WikiWomenCamp/FAQ/Perspectives/Italy
Italy
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Wikimedia Italia is mainly led by women. 3 out of 18 founding members were women. Frieda Brioschi and Giulia Clonfero are the most recurring members in the board, Frieda being president since 2005, with a single break when she was elected as community trustee in the WMF board (2007), shortly resigning; they're also the only members who got appointed as non-voting members when didn't stand as candidates, so that the average number of women in the 7 boards WMI had is 1.14 out of 5, or the 29 % of members of the extended board. Marina Milella, a woman, is one out of three chapters ombudspersons. Civvì, former (founding) member, has been the first (part-time) employee of the chapter.
This situation reproduces with what happens "under the hood" on the Italian Wikipedia and other Italian projects: Frieda has been the first sysop and bureaucrat on most of them and is jokingly referred to as "la capa" ("the [female] boss"); 4 out of 11 bureaucrats it.wiki has had are women, but only about a dozen out of 180 sysops. Women are also authors of some of the (very few) semi-official "community sayings", such as "Bots are like children, they have to be taken care of (followed up)!", by Civvì (also a bureaucrat), sometimes referred to as "mommy Civvì"; in general, women have an important and perhaps peculiar role in the community dynamics, which is not easily visible from outside. There are or were also several (married) couples of very active users, one of which or both are sysops, for instance Xaura (Giulia Clonfero) and Marcok (one of the first sysops), Frieda and Jollyroger, Eumolpo and Eumolