. See Grants:IdeaLab/Study how current mechanisms handle harassment. Ajraddatz (talk) 02:41, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

I have been very strongly against harassment on Wikipedia, but aside from what I mentioned here, the issue of harassment needs to show an understanding of why people engage in harassment. We don't need blather about how harassment is an issue for "marginalized" people as though the motive is simply bigotry from "privileged" groups towards "underprivileged" groups and as though it is an issue that does not impact the "privileged" individuals. A lot of people who are harassed are not saints, "privileged" or not. Far from it, I would suggest a large portion, perhaps the main portion, are harassed because of other bad behavior. Not to say behaving right is a guarantee against harassment, but people are less inclined to lash out with hate if you behave yourself. What is infuriating is when people who behave badly try to use harassment as an out to avoid sanctions or responsibility.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 06:00, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Idée

Quand vous dites "Vous préférez créer votre idée à l'ancienne" cela signifie un a-priori détestable. "Vous préférez créer votre idée" aurait suffit.GGDELABAS (talk) 14:07, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

I oppose this project

I have been harassed occasionally as editor but that never hampered my work. I have decades of experience as a former leftist activist and take this as yet another project to get funding or attention for trumped-up causes. I've been a wikipedia editor for around ten years--that comments get deleted from talk pages is extremely rare, the fact that it is the norm with mine over here clearly shows that something is going terribly wrong. --Tickle me (talk) 08:30, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

About the Leaderboard Endorsed Ideas List

[See Leaderboard]

In “This list is updated daily at approximately 1600 UTC. It was last updated on dd/m/yyyy by User:GrantsBot.” (line 28), I think daily at approximately 1600 UTC should be changed to hourly, since GrantsBot updates the list every 60 minutes. The thing is that the bot would override any change to the text. Can someone update its configuration? Eduardogobi (talk) 03:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

@Eduardogobi: I'll get in touch with the bot maintainer, Jmorgan (WMF) about this to see if we can get it updated. I asked for the change that those pages would be updated more frequently than daily, which was done for prior campaigns, but neglected to ask to change the text on the page when the bot updates it. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Division of effort

I am surprised that a single individual can both make a proposal to the Inspire campaign and also remove someone else's proposal from the campaign. Would it not be better to have the two actions performed by different people? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:21, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

@Rogol Domedonfors: Hi Rogol, thanks for your patience. Please accept my apologies that I couldn't get back to you sooner; I was at the WMF office this week (I'm a remote employee), and I didn't get much time to sit in front of a computer and write responses. I'm flying back home now and writing to you now that I have some time while on the plane. In the future, I'll do my best to let you know when I think I can respond if I expect to be busy.

The ideas that were removed were fundamentally inappropriate for the campaign. They were premised on opinions that effectively discourage participation in the campaign or discussion of the topic of harassment generally. I am in charge of IdeaLab, so I have some discretion over making judgments about these cases. If folks want to offer constructive criticism on the campaign or debate about harassment as a general concept, that's fine, but that should be centralized at Grants talk:IdeaLab/Inspire/Meta. As for the ideas submitted by myself and other staff, these are ideas that we hope to get some feedback on, make improvements to, and also see if any community members might be interested in taking a more involved role in. If any of these ideas we've proposed are led by community members, our intention is to be involved in the implementation of those ideas in an advisory capacity, and leave the decision-making to the community members involved with the idea. I see the value about having separate people involved in making decisions about inclusion here, but again, the ideas were removed because on the basis of disruption: they discouraged participation in this campaign. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 01:05, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Managing the campaigns is one thing, and removing patently disruptive suggestions is clearly part of that. My issue is with the same people who do that also making proposals. Of course they are ideas that you wish to get feedback on, and so forth, because that's what everyone who makes such proposals may be presumed to want. The question is whether there is a conflict of interest, actual or perceived, in your managing the process (for example by removing proposals that you see as disruptive) on the one hand, and on the other hand your participating in the process by proposing ideas that are in some sense competing with other peoples' ideas. It is perhaps clear that I for one do not regard that combination as completely satisfactory. Has this issue ever been explicitly addressed, and if so, what was the reasoning that led to the current situation? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 10:47, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree that there is a substantive problem here regarding competition. Offering an idea and mentoring on a project that would ultimately be led by community members (if they were interested) is also not in conflict with dealing with cases of disruption. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:53, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Does that mean that you accept that there is appearance if not substance of conflict of interest? I note that you have not yet answered the question that I asked, namely whether this issue has ever been explicitly addressed and if so what the reasoning was that led to the current situation, although you did answer a question I explicitly did not ask about disruption. Please would you respond again. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:44, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Kind of feels like you're trying to back me into a corner; I don't really appreciate that, Rogol. I don't think this matter has been brought up before. I don't think there's an appearance or actual COI here. If we had more resources to have more WMF folks centrally focused on IdeaLab and Inspire Campaigns, maybe we could set up something like you're suggesting, but we simply don't. That's all I have to say on the matter. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:10, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

I have been trying to get an answer to a legitimate question, which I now have, thank you. Since you are disinclined to discuss the matter further, allow me to conclude the conversation on my part by saying that I believe that it would be more appropriate for members of staff managing this process not to also participate in it; that this issue ought to have been discussed previously; and that as a result you have allowed the appearance of a conflict of interest to arise. This situation is unsatisfactory, not least for you, and should be resolved by the WMF. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:18, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Taking forward ideas

It is not really clear to me how ideas are supposed to be taken forward - other than through grants, which are not suitable for all ideas or all people who are coming up with ideas. Let's take the current Inspire campaign as an example - harassment. Many of the ideas posted would require policy, terms and/or technical changes. The people who come up with the ideas, and also some or all of the volunteers, may not be willing or able to do the complex, protracted work of navigating Wikimedia bureaucracies and systems (such as Phabricator for technical work) to achieve their goals, and may be expecting someone else, maybe from the WMF, to step up to the plate and take their idea forward. Is this actually the case, or will the ideas just tend to languish in obscurity and be forgotten, for the most part?

If this process is actually intended to just spur people on to come up with an idea and then do everything themselves, you need to make that much clearer from the start! Particularly given that in some cultures and for many people, self-organising groups within an organisation without formal hierarchy are just not something that would occur to people. In some cultures, people expect officials/staff to approve and then manage new ideas.

Also, from a financial point of view, how much money has been spent on IdeaLab, and is there any performance-related pay or bonus aspect to it for those within the WMF who have overall responsibility for IdeaLab? I strongly suspect there isn't, and that's why the process (as with many WMF-related processes) is so dysfunctional.

Moreover, if there is an incorrect performance-related pay or bonus aspect to it - e.g. based on number of ideas generated, rather than number of ideas attempted or put into action - then that could explain why the process is not so clear. If it is the case that people are expected to take their own ideas forward, making that super-clear could deter people from posting ideas and negatively impact the "number of ideas generated" metric! But as I said, that is a bogus metric for success. Anyone can come up with flights of fancy - an idea is no good if it is not implemented - what we need are actual implemented ideas.--Greenrd (talk) 08:59, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Archive or update?

Someone might want to review Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire/Team match; some of the staff names are out of date, and there doesn't seem to be a talk page. Regards, —Neotarf (talk) 22:46, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up Neotarf-- I removed some of the staff names there yesterday.

Just thinking out loud here...I'm still trying to think what I'd like to do with this page. It's based on the profiles with the first Inspire Campaign, which did not prove to be very effective in connecting people together. I'm open to suggestions; I think the idea of letting people identify their skill sets and give them the ability to receive recommendations for projects is a decent idea on paper, but it hasn't panned out yet. I might need to think through a different approach to implementation here. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

No problem. What are you trying to accomplish? It seems to me this is the brainstorming phase, where any and all ideas are thrown into the wind, and everyone riffs off of each other to throw more ideas into the wind. The culling and organizing comes later. You also have a situation where the people submitting ideas are mostly new users with no previous edits to WP, and are coming in through banners from somewhere, I suppose on the main page (although I came in through the notifications to the mailing lists.) I think I linked to this one before [3] you can probably find others that fit your purposes or learning style better. My favorite theory is the "garbage can theory of policy development": you have a bunch of solutions in search of an idea and you have a bunch of problems in search of solutions, you shake them up in a garbage can and see what comes out. Perhaps a bit cynical, but it does account for the inevitable chaos. Personally I have a hard time navigating your templates as I don't have a background in this, but I would say keep it simple enough so the usual suspects can wade around in it and see what they come up with. There is also a problem here of what I think is being called "scale" these days. People can see what needs to be done, but it takes a huge organization to do it. In the meantime, the foundation has the capability but does not think it has the mandate, thanks to bad karma generated as a result of [name least favorite software project here]. —Neotarf (talk) 00:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Neotarf: Thanks for passing along that essay, I'll be sure to check it out. In regards to the new contributors issue who are submitting ideas, that has to do with who the CentralNotice banner is displayed to, which is to all logged in editors. Not sure if CentralNotice can be delivered only to editors with a certain level of participation or contributions, but that might be worth considering in the future. That could be one way to cut down on ideas that are clearly not workable or demonstrate a lack of experience actually contributing to a project. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, I JethroBT (WMF), I guess you ought to dance with who brung you. You have asked a question and gotten an answer in a way you did not expect, but it might be interesting to examine what you did get. For one thing, experienced users might be hard to come by, at least experienced users who are willing to say anything about harassment. I cannot name even one person who has spoken out openly against harassment and is still in good standing and actively participating at enwiki. You might take a look at the rather unpleasant discussion of the research results, with a word search for "bash". People were emailing the safety team with their objections, rather than post openly. As I state in that thread, Wikimedians will no longer speak out publicly about harassment. They will only do so in the context of an anonymous survey. So maybe your only chance is with the new users. If they are all saying "do not feed", and experienced users aren't saying that anymore, that could be one disconnect/challenge to ponder. It might also be interesting, once everything gets classified, to chart the experience of the users vs the topic. —Neotarf (talk) 00:46, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Some translations fail to register

Example: label “Prior campaigns” remains untranslated in the Polish translation of Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire despite my translation of it to „Poprzednie kampanie” in Grants:IdeaLab/Content/pl (translation link). The same problem persists in the French translation.

Who owes attention to this issue?

– 6birc (talk) 14:33, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

I have found a translation subpage of this talk page.
Posted a notice there. Although it seems quite dead.
– 6birc (talk) 15:09, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

@6birc: I'm not exactly sure why that's happening. I added the text and translation tags for "Prior campaigns" just recently-- I tried to put in the markup so it's consistent with everything else on Grants:IdeaLab/Content, so I'm not clear what the problem is, either, but I may have gotten something wrong. I'll see if I can figure out what went wrong. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

@6birc: I also note it is working in some languages but not others...could be an issue with how the translatable content templates operate. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

It is working now :-). Templates seem to have some caching mechanism that’s triggered only by certain events, which makes me wonder whether this fix was automatic or due to somebody’s intervention. – 6birc (talk) 15:18, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Werbetemplates

Jede Woche ein neues banner das zu irgendwas tollen/wichtigen/einzigartigen aufruft. ich finds nervig. Ein Knopf mit dem man den Unsinn abschalten könnte wäre toll. ...Sicherlich ^Post 18:14, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

IdeaLab and staff conduct

Boldly moved from Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat following consensus that the discussion was not appropriate for that page.

Hello fellow admins and Meta-Wiki regulars,

I find myself slightly concerned with the WMF staff's behaviour in their current IdeaLab campaign. I will preface this by saying two things: First, I do not take issue with such campaigns being hosted here; cross-project coordination and discussion like that is ideal here, and I appreciate that they are using community infrastructure to do this. Second, while I object to a lack of preparative research being done prior to the campaign, I do not object to the topic of the campaign itself - harassment (and poor behaviour in general) is something which we do have a problem with and trying to fix it isn't a bad thing.

That said, I am concerned with the little fort that WMF staff has constructed in the Grants: namespace. They have set up a user behaviour policy without any community consultation, and one which duplicates our existing policy here. In the current campaign, they have separated those supporting and opposing proposals - supporters may use the front page, but opposers are relegated to the talk page where they are significantly less visible. The outward justification for this is that it allows the oppositions to be more effectively discussed, but I suspect it has more to do with providing a space for idea authors to work without a flood of opposition. Again, this is not necessarily bad, even if it clearly violates our founding principles. But I am concerned that all this behaviour as a whole is undermining community control of Meta, and I want to engage with WMF staff here to figure out how they can better operate as an equal part here, rather than the sort of overlord behaviour they are currently displaying. I would remind the Foundation that they were created to support us, not the other way around.

So to the WMF staff: Can you please stop setting up your own little fort there, and instead engage with the broader community? Many people have expressed concern with moving the oppositions to the talk page. Why not move the supports there as well, to ensure balance? Why not have some actual conversations about this with the community on the appropriate talk pages, rather than just telling them how they are expected to participate in your area? And why is a "friendly spaces" policy necessary when our own community policy clearly covers it? And with Meta admins and regulars, am I making sense here? This probably would have been best on Babel, but I opened it up here because I was honestly considering reverting the mass moving of comments by WMF staff myself, so it's kinda an administration issue. Feel free to disagree on this point :-)

@I JethroBT (WMF) and PEarley (WMF): and whatever other WMF staff are working on this. Ajraddatz (talk) 23:22, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

A similar situation with OTRS from a few years ago: Talk:OTRS/Volunteering/Archive_1#.22Comments.22_on_prospective_OTRS_helpers IMHO, if they wish to do this, they should move the discussion to another wiki that they control. --Rschen7754 01:03, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

If they are truly unwilling to engage in discussion with the community, then another project would be the best place to take this indeed. But I think Meta is a good place to host this; I just don't understand why they are behaving the way that they are, and I hope we can move past this. Ajraddatz (talk) 01:37, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Ajraddatz. I’d like to start by saying thanks for opening this discussion-- I appreciate being able to discuss this in a centralized location. PEarley (WMF) will be responding here a little later about your concerns over the behavioral expectations in IdeaLab.

Let me start by explaining why things are the way they are, acknowledging there are costs and benefits to this system (as there are with any system). IdeaLab is primarily a drafting and collaborative space for idea creators. For volunteers, taking the initiative to draft an idea and continue building it takes considerable effort. Such effort is worth supporting, and making it easy to endorse and see endorsements is a good way to do that. Furthermore, when an idea is still being thought out and crafted, idea creators and others should have an opportunity to respond to feedback. It makes most sense to do this on the discussion page of an idea, and as a result of that discussion, the substance of that idea has the potential to change. IdeaLab is also connected to the grant programs that the WMF offers, and funding decisions are not based on simple tallies of support/oppose-driven discussions. Furthermore, talk page discussions are always considered at whenever a grant proposal is submitted.

I'd like to hear from others about their thoughts on this approach to feedback. It places feedback in separate places, and while there is value in having all feedback centralized in one place, separating it out has benefits as well. I think your idea of moving all feedback to the talk page -- endorsements, concerns, comments, suggestions, etc. -- is also worth considering. I’ve started some conversations with my department about the prospect of this change you've proposed. It's important to keep in mind that these changes would require considerable changes to templates used for IdeaLab and WMF grant proposals, maintenance and updating operations of User:GrantsBot, and manual updating of existing ideas, and could not be implemented right away. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

The ability to see both potential pros and cons on one page makes more sense than the current system. Care needs to be taken to avoid creating a politically charged environment with an unintended Emperor's New Clothes effect by actively supporting contributors who would like to test a proposal from different viewpoints. A few "critical friends" can be a lot more helpful than a pile of +1s. --Fæ (talk) 23:04, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

I can see both sides of this discussion. On the one hand, I understand the reasons for keeping each main idea page for explanation and endorsement only, and leaving all discussion (pro or con) to the talk page. On the other hand, many here seem to think that if only endorsements are seen on the main page, it implies that there is no opposition. I don't really agree with the argument that supporters will not visit the talk page to see the opposition, because the main and talk pages are automatically added to the watchlist when a person endorses an idea. But I realize not everyone checks their watchlists.

I think that now that we're a third of the way through this campaign, it is probably too late to change the template. Instead, some clear explanation should be given on the main page as to why things are set up the way they are, with instructions that proposers are welcome to explicitly add an Opposition section to their main page if they choose.

Honestly, I think there is some confusion in how these "Ideas" are supposed to work. Unlike on Wikipedia where "no one owns a page," each idea here has a specific person listed as proposer, with an optional bio and everything. But then anyone can edit the page anyway (one editor even merged another idea with mine, without checking with either proposer first). So even if the idea proposer would prefer to keep discussion on the talk page, there's currently no way to enforce that. Funcrunch (talk) 14:31, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Two points of contention:

"Such effort is worth supporting, and making it easy to endorse and see endorsements is a good way to do that". It is worth supporting not simply for it's own sake, but rather because the idea has some merit. If it is clearly a bad idea from the start, I think it's much nicer for the proposer to receive a swift reality check through opposition than to let him waste his time on an idea that is doom to fail.

"and funding decisions are not based on simple tallies of support/oppose-driven discussions. Furthermore, talk page discussions are always considered at whenever a grant proposal is submitted." While that may be true, it doesn't take into account that there is a real probability of missing out on good counterarguments and popular opposition when the place to voice that opposition is obscured the way it is when it is on the Discussion page (with no indication on the main page that opposition should be voiced there). --Doveofsymplegades (talk) 21:01, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

• To be honest, i agree with Ajraddatz and i hope this issue gets resolved soon whiteout drama. --Steinsplitter (talk) 20:42, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

It appears to me that moving “oppose” comments to the discussion page is a clear case of separate but equal, which of course is not equal. Different viewpoints should be able to be compared and discussed. Every person should have an equal chance to state their views. A person's comment should not be removed because of its position. A discussion should not be “agree with me or leave”. Each person invited to the discussion should have an equal voice. There are plenty of places where opposition is suppressed, should this be one of them? Sammy D III (talk) 21:32, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

I JethroBT (WMF) is systemically suppressing opposition comments from discussions, effectively censoring them, with no discussion. Sammy D III (talk) 04:01, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

@Sammy D III: It's neither suppression nor effective censorship. It's moving discussions and things likely to be discussed (i.e. concerns) to the talk page. It's exactly what talk pages are intended to do. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 06:52, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): Thanks for escalating my concern about the voicing of opposition! Let me first reply to some things you wrote on this page and then propose a solution. The current way of handling opposition (i.e. moving it to the Discussion page) is not censorship in the strict sense, that's true, but I do think that it is a form of suppression in the sense of intentionally reducing the impact of what is written by means of limiting the audience's exposure to it. But let's not get too caught up on terminology.

More importantly, I think you're mischaracterizing opposition in two ways: 1. you're equating it with concerns; 2. you're assuming that it will provoke discussion more than endorsements. Regarding the former: Opposition is much more clear-cut than concerns. I've seen lots of endorsements that include some concerns as well. The discussion page seems like a suitable place for concerns to me (though I'm fine with a Concerns section on the Grant page too). Oppositions however are nothing other than "negative endorsements", that is to say they serve the same purpose: letting others know whether or not you support the idea. They are not intended as discussion starters. This is clearly how people have used the Opposition sections. For example, take a look at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Real_Names. The statements there are of the same format as the endorsements: I oppose it for such and such reasons, period. The arguments people provide in their endorsements or oppositions may spark a discussion, but they're not intended to, which brings me to the latter point: both endorsements and oppositions provide food for discussion and oppositions. For example, again looking at the Real Names idea (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Real_Names), you can see that two of the endorsements have been answered with concerns or opposition.

Now as to my concerns with the current state of handling opposition and concern, for brevity's sake I've summarized them into a number of points:

1. Having only endorsements visible on the main page creates a skewed impression of the reception of the idea. This is wasteful and inefficient because it a) might make some people jump in (become a volunteer, write an endorsement) only later to read counterarguments that make them change their mind; b) gives the proposer a false impression of good reception; c) might make ideas that are clearly not realistic run for much longer than is necessary.
2. Having only an endorsement section confuses people and makes for a chaotic main page. I have already seen quite a few statements listed in the Endorsement section that are actually oppositions or concerns. For example the second statement on this Grant: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Women_have_to_make_up_at_least_40%25_of_admin_in_the_arbcom_and_every_other_elected_position
3. Makes it harder to quickly compare endorsements (i.e. arguments in favor) and opposition (counterarguments) to make up your mind on whether the Grant is worth supporting or not.
4. Isn't fair to those opposed, since they're essentially told to voice their concerns in on a separate page which only 10% or so of the audience of the main page care to visit.

My suggestion is this: Create a section named Votes with the subsections Endorsements and Opposition (and possibly Concerns). At the top of this section, place a notice (preferably in an information box) that informs users that this section is meant only for expressions of endorsement or opposition and that discussions should be held on the Discussions page. In addition to the Endorse button, provide an Oppose button. They serve the same purpose: to let users voice and explain their verdict on the idea. Similar to endorsements, opposition submitted using this button would be added to the Opposition subsection.

Hoping to hear your take on this and with best regards,

--Doveofsymplegades (talk) 20:35, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

One issue I have here is that ideas in IdeaLab are not RfCs that appear on some Wikimedia projects. It's not a vote, and the endorsements are there to give some indication of general interest in the idea. The nature of most opposition comments is outright rejection of the idea rather than what could be changed to improve the idea. As an idea creator, that's discouraging. (Though of course, it's true some ideas are completely unworkable or not fully considered. That's happened in every campaign.) Even if you change your idea in a manner that might change someone's mind who opposed, there's no guarantee or any expectation that the person who opposed would come back to review your changes at all, and so the oppose would sit there, even if their concern is no longer relevant. That's also going to bias readers. This brings me back to the main point: Idealab is a drafting space, and the ideas are usually incomplete until they are submitted for a grant or turned in a formal RfC or proposal on a local project. It makes me wonder if there should be a "draft" indication so that the idea creator can work on the idea and gather feedback whenever they complete it. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 08:40, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

I was invited to a discussion, made a good-faith comment, and had my comment deleted. Double-talk about “moving” doesn't change that my comment was removed from where it was posted. Deleted. I was excluded from that discussion because of my position. I was prevented from exchanging ideas, learning things, and making an informed decision. I didn't even know where my comment went.

1. If the front page is only for the first impressions of people who have not yet discussed the issue, and only those who support the idea, shouldn't that be made clear?
2. Who says “It's exactly what talk pages are intended to do.” other than your group? That is not how the RfAs are done. Aren't they pretty serious discussions?
3. Does “keep in mind that these changes would require considerable changes” mean that a questionable policy should stay in place because it is to much trouble to change?
4. “The nature of most opposition comments is outright rejection of the idea” assumes that anyone who does not support the idea is close-minded. I came here for a discussion, not a political rally.
5. “there's no guarantee or any expectation that the person who opposed would come back to review your changes at all”? You need a guarantee? The possibility that only some of the oppose come back is a problem?
6. “the oppose would sit there, even if their concern is no longer relevant”. So what? Endorsers have the same problem. Not all Endorsers come back and update their posts, either.

I believe that all positions should be shown, not only those that are chosen by an Admin.

--Sammy D III (talk) 13:16, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

It appears Sammy D III just beat me to it on some of the points I have concerning this post (I ran into an editing conflict when I tried to submit this response), so sorry about the duplicates:

• I agree that it shouldn't be (just) a tally. "Votes" is not the right name for this section. I couldn't come up with a good umbrella term for Endorsement+Opposition(+Concern) last night, but I now suggest "Feedback".
• The general interest in an idea can also be negative. Only showing endorsements does not accurate reflect this.
• The nature of opposition is indeed rejection in most cases. If it wasn't, they would be concerns instead. That's why I suggest splitting up Opposition and Concern.
• Opposition doesn't have to be discouraging, but it can be. If it is, that isn't wrong in itself, because the goal of the campaign is not to encourage people to work on ideas per se, but to work on good idea. Swift opposition prevents "Well, why didn't you tell me right away?!" kinds of scenarios.
• Your objection to oppositions on the main page because it might linger there after it has been resolved applies just as much to endorsements: the proposer can change his idea in a way that would make someone drop his endorsement.
• "IdeaLab is a drafting space [...]". I acknowledge that, but looking at the results, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. A lot of Grants are literally nothing more than one or two sentences, often about some general concept, without any explanation of how it is going to be applied. Many others are simply not thought out well enough. I've read most of them and have only seen a handful that I would consider sufficiently fleshed out to be put up for the general public to consider and discuss. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to encourage or force people to present a properly fleshed out idea. This prevents a lot of confusion, cuts down on the number of ideas to consider (we have 181 now!), increases the signal to noise ratio and prevents the kind of scenarios in the bullet point above this one. If we really want to discuss this we should make a separate topic on the IdeaLab discussion page though.
• Kind regards, Doveofsymplegades (talk) 13:42, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

• Honestly, I agree with Ajraddatz. I also concur with Sammy D III that opposing comments should be as visible as supporting ones. PiRSquared17 (talk) 07:54, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

• It really would help to explain what the concept of "endorsement" is being used for in these pages. For example, at Grants:IdeaLab/Propose Wikimedia Code of Conduct (adapted from open source Contributor Covenant) some of the endorsements ask quite important questions (eg "is this Code of Conduct for all Wikis [...] or should each create a separate one?") and some are actually not endorsements at all (eg "I would suggest rather than the using the proposed text to use the text of NOTHERE"). So it's not at all clear why these are not part of the discussion on the Talk page. If the endorsements are to be restricted to simple statements of support, and nothing else, but are not votes, then what purpose do they serve? If the count of endorsements is to be used for some purpose, then what meaning can that count have, and how can that purpose be served, if negatives are excluded? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:10, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

• The entire notion of these cordoned off namespaces was going to lead to problems like these, the other problem being neglect. I recall a few of us objecting to so many namespaces, staff were in a hurry to create 1-2 year ago. The research, grant namespace come to mind. Programs is another that seems almost dead. I don't know what perceived benefit they brought. It's time to consider merging them back with main. Theo10011 (talk) 20:20, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

I'm offering insight here into how comments on the talk pages and endorsements on the proposal page, respectively, get used in the review process for Individual Engagement Grants (IEG), since some IdeaLab proposals are ultimately converted into IEG proposals.

First, community feedback that appears on the talk page is much more influential to funding decisions than what appears in the endorsement section. The talk page is not an afterthought but an integral part of the proposal, offering a critical lens for understanding whether a project is fundable. The talk page input feeds into every stage of proposal review and selection, informing committee scoring, driving interview questions, directing expert consultations in due diligence and shaping discussion in the final committee deliberations. In fact, if the discussion page includes substantive comments, it will frequently consume more review time than the proposal page itself.

By contrast, the endorsements section warrants only brief attention, providing a quick, at-a-glance review of who has signed off on a proposal as "ready to go." Nevertheless, it serves a useful strategic function during the due diligence review. During that period, I develop a list of people who can make an informed assessment of risk and readiness for a given proposal. In cases where the risk is high or complex, I ask the applicant to reach out to those individuals and ask that they review the proposal, offer comments on the talk page and, if they believe the proposal is ready for funding, endorse it. During the quick turnaround time of the due diligence period, endorsement offers a quick, clear indicator that someone has ultimately signed off on a project, which might be otherwise hard to discern on the talkpage.

A negative endorsement, by contrast, wouldn't offer any further clarity except via accompanying feedback, which belongs on the talkpage. The feedback is crucial to either resolving outstanding issues with a proposal or determining that it is not fundable. It also provides a valuable implicit test for the applicant: whether and how an applicant responds to constructive feedback is a major indicator of readiness for funding. Since the endorsement section isn't the right place for discussion to happen, any kind of negative feedback is more valuable on the talk page because it invites the applicant's response.

We aim to make the grant application process as much about mentorship as possible. Some proposals will never be funded, but we still try to support the applicant's development by offering resources like encouragement, rigorous constructive feedback and opportunities for collaboration. Thoughtful, negative feedback on the talkpage serves this goal, but I don't believe that a negative endorsement section would because it leaves the applicant (and the decisionmaking committee) without any clarity about what is lacking in the proposal. It would make the endorsements section appear to be a popularity contest, which it isn’t intended to be.

I'm wondering if it would address the concerns raised in this thread to try to make the purpose of endorsements clearer, by more explicitly inviting feedback on the talkpage from those who aren't ready to endorse, and by making it clear that constructive feedback offered on the talk page is carefully reviewed and plays a crucial role in the grantmaking process?

Cheers, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 20:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Pinging Ajraddatz about my comment here. --Marti (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

This is valuable input, thanks Mjohson. I have a couple of points in response:

• As it is currently set up, the endorsement (button) does not give off the impression of making a "this passes the quality check" statement, but rather a statement of wanting to see the idea succeed. The prompt for arguments for why you support the idea reaffirms this.
• More importantly, I really don't see how a statement of opposition is less informative than an endorsement. Doesn't a statement of opposition give you "a quick, clear indicator that someone has ultimately rejected a project"? And wouldn't that also be "otherwise hard to discern on the talk page"? Only using endorsements as your quick gauge general reception seems very biased to me.
• Even if it would be preferable to have the statements of opposition on the talk page, you would still have a setup that is much more conducive to endorsement than to opposition. If anything, I'd say that making the expression of opposition as easy as possible is much more beneficial than "+1s": if a proposal can survive a proper grilling, it is probably solid enough to receive grant money. As it stands now, there is nothing in the template that indicates where one should file statements of opposition, which leaves it up to those already familiar with talk pages and etiquette to file them. Thus we lose out on potentially poignant criticism.
• In a similar vein as the point above, you can already observe the confusion the Endorsement button causes for people that want to leave concerns or criticisms. There are plenty of "endorsements" that explicitly state they aren't, but that they rather are expressing concerns/opposition.

Cheers, --Doveofsymplegades (talk) 22:22, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

• @Mjohnson (WMF: I understand the purpose of separating them, and honestly I even agree with it. What I am concerned with is the lack of responsiveness to the community. Moving forward, I wonder if you could make it clear that the endorse/oppose sections are separately to not discourage idea creators (along with reinforcing that ideas are not concrete proposals nor binding referendums), and also permit some sort of discussion (maybe on the /meta talk page?) regarding this practice to gain wider input. If a significant portion of the community opposes it, then that is something staff should take into account. Ajraddatz (talk) 00:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Doveofsymplegades:, @Ajraddatz:, thanks to both of you for comments.

Doveofsymplegades, I didn't mean to imply that endorsement is more value than opposition. That's definitely not the case! Informed, constructive opposition is incredibly helpful and I consider it to be one of the most valuable resources that our open grantmaking process offer applicants. I only meant to say that a positive endorsement can stand alone and still be useful, while a negative endorsement is much less useful if it isn't accompanied by additional feedback. A positive endorsement, by itself, is a way for community members to say, "No further action needed for this idea to be acceptable for funding." A negative endorsement, by itself, is a way of saying, "Further action is needed before this idea would be acceptable for funding." In my mind, this isn't useful unless the "further action" is spelled out. In my experience, applicants have almost always been very willing to make significant revisions to their proposals when offered worthwhile, constructive feedback. A problematic proposal can often become much more workable and robust in response to good criticism. Conversely, without substantive comments, a diligent applicant could conceivably make revisions to their proposal that would actually make it worse if, for example, the negative feedback on the talkpage is misguided and unrepresentative of the dissenting voices, but is all the applicant has to go on to interpret negative endorsements.

That said, I hear the concern that both of you are raising about the lack of clarity about where and how opposition should be expressed and whether it will be taken as seriously as the endorsements. I can see how the current design might imply we favor positive endorsements over negative feedback, and it's very understandable why it would raise a red flag about fairness in the process. And I agree that listening to the community's concerns about this is important. As we transition into the Project Grants program (which will shortly replace IEG), we'll consider the concerns raised here and try to find a good way to address them. Ajraddatz, I appreciate your concrete suggestions about possible ways to do this.

On the topic of WMF staff listening to community feedback, somewhat tangentially, I want to add that the WMF staff most closely involved with the process/program addressed in this thread--including myself--are gearing up to leave to participate in Wikimania next week, so we're all a bit under water with work and will be until we return in late June/early July. I mention this now because I see that this discussion is garnering quite a bit of energy and thinking at the moment and so I want to pre-emptively say that if we drop out of sight temporarily, it's not because we're ignoring it. It's because we're about to be in a very intense sprint that might make it hard to engage here. I'll make a point of catching up when I return (I've added a reminder to myself on my calendar to do this when I return).

Thanks again for the feedback. Cheers, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

• For administrative attention: I'd like to call attention to behavior from Doveofsymplegades who has pre-emptively created opposition sections on at least 10 different ideas before and during this discussion:

• [4]

• [5],
• [6]
• [7]
• [8]
• [9]
• [10]
• [11]
• [12]
• [13]

There are many more than this, going through their contributions. I've asked them to move these to the talk page, but they have refused. If we're going to talk about process, it is presumptive, hostile, and disruptive to impose a design change before we've had a chance to figure it out. Their actions do not create an atmosphere where we can work together on this matter. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I JethroBT (WMF), As a local admin, I went through that list of links. I am not sure what you are objecting to here - could you be more specific about your complaint?

Since you asked, I went through each link one by one and really found no behaviour in violation of ToU, any policy or even good conduct. You are objecting to his nature of objecting or his ability to object? Would you like him to be silenced and gone? He is doing quasi-janitorial work in half those links. Yes, there is opposition, but that is the basis of debate, and consensus. We have disagreements about everything, it is how we discuss and come to consensus that formed the back-bone of Wikipedia itself. You can't silence him just for disagreeing or questioning something? Is that what you are asking?

• First link is the idea lab talk page itself. The user is stating some opposition is moved to discussion, some isn't and then the user ask for judgement on policy. it seems like the appropriate place to mention his concern and the tone is civil. He is doing what Aj did here.
• Second link, on a grant "VALUE THE TRUTH" in caps. He mentions the idea is too vague, what this has to do with harassment and how will a "strong team" identify false content. The grant itself is about 4 lines, from users with zero history. The opposition part is the most coherent section of the page.
• Third link, A one line grant proposal in german. The user above only mentions that it's a duplicate.
• Fourth link, A minimal grant page titled "Women have to make up at least 40% of admin in the arbcom and every other elected position". The user questions if merely having a male majority makes wikipidea biased and unsafe for women. He cites WMF's non-discrimination policy and questions the veracity of a quota system. This seems like a knowledgeable review and an conflicting opinion.
• Fifth link, Another small grant page titled "Non violent communication". The user states the idea is too vague. Asks questions about how his goals can be accomplished.
• Sixth link, Same as Fifth link - I assume you copy pasted.
• Seventh link, idea of global guidelines and dispute process (this idea is actually quite old and has had a lot of discussion on Meta over the years). The user questions why "one size fits all" approach and expands on the uniqueness of every project instead of a top-down view. This is an acceptable position to take that many here might agree with.
• Eight link, links to Sandbox. Error?
• Ninth link, An idea about creating a "new theme for wikipedia abd update all the information". The user rightly states this has nothing to do with harassment.
• Tenth link, A blank grant titled "There must be set of espeacial terms and condition against harassment in offices,school government and non government." There is no information on the grant page itself. The user rightly states, This is too vague and has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Lastly, I don't know your exposure with the community here, but half his comments I can imagine coming from anyone else on Meta. There is nothing wrong with anything he asked in those links. By those standards, a lot of us, most of us, would be in violation of your policy. Even your message on his talk page, he calmly replied that "he read the discussion and since there are others expressing concern over the same thing. If you won't mind, he'd rather wait for it to be resolved before moving." Again, This user seems knowledgeable and civil. There is no offending action here besides disagreement. Should that be an actionable offence? Theo10011 (talk) 23:46, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Theo10011 The content of the ideas is not the issue, and I don't have any problem with people being opposed to ideas at all. It's the fact that IdeaLab is not currently designed in this manner, and it's disruptive to implement changes to that design before we've agreed on what to do. Different proposals on how to arrange feedback have been pitched. But apparently for some, it is a foregone conclusion. It makes it difficult to have an actual conversation where I feel like anybody's perspective is being taken seriously, and individuals just arrange things how they like in the space. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 00:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I JethroBT (WMF) Well, this is how wikis are designed. WMF or the grant department or any staff didn't invent or design the underlying platform here - It's based on wiki. And this user seems to be experienced. The grant namespace mangled certain underlying feature of a wiki to accommodate some things. The software, the policies, the community support openness and discussion - which is what you guys don't want. Maybe you should consider moving to another platform - google docs or survey/campaign. What you want is inherently against the nature of your own platform. Theo10011 (talk) 00:13, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I disagree; the behavior is pretty much at odds with the whole idea of not disrupting projects to make a point. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Theo10011: For the record, I'm not an experienced Wikipedian. I try to act in good faith, but I wasn't aware of some policies and mechanisms of handling issues and controversies such as these, so I understand that my actions may seem inappropriate or odd to more experienced users. I agree with Jethro's main point ("don't just do it your way until it has been resolved"), though I think only the few edits I made yesterday are clearly in violation of this rule for the reasons stated in my comment to Jethro's accusations. --Doveofsymplegades (talk) 07:00, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

The first line there reads - "Discussion, rather than unilateral action, is the preferred means of changing policies, and the preferred mechanism for demonstrating the problem with policies or the way they are implemented." - This is the opposite of what you want? No discussion, no comments until you sort out your own systems? I don't think you'll find a policy anywhere on wiki where it says to not talk or discuss at all. Anyway, That is an essay imported from en.wp in 2006. The en.wp current version is quite different and suggests in a nutshell "When you have a point to make, use direct discussion only.". Neither one supports your argument currently. Theo10011 (talk) 00:46, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I was unclear with what I disagreed with. Of course, I agree that discussion here is sensible. Preemptive changes during this ongoing discussion is not. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 02:37, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): "If we're going to talk about process, it is presumptive, hostile, and disruptive to impose a design change before we've had a chance to figure it out." I agree. Sorry about that. Some points in response, not for the sake of exculpating me, but to explain why I did what I did:

• The majority of these edits were made before I had even brought up the issue of where statements of opposition should go and hence before I was aware or could have been aware of any rule regarding where to voice opposition. I noticed some other editors had created similar Opposition sections so for the sake of providing some structure to the feedback, I put the existing statements of opposition in an Opposition section. On other articles, I created such a section myself so I could leave statements of opposition.
• I stopped adding Opposition sections after I noticed that you or others had moved some of them to the discussion pages of the grants and I had brought up the issue on the discussion page of the IdeaLab itself.
• Regarding asking me to revert the changes: I may have been wrong, but it didn't seem to me to be an authoritative command, but rather a "I think this would be better" kind of suggestion which was up for discussion. Hence I responded the way I did, expecting a definite decision from you in return. My intent was not flat-out refusal to comply and if you still want me to comply, I will.
• Yesterday, I added some Opposition sections to proposals that are, in my opinion, unambiguously nonsense or otherwise unworkable. I agree that that's disruptive and that I shouldn't have done that before this issue is resolved. My apologies.

Kind regards, Doveofsymplegades (talk) 06:31, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Doveofsymplegades: I would like you to comply, thanks. With that said, I appreciate your feedback pointing out ideas that are clearly not workable. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

It is sort of a sad deal when a problem goes on for months, with many voicing concerns. “Bias”, “censorship”, and “suppression” are brought up regularly. Then WMF members seem to stonewall and blow smoke-screens. Their main defense seems to be “because that's how we do it. Period”. This board is not about women being harassed, it is about good-faith editors being harassed. Nobody has shown that any of the deleted comments have any potential to harass any female. Now WMF members, instead of really addressing the issues, choose to attack the character of a good-faith editor. All positions should be heard. This seems like such a basic Wikipedia principal that I have problems understanding how anyone can oppose it. Sammy D III (talk) 11:58, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

On the Friendly spaces expectations

Ajraddatz mentions this, so I thought I'd add some background on that here. The Friendly spaces expectations (FSE) were drafted in response to community and staff concerns that personal attacks and profoundly toxic discussions were demotivating grant proposers, and derailing important discussions around funding. It was brought to the wider Meta community’s attention several times, the latest being in July of 2015. That post goes into some of the motivations and research that led to this approach. Unfortunately, in my working on Meta, I have never seen Meta:Urbanity explicitly enforced, or even invoked in warning. I believe it has only been in place since January 2015, and I wonder how many Meta users are even aware of it? It does not appear to be linked from the index of Meta policies. If it were a functional, enforced policy, there would be little need for the FSE. The grants team were very aware that they could not require Meta admins to patrol Grants spaces, and began to craft a more specific and actionable behavioral guideline specifically for that space. I agree it isn’t ideal to have overlapping policies or expectations, however, there does need to be some sort of working guideline. Where do we go from here? The FSE was simply an effort to improve collegiality among participants in an environment that, at the time, lacked a working system to encourage it. Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 13 June 2016 (UTC)edit: bad link fixed. Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi @PEarley (WMF): thanks for getting back. I didn't realize that there was community consultation, so I'm sorry for misrepresenting that - obviously I just didn't participate or remember about it. I think the issue with our existing policies isn't the policies themselves, but the lack of active admins we have always watching Meta. That is a structural issue; Meta is (almost) nobody's home project.

I would still prefer that the overarching policy be used, rather than setting up per-namespace policies. Is Meta:Urbanity missing anything that you think should be included? If not, then I think the two could be merged rather easily. You could still enforce civility and niceness in the Grants: namespace with URB of course. Ajraddatz (talk) 06:43, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Ajraddatz, there's probably room for improvement in both policies, and I agree getting them together is the ideal end point. I guess one of the first criticisms I have of Urbanity is that it sets respect as not only the ideal (with I agree with), but the standard to judge behaviour. Respect can mean many things to many people, and the policy may lack the specificity to be practically actionable. If we go any deeper on this topic, we should probably move over to the Urbanity talk page.

Lack of admins is certainly another pain point. From the discussions I've had with Meta admins, at least several took on the role primarily because of their technical expertise - they didn't sign up to deal with behavioural issues, and don't feel comfortable working on them. And, as you say, Meta is rarely someone's home wiki, so there's an attention problem as well. So, perhaps an admin recruiting drive might help? Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 15:28, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Meta admins are basically expected that meta isn't their home wikis - Meta:A says candidates have to "demonstrate cross-wiki experience (e.g., be a participant of at least two months' duration on at least one project other than Meta and the "home" project).". Not sure if admin drive will help the problem if their home wiki still isn't meta :P — regards, Revi 15:35, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

@PEarley (WMF):, You are referencing something less than an year old, proposed by you, for lack of policy enforcement as viewed by you. Now, it is some inherent policy of grants namespace that has to be abided by? The forum link you provided has all but two comments offering differing views, after a week you announce in an update that you've formed certain expectations and that seems to be the end of it. This is blatantly one-sided.

You offer a link where our policy isn't explicitly enforced, but that's either broken or doesn't exist and leads back to the first link where you proposed this. I'd like to see the admin failing that prompted this policy. This seems to be an attempt to create a fishbowl where only one type of comment is acceptable - maybe this isn't suited for Meta and would be more home at wmf wiki? You'd have all the control there.

Obviously, your attempt here isn't working. Users, even admins are complaining about censorship - this isn't remotely a good trade-off for an open culture project. Censoring and removing comments from other users is something that just isn't done on-wiki unless there is some privacy violation or blockable offense. I don't know about your past experience, but this entire policy is inherently ill-suited to an open-source project - open-source means free and equal access for every voice- even those you don't like, or find offensive. Perhaps you can look at other ways of enforcing this policy without attempting to censor. Theo10011 (talk) 12:13, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Theo10011, I think you may be misunderstanding something here: Patrick liaised with Community Resources in spreading the word about their expectations. He neither created those nor proposed them. Unless you are using the plural "you" there, of course, which is not clear to me in context. :) That said, the CR policy is based on the m:Terms of Use which apply to all spaces and every project. We do not tolerate harassment or threats. Placing these on our projects is against the ToU and thus by nature illegitimate contribution that can and should be removed by anyone. The Friendly Spaces Expectations explicitly calls out the following for potential removal or hiding (hatting):

• offensive comments related to gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, political affiliation, or religion
• violence, threats of violence, deliberate intimidation and personal attacks
• stalking, following, or continued one-on-one communications after being asked to cease
• sustained disruption of discussion
• deliberate “outing” and/or doxing of any person’s identity without their consent
• publication of non-harassing private communication

If you think some of these should not be removed or hidden (as by hatting), being specific about which and why might be helpful. It would seem courteous to notify the users who talked about the expectations page during it's formation, perhaps with a link at its talk page.

That said, the Meta:Urbanity page looks great. Looks like this was created the month before the Friendly Spaces Expectations and boldly put into place. It would be nice if more people could be made aware of it, such as by including it in Meta:Policies and guidelines. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

On the Friendly spaces expectations (continued) (arbitrary break)

Hi @Mdennis (WMF):, I'm not sure what the implication here is. You say the friendly place policy is based on ToU but the next logical implication would be, that meta somehow does not abide by ToU? or that We (Meta community and admins) tolerate harassment and threats? Only logical implication so the staff had to create a separate fort with grants and set up a policy and then censor people just to abide by the same ToU policy?

• I am also not sure why you mention things like violence, stalking and racial epithets as offending items that are outlawed under ToU - We are well aware. Admins have been doing the job of monitoring and cleaning much much before there were these ToU to codify them. I don't think you would have any disagreements with 90% of the things you are repeating here. I don't know the history of this policy, but you said patrick liaised then who proposed it, where is this consensus? He only offered a single link to babel (which wouldn't even be the right place to propose this), which had two dissenting opinions and nothing more. I must be missing it on this page, so please provide the link where this policy was formulated with the community. Also, bear in mind this is all less than an year old.
• Meta:urbanity, again is a recent development and a bad example for your own actions. The page was created in 2015 by a fellow community member. It is about civility and etiquette which we all try to abide by. It mentions AGF if you feel attacked, remaining calm and then asking for help from admin if the problem escalates. Patrick mentioned failure to apply this policy of 2015 as impetus for creating friendly space - I asked for example of where he felt the meta admins failed? I would still like to see what prompted creation of this policy - I have faith in the admins here more than anyone else. If something was brought to our attention than I have faith in the community here. Also, I have no idea what reading of Urbanity would say to create a separate namespace and establish a draconian policy of censorship to achieve the same results. It is entirely antithetical to the approach you guys are taking.
• If you read the objection above, the policy is taking those things way over the line. Merely disagreeing with someone on staff, isn't inherently worthy of removal or hiding - if you would read through the objections here, there are legitimate concerns about censoring opinions that aren't in absolutely one-sided in support. Disagreement in itself wasn't, isn't and will never be outside the purview of any ToU. In the interest of impartiality, how about you let neutral admins decide on case-by-case basis just like 99.9% of the wiki-verse instead of this policy?

Maggie, I hope as a senior staff member you can admit or at least recognise there is a problem here, instead of ignoring it. You can read through the comments and it reads like another one of those community vs staff discussions, with each side picked. If you would read through, your staff isn't changing anyone's mind, neither are they making a good case here. You have admins and long term community members telling you there is a problem here - don't just say, this was the way it is and you are trying to do your job - I have read far too many of those discussions. It really doesn't matter what happened or who proposed what. Recognise there is a problem here and please try to address it. Thanks. Theo10011 (talk) 17:43, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

To reinforce what Theo is saying, the behaviours forbidden in Meta:Urbanity (itself just representing common practice) have always been unacceptable on Meta. I understand that most staff are from the English-speaking world and probably enwiki, but you should understand that enwiki has over 300 policies and guidelines. Most projects have significantly less, and don't feel the need to legislate the obvious. The issue has and will be administration - Meta admins aren't around as much as admins dedicated to a specific project, and this is by design. However, we can always be contacted here (a bit less ideal in cases of abusive behaviour tbh) Ajraddatz (talk) 17:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Ajraddatz. And I would clarify on one minor point, if I may. ;) This is my opinion only, I think we have enough admins here, good ones in fact, great even. I've always been happy of admin and steward conduct and the conduct of my fellow community members. They are a very diverse group, much more so than any other language or project. We are located all over the world, it ensures that a) There is always someone around b) Language is rarely a problem. There are wonderful admins/stewards here from en.wp and commons who go above and beyond to help and be accommodating given our diversity. There is rarely any trouble requiring more than one admin's involvement. And considering a lot of questionable admin conduct on other large project, I think we do a good job here without an arbcomm type body or lengthy disputes. Meta, does fine given the admin it has for a wiki its size. They have never disappointed me in the last 7-8 years I've been around. I have faith in these people, I suggest you do too. Regards. Theo10011 (talk) 19:35, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Maggie, I have to say I am disappointed in your answer. The issue under discussion is, as far as I can determine, the perception by some volunteers of high-handed behaviour of certain WMF staff: that staff are perceived as regarding themselves as in a position to impose procedures and policies on mere volunteers and Community members, and that their behaviour is not only uncollegial but counterproductive. The special Friendly Space policy for the Grants namespace is seen as such an imposition. To suggest, as you seem to do, that to question the way in which that policy was imposed, or the way it relates to other policies, is somehow condoning the behaviours it prohibits ("If you think some of these should not be removed") is frankly unreasonable and, if not a simple mistake on your part, at best an unfair debating tactic. Please think again and give us a more considered view about whether the current mode of behaviour of your staff could become more collegial and better aligned to the long-term interests of the Grants programme. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:56, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Theo10011, Ajraddatz - I'm afraid that I have pretty limited time at the moment (we're getting ready for Wikimania and our Board presentation there and also preparing for the next quarter), but I'll try to address major points. Hopefully I won't miss anything.

• My point in mentioning the TOU is because the Expectations document does - and probably for the same reason. These expectations are based on existing policy. They're not new policy that need consensus.
• In terms of admins doing the job, they certainly do and long have been; we've been grateful to them for assisting with problems many times. However, I'm not aware of any rule that says only admins may remove content that violates TOU. It isn't spelled out at Meta:Administrators, and as far as I can tell Meta:Urbanity does not mandate, request or even advise seeking an administrator to remove content that is highly incivil or insulting. It simply acknowledges that you may do so. In my 9 years as a Wikipedian (albeit not really active at the moment), it's been my experience that editors are permitted to remove personal attacks on sight. Of course Meta admins don't go through and patrol all this. It was never their jobs.
• If the expectations are being applied in a way they should not be, that's certainly worth calling out and refining practice, especially if you think they're being used to remove or hide content simply because it's disagreeing with staff. However, I believe that's independent from the fact that people have a right to know under what conditions this work will be done.
• Ajraddatz, my understanding is that one of the reasons for these expectations was fears voiced by contributors from those very smaller communities who either had had bad experiences on other projects or had heard alarming stories and who wanted some assurance that they could expect to be treated with courtesy, even when disagreed with. This is particularly important when quite a few people are drawn to these conversations by external canvassing on sites that politically oppose some of the issues Idea Lab is intended to confront. (Sadly, this happens. We know of several such cases of canvassing for trolling related to the current campaign.)
• Rogol Domedonfors, the Grants namespace is not used only by staff, but by community. These expectations protect everyone. Harassment is forbidden by our TOU. Defining harassment is open to conversation, but that basic policy is already binding. As I noted above within this response, there doesn't seem to be anything extraordinary about removing personal attacks, from Meta or elsewhere. If stuff is being removed that shouldn't be, that is something that should be discussed. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 21:14, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Maggie, I'm sorry to say that the comment you address to me is so far from being a response to the point I made that I can only conclude that I wrote it too obscurely for someone as busy as yourself. Perhaps when you have a moment you could consider instead the point I raised [14] on your talk page on a closely related matter on 30 May? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:30, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Rogol Domedonfors. I had written my response and failed to save. When I tried to save, I saw and attempted to answer your note. But I do intend to respond to you. I understand what you say about imposing procedures and being uncollegial and counterproductive, but I do not see this as such a case. I reiterate that these expectations are based upon an existing policy - one which underwent months of consultation - and that if the expectations set forth which are based on understanding of that policy seem wrong in any respect, that's worth discussing. I stand by the belief that making these expectations explicit is a good thing and important in this work. With respect to the Code of Conduct, I believe staff are putting considerable time into moving that to the next stage, currently focusing on constituting the committee. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
What a long thread this is. Some asked about how this started. As I recall it was here Grants_talk:IdeaLab/WikiProject_Women#Keeping_discussion.2C_comments_and_opposition_on_discussion_page_.28more_room_to_discuss_here.21.29 when a hundred or so individuals appeared at this discussion after being directed there from a gamergate-related subreddit. Kind of interesting to read the whole thing through. —Neotarf (talk) 03:07, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Back to the main header

I also rise the allegation of staff acting biased in this campaign. Additionally, I want to make public the fact that staff (Patrick Earley (WMF), I JethroBT (WMF)) does not only partition endorsement and denial, but also simply declares submissions to be "ineligible", not caring even the fraction of a second that these ideas were at the top of the leaderboard. I strongly confirm that these ideas (I am talking about more than one!) did not only enjoy broad endorsements, but also were formulated fully de rigeur and in a way indisputably fitting to "Friendly Space Expectations", whereas I do perceive actions based solely on the unlimited administrative but not on argumentative power of making ideas invisible, deleting contributions on talk pages, and similar, as a form not only of censorship, but also of harassment, currently in the focus.

• Strong support for Ajraddatz!Purgy (talk) 06:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

The talk page can be used to debate about harassment or express concerns about the campaign. Your commentary that people are too sensitive and alarmist, that harassment that happens online is not actual harassment, and that the responsibility of dealing with harassment is primarily the problem of those who receive it are all reasons your submission is out of scope for the campaign. That it has a lot of endorsements only reinforces the issue of why this campaign is necessary. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF):I am deeply concerned that I was not able to express sufficiently clearly my humble attempts of launching an idea involving "lowering raising the trigger level" for harassment alarms in a way that you could not misinterpret it as claiming that online harassment were no actual harassment, and that the responsibility for dealing with harassment were primarily on the receivers side. I am disappointed that some officials call my idea just a "comment", when it was intended as setting up a target, worth to ponder.

Nevertheless, all this is only a small part of the resentments, triggered by a wealth of staff's deeds in a broad context just within this campaign, which I expressed above in my consent with Ajraddatz. Not dealing with these objections on an argumentative but only on a bureaucratic level, by authoritatively fixing a rather arbitrary, narrow scope, enforces the resentment. Dealing in the same censoring way with other submissions (leaderboard, hint, hint, ...) too, should be sufficient reason for reconsidering the manners you personally, presumptively in submissively obeying commands by Patrick Earley (WMF), enact within this WIKI(!). Purgy (talk) 07:20, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I've struggled to figure out a proper response to this thread. I've heard these concerns before—during the first Inspire campaign, and even when we launched the Teahouse, which also has its own behavioral guidelines and operating procedures that are different from the rest of EnWiki. I guess you could say I understand these objections in principle, but not in practice.

Heather, Siko, and I created the IdeaLab in 2013 with a dual purpose in mind:

1. As a 'Drafts' namespace for potential grantees, so they could develop their ideas openly and collaboratively, without the high stakes of working directly on a grant application in public, with all the (real or perceived) expectations of completeness, correctness, and public scrutiny that entails. Also, to make the task a little less daunting: the grant application template is uuuuuuge and contains a lot of questions, headings, etc. that can't be addressed until much later in the process.
2. As a community space where anyone could create an idea for a project, even a two-sentence stub of an idea, and that idea would be lightly curated, formatted, and archived and could be expanded/adapted/adopted at a later date, by anyone. Or not—that was fine too.

As with the Teahouse, I've always thought of the IdeaLab as a sort of WikiProject. WikiProjects have their own spaces that they organize the way they see fit, within bounds. If you walk into an established project and start changing templates or posting comments in the "wrong" places—in short, if you don't abide by the local norms—someone will likely revert that edit, or move your comment to the locally appropriate forum. Local norms are not a new thing on wiki. They're not a new thing on Meta. And they're definitely not a new thing when it comes to spaces that are primarily curated by WMF staff, rather than people who aren't currently being paid to edit the wiki. The Resources team coordinates hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants through Meta every year, and they couldn't do that work effectively if they hadn't been allowed a good bit of leeway in the way they maintain their processes and pages.

The IdeaLab works in a particular way, and (especially during the Inspire campaigns) is being used for a very particular purpose. That purpose falls within the purview of the Meta project, and is well integrated with the main work of the WMF Resources team, a key community stakeholder on Meta. No one has to participate in the IdeaLab. For those that choose to do so, the norms of participation are clearly documented (not just in the Friendly Space Expectations, but also in Grants:IdeaLab/How_it_works, which provides a rationale for the placement of endorsements vs "opposition" that I don't need to re-hash).

Why is it a problem, then, that the IdeaLab is designed in a particular way to suit a particular purpose, and enforces a few, lightweight participation norms? Note that I'm not asking "why can't anyone set up any portal on any wiki for any purpose any way they want?" or "Why can't the Wikimedia Foundation do whatever it wants whenever it wants—because forget you, community!?". Rather, why is this a problem?

Actually asking. Not a rhetorical question. Also, I'm no longer directly involved in the IdeaLab, Inspire Campaign, or the Resources team, and my opinions are my own. Cheers, Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jmorgan (WMF): thank you for replying, in spite of struggles. I am not absolutely sure, if I understand your question in the intended way, since I am not native in English, but it makes me unsure about its intention, because you mention having read concerns about the "climate" ("air", ???) within these campaigns already earlier. It is of no big help to learn afterwards that this WMF section has been created by Heather, Siko, and you in 2013 with some specific agenda in mind. Any visitor, lured from any other WIKI(!) by invitational and inviting banners, assumes a fair, open-minded environment, in which one expresses ideas to achieve sort of an optimal solution, and not a biased bureaucracy with hidden to secret targets up the sleeve, totally contrary to any spirit of a true WIKI(!).

One should be warned when clicking these banners

You are now leaving the open-minded region, and enter places with palmed agendae.

Prepare to be forced to rules alien to your mind.

Please notice, I do not insinuate that these were your intentions when creating this space, but please, let me assure that this is the way I perceived how my suggestion and those of others, too, are treated around here. For completeness sake, I'd like to emphasize that it was not me who started changing templates in my submission. This place definitely is not up to develop ideas openly and collaboratively, but rather to pursue a priori fixed goals by brainstorming for supportive thoughts only.

This -certainly not illegal, but contradictory in WIKIs- bias should be made explicit a priori, too. Purgy (talk) 08:22, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Purgy Purgatorio:. Thank you for your reply. I don't see these actions as censorship, or believe they are in any way sinister. But I saw a lot of abuse directed against idea creators (and WMF staff) during the first Inspire campaign, much of which came from SPAs who descended on ideas that they were ideologically opposed to and spewed bile, or filling the forum we'd set aside for idea creators to get help with angry rants. If moving or removing those comments, and making other design decisions that encourage encouragement, gave even one person the confidence to propose an idea that they had previously been afraid to raise on wiki... then I stand by that decision. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jmorgan (WMF): It looks to me like you beat about the bush, to justify something with which the community disagrees. In regard to the founding/wiki principles, you have to ask yourself if it is morally okay to ignore the community. --Steinsplitter (talk) 14:31, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Steinsplitter:, I don't see it as a moral issue. I see it as a governance issue. One group of community members in this discussion (most or all of whom are current WMF staff), would like to run a particular on-wiki process in a particular way. Another group of community members in this discussion (most or all of whom are not current WMF staff) want to change the process. The vast majority of people involved in the process are not participating in this discussion; the vast majority of potential stakeholders in the process are not involved either. Those of us involved in the discussion are taking on the daunting task of bringing a dog's breakfast of potentially applicable rules, principles, norms, and precedents to bear on the decisions at hand, while asserting that we can speak for the will of a vast, loosely organized movement composed of people who don't know this conversation is happening, and whose input we could never actually integrate into our decision-making even if they cared to to give it. In other words, it's a governance issue. In my original statement, I attempted to provide some background, and then asked a specific question to better ascertain the positions of others in the discussion, to help work towards a solution. I don't think framing this dispute as a Foundation/community issue is particularly productive, because a) the Foundation staff are part of the community, and b) the non-staff community members in this discussion do not represent the will of the entire community, nor do they have a privileged position vis a vis the interpretation or application of founding principles. But given that all of use here are equal stakeholders, and we seem to be invested, perhaps we can find a solution that we can agree to abide by. Hopefully one that we all feel does a reasonably good job of addressing the needs of the giant community we are purporting to represent. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jmorgan (WMF): Of course there is a substantial moral and governance issue, it is explaining itself. To be honest, i am shocked about your replies here. A WMF grants vs community battle. --Steinsplitter (talk) 09:29, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

When is it time to just say “I guess that didn't work. It seemed like a good idea, we tried, but it lead to suppression and censorship and bias, which are unacceptable. When I change the others will appreciate my actions.”? Sammy D III (talk) 16:23, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Sammy D III: I don't agree with your assertion that moving a comment from one page to another constitutes censorship. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@Jmorgan (WMF): I agree that there is no censorship, some of my posts have been a cheap use of the word. I will retract the word anywhere I should, but will stand behind a couple. I stand behind “bias”, “delete”, and “suppress”. Especially “delete”, “move” is a cover word. My good-faith comment was deleted from the discussion it was posted in, and then posted somewhere else. (Deep breath). Anyway, it's evening here, have a good whatever it is there. Sammy D III (talk) 23:00, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Sammy D III. It's early evening here on Whidbey Island. I believe I understand your points more clearly now. I'm going to take a few deep breaths myself before wading back into this discussion, but will post some further thoughts on this thread tomorrow. I'll try to keep them concise and constructive. Talk to you then, Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

• @Jmorgan (WMF): In my opinion, the controversy isn't over combating harassment, it is over the perception of censorship/filtering criticism over various proposals, and "policies" that further this. --Rschen7754 18:16, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

That's a helpful summary. Thank you, @Rschen7754:.

• Exactly this. Most of us are not concerned with the topic of the campaign, but rather with how the IdeaLab is set up. I don't like the fact that there needs to be a separately make and enforced behaviour policy when Meta-Wiki already has one. I don't like the fact that community concerns over how the IdeaLab pages are structured are summarily ignored, rather than engaged with. If the community is complaining about the separation of the support/oppose ideas, then it's the responsibility of the staff running the campaign to respond to those concerns and fix them, rather than telling tens of people off. This is Meta-Wiki; the same expectations of collaborative work apply to everyone, community and staff. Edit: I think you'll also find that per-namespace behavioural norms are quite alien on most projects. All of your experience is on enwiki, and that's fine. But whereas enwiki quite often allows behaviour that is not acceptable anywhere else, and needs to set up a "safe space" for the teahouse to prevent the usual incivility and other such behaviour, most projects just enforce those standards across the board. Ajraddatz (talk) 18:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

  Another long thread here, but I linked above to this discussion, where the format seems to have first evolved. In that discussion a lot of weight was given to the wishes of the person who drafted the idea. If the OP doesn't mind, why don't you just structure the conversation in whatever way works best for you all? The staff has already given plenty of examples of groups that are already doing that. What's with all the long discussion here, just do it. —Neotarf (talk) 03:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you , @Ajraddatz:. I believe I understand your position, even if I disagree with what I believe is your main point. The IdeaLab definitely needs to be a safe space--at least, during Inspire Campaigns. I saw behavior during the first Inspire campaign that makes the way English Wikipedia treats newbies look gentle and nurturing by comparison.

These campaigns bring in a flood of new people to Meta. Many of these community members are unaccustomed to the nuts and bolts of editing--I'm speaking of researchers, educators, program leaders, and software developers whose contributions to the movement don't always involve substantial editing or frequent participation in on-wiki culture. These folks are often less confident with editing, less knowledgeable about norms, and may be unaccustomed to the way people speak to one another on Meta. And we're asking them to enter an unfamiliar environment and share their ideas with an unknown audience.

Inspire Campaigns also often bring in a flood of SPA's to Meta, people who show up primarily to flood the chan, disrupt the process, and shout down people who don't agree with them. This shouldn't be a surprise: two of the three Inspire campaigns have addressed topics that are highly polarizing within the open web broadly. They're also topics that, when they've been raised elsewhere in the past, have frequently resulted in abusive behavior directed towards the people who raised them, and anyone else implicated by association.

As you noted yourself above, the process for reporting and resolving abusive behavior on Meta is not "ideal". The current process is certainly not set up to deal with the volume of abusive behavior that can potentially (and in the case of the first Inspire Campaign at least, did actually) occur. If there's a will among the Meta admins to regulate this behavior more proactively and expediently, I'm sure the WMF staff involved in the campaigns would welcome their involvement. I haven't seen much evidence of such a will, but I would love to be proven wrong on this point.

Ultimately, if this issue can be resolved by removing the endorsements section from the page, then I am happy to join Team Remove. Because the real issue for me is much broader: the IdeaLab absolutely does need to be designed and managed in such a way that a) encourages participation by people who have ideas to share, and legitimate apprehensions about sharing them on a Wikimedia wiki, and b) mitigates the negative impact of inevitable trolling, mass disruption, and abusive behavior. The current strategies in place are doing that effectively, and throwing them out without a better solution in place is going to leave a lot of good-faith contributors vulnerable to abuse and undermine the substantial work that went into IdeaLab and Inspire.

I agree that staff need to respond proactively to community concerns. But staff are also community members, and on Meta staff have a long-standing, significant, and critical stake in project governance decisions. This isn't the same issue as the MediaViewer scandal, the VisualEditor fiasco, or the SuperProtect "putch". A lot of staff work here, on this wiki, and have for many years. If we're going to continue to run Foundation programs on public wikis, the staff who edit those wikis need to be treated as equal partners, not interlopers or would-be overlords. Based on the way you have engaged in this discussion, I think you may even agree with me. But many of the comments I've seen in my time here, including comments in this discussion, suggest to me that the Meta community more broadly wants WMF out. And that, ultimately, will benefit no one. Is there room for a compromise solution in this case, or is the consensus among non-staff that WMF needs to completely dismantle every part of the IdeaLab pages and process that has been called out as objectionable by anyone? Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Please don't set up strawman positions like this. Is there substantial evidence that the "Meta community more broadly wants WMF out" or that there is a "consensus among non-staff that WMF needs to completely dismantle every part of the IdeaLab pages and process that has been called out as objectionable by anyone"? I think not. There is at least some evidence that the local norms set and enforced by staff in the Grants space have been unexpected by community members used to other projects, or other parts of Meta, and that staff have not been as proactive as they might be in explaining what these local norms are and why they need to be different. There is also evidence that some community members have interpreted the attitude of some staff members as high-handed. There is perhaps evidence that some staff members take the view that community members who are not regular participants in Grants discussions do not have the best interests of the Grants process at heart. Can we now address the concerns that have actually been expressed by community members rather than these unproductive exaggerations? The veiled threat that if community members are not nicer to staff then the Foundation will take its discussions away to private spaces is not the way to achieve the compromise solution you ask for. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:06, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Moving WMF operations off Meta is not within my power. Nor is it an option I would pursue if it were, so please take my comments as they were stated and intended, Rogol Domedonfors. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

I do not know what you intended to say, I can only go by what you did say, and I would prefer it if you would do the same for me. I thought, and think, that your comment "If we're going to continue to run Foundation programs on public wikis, the staff who edit those wikis need to be treated as equal partners" sounded like a veiled threat that if volunteers did not behave better to staff, then "we" (whoever "we" refers to) would take these discussions off Meta (which is a public wiki). You say that you personally have no power to do this, and would not pursue it. That may be so, but it is not the same as saying that your previous comment does not sound like a veiled threat, and it is not the same as saying that this move would not happen -- it is saying that you can and would not do it personally. So please address the point under discussion, not these similar-sounding-but-actually-rather-different points.

A similar remark applies to the question "Why is it a problem, then, that the IdeaLab is designed in a particular way to suit a particular purpose, and enforces a few, lightweight participation norms?" Nobody has been suggesting that the IdeaLab should not have a design, and nobody has been suggesting that it should not have norms. What there has been discussion about is the nature and purpose of those designs and norms, the extent to which they differ from users' expectations, the extent to which their nature and purpose is explained to users, the manner in which they are enforced and the perceived attitudes of those enforcing them. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:28, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

As I stated in the sign-off of that comment, I asked that question in earnest, based on my understand of the issue at hand, which I had gleaned from previous comments in the thread, Rogol Domedonfors. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps you could remind us of the comments made here or elsewhere that support the asertion, made in earnest, that members of the community believe that it is a problem that IdeLab is designed to suit a purpose, or that it is a problem that they should have norms, as opposed to the nature and operation of that design and those norms? I do not believe such an assertion can be supported and I personally see no point in discussing a question which in my view is based on a mistaken premise. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

I can't speak for everyone, but my goal is to better include IdeaLab here on Meta, not move it off. That's why I want a single behavioural standard, rather than a mish-mash of policies by namespace like what is happening now. I'm not saying that the ideas should be an area for the usual rudeness; I want to reinforce positive interactions across Meta, rather than looking at every issue as a zero-sum game. Ajraddatz (talk) 21:52, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

would you care to strike your vocabulary that would seem to flout the behavioral norms on meta? Slowking4 (talk) 23:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Nope. But I will per the nice request of I Jethrobt on my talk page. Ajraddatz (talk) 18:43, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

A related but different question

It seems that a member of staff has taken it upon themselves to move a number of conversation from one talk page [15] to another [16] for reasons that are not entirely clear ("moving meta-level comments about the campaign") but appear to signify that in their personal opinions the discussions are better placed, which may or may not be correct, but was certainly not discussed or explained on either page. (I should point out that this is not an example of the behaviour discussed above.) Is moving conversations without consultation or notification a privilege reserved to WMF staff, or are any users allowed to do this whenever they see fit? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:53, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Note

This discussion is going nowhere. Some of the staff also mentioned they would be leaving for Wikimania, so this is likely to not get any impactful development until they return next month and even then, things aren't looking like they are going to change. Most of the staff already seem to have disengaged. So, I propose we move this discussion, or someone start an RfC - this page is usually for direct request to admins here not for overdrawn circular discussion this is turning in to. The concerns have been made known to the staff and the grants team - there is no point in defending old decisions and actions or citing policy, it will only go round and round. Please see if you can come up with a better system than the one you have now or at least address some concerns. If you want community input, start an RfC or bring it up in the relevant place but you should really look in to this before it comes to a boil again. This page is not intended for decision-making, and design implementation discussion. I propose we close this discussion and archive it for now, if no one objects. Theo10011 (talk) 20:59, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. I'm going to start an RfC on merging the friendly space expectations with Meta:Urbanity (and giving the latter a work-over), and try to have my above suggestion implemented regarding the moving of comments. This can probably be closed. Ajraddatz (talk) 21:50, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

strong oppose the friendly space expectations are just fine thank you. Slowking4 (talk) 20:05, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Before we close

Given that most of the relevant discussion is already here, and in the interest of not rehashing the same arguments in an RfC, I wanted to pitch this idea to everyone based on the concerns you've expressed about the way feedback is handled on IdeaLab. You've noted that having endorsements visible and concerns/opposition separated onto the talk page is problematic: It can skew the impression folks have of the idea and people are less likely to see feedback that points out problems or concerns with those ideas. That's not really fair, and I think that makes sense. It's also been noted that it's not clear that ideas need to progress to a grant proposal or be brought back to their local communities for consensus-building (such as through an RfC) in order for them to be implemented. Outside of the issue of Meta:Urbanity and Grants:Friendly space expectations (which we'll need to pick up on after Wikimania as it much more complicated), if I've missed any other concerns, let me know. Based on this feedback, and your suggestions about how to solve it, I think this course of action is appropriate:

1. More clarification will be provided about what IdeaLab is, that is, a drafting space for ideas, but not a place where proposals get directly implemented. It will be made clear that unless ideas get brought back to their local community for discussion or are submitted for a grant proposal, there isn't really a path for the idea to go anywhere.
2. Endorsements will no longer be on the main idea page. All feedback -- endorsements, concerns, suggestions, etc. -- will be placed on the talk page.

Although I can't feasibly make changes to the current campaign, it's something I could start working on after Wikimania and would apply to IdeaLab and any future Inspire Campaigns that are run. If this addresses the concerns that have been raised here, I'm happy to make these changes. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @I JethroBT (WMF): this looks like a good way forward. However, I would add one thing - would it be possible to survey or contact users who have participated in the IdeaLabs campaign, and see what impact they saw with endorsements and opposition separated? If idea creators felt that it was a positive thing in this and previous campaigns, then maybe it is something to discuss further before the next campaign. Of course, both on the talk page would be good either way - keeping all discussion in the same place, and separate from the main idea. Ajraddatz (talk) 22:21, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I would like to repeat what I JethroBT (WMF) said above -- that we will pick up on the issue of the Friendly Space Expectations after Wikimania. Many of the WMF staff and community members most closely involved with developing and implementing the guidelines will be at Wikimania and traveling for the next few weeks. The issues raised above are challenging ones and require more time to propose the best next steps. We commit to coming back to this discussion and providing an update by the end of July. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Food for thought in the future, no reply needed. Talk pages alone are a mess. Maybe Endorse/Undecided/Oppose (or whatever) on the front, or maybe the top of the talk page. Make it very clear that the post is only supposed to be 2 sentences or X words or whatever long, and there are no replies there. It isn't clear now. Maybe make a way that a person's “vote” can be easily changed with a couple word explanation. The “votes” don't really count, but give a quick overview. Then people could hunt down each other and their thoughts on the talk page. Sammy D III (talk) 00:14, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

strongly endorse staff conduct User talk:AWang (WMF), User:I JethroBT (WMF) i would like to thank the staff for attempting to keep this idea lab as an on-ramp for community health grants; we would not want meta to become yet another battleground, and have to organize our teams and grants off-wiki. the grant reviewers can reach their decisions, regardless of the noise and attempted disruption. Slowking4 (talk) 20:03, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Strongly endorse staff I have had a chance now to look through the diffs, and see how skillfully the staff has handled the influx of new users, and prevented other users from tearing them down. For next time, it might be worth writing a FAQ for those who are unfamiliar with the process of collaboration. It would also be worth implementing the "friendly space" to all of Meta, but maybe it's time to give it a little more grown up name. As Jmorgan (WMF) points out, some of the community members who come to this page for the first time are "researchers, educators, program leaders, and software developers", and are used to a more professional level of interaction, which may actually be mandated by employment and civil rights law that does not ordinarily apply to volunteers, but that they may be required to follow by their sponsoring organizations. Explain it on a tenth grade level, sure, but you don't want to lose the PhDs, they do contribute. Also, this is not the time and place to try to restart old discussions that have already disrupted other wikis. And I am absolutely appalled by the way an attempt has been made to mischaracterize my own role on the wikis or imply that I have ever been involved in any misconduct. I would like to know what website they are getting that from, because they certainly didn't get it from my edit history. I am not a gamergater, whatever that is, and have never been one. For anyone who doesn't remember me from WP:MOS, I had a small hand in drafting the Simplified Manual of Style, and I also wrote the Arbitration Report for the Signpost, back when it was a regular feature, and have had something to do with hyphens from time to time. There has been way too much personalization here. I would urge the staff to get this process back to a professional level; if they can't do it here by agreeing on roles (just a reminder that Arbcom does have its own clerks), then take it somewhere else, where it won't be disrupted. —Neotarf (talk) 23:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

A great image in Arabic language

لا للتحرش

User:Nohayla el azg has a great image on their user page, the Arabic word for "no" in red, with the caption "no harassment", also in Arabic. —Neotarf (talk) 00:30, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

@Neotarf: Agreed! Thanks for passing this my way-- I'd like to consider using this for a future Wikimedia blog post I'm planning on this campaign, and could make for a nice image for ideas being submitted. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 04:25, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

I have just spent a few hours following this image down the rabbit hole, and here is what I have found so far. It is most certainly an Anarchism symbol, apparently repurposed for the campaign. The name of the file is لا سلطوية literally "anarchism", or لا "no" plus سلطوية "authoritarian". The English language version would be a red letter "A" superimposed on a circle. You can see a variation of the Arabic symbol on this blog. While this particular Commons image doesn't link to very much, a similar file has been extracted from it, and is used on a couple of dozen Arabic language articles. This is the symbol used at the top of the Arabic Anarchism portal. Also, while Western anarchism seems to be a kind of "no gods, no masters" movement, Arabic anarchism seems to be opposed to governments in favor of submission to divine will. So the user who posted that image seems to me making a statement that harassers are both authoritarian and un-Islamic, if I am not imposing my own western eyes on this too much. If you are still considering the use of the image after all of that, you might want to look for a cultural informant, there is a WikiArabia meeting on Saturday morning, about the time you will be waking up and reading this. Also, keep in mind when talking to Arabs that they may be accustomed to living under less than optimal political conditions, and you may learn more from watching their faces than from their words, but I guess that could be true of anybody. —Neotarf (talk) 17:30, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Help, somebody is harassing me out of the blue trying to delete my User page!!

Help, somebody is harassing me out of the blue trying to delete my User page!! https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jidanni&diff=next&oldid=642162 Jidanni (talk) 05:46, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I did not know it was illegal to report illegal stuff (such as spam) in user pages. Yanguas (talk) 02:10, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

How is a link to a personal website spam, Yanguas? Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

In Portuguese Wikipedia, it is. And since his PU in Meta has a link, his PU in pt:Wiki becomes irregular. Yanguas (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't seem practical or sustainable to hold Global user pages to the specific user page policies of every single project. Especially if the user in question isn't active on those projects. I don't know if this issue has come up elsewhere, and if so what the outcome was. Regardless, this doesn't seem like a particularly worthwhile case to dispute. Jidanni's link is clearly intended for reference purposes, not self-promotion. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Since the Meta page is replicated only on wikis where there is not already a local user page, part of the answer would seem to be for administrators at a wiki where the user has no local page, and the global user page is a violation of local policy, to create a blank local user page. Of course, another part of the answer would be to engage in constructive dialogue with the user concerned rather than taking disruptive action here at Meta. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:36, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

contre le harcèlement

Bonjour,

Il faut imposer la création d'un compte pour écrire dans la wikipedia avec une adresse mail valide, nom, prénom, numéro de téléphone. Ces informations ne seront pas divulguées, elles serviront uniquement à éventuellement bloquer ceux qui ne respectent pas les règles de la wikipédia.

Bien cordialement

PierreJarret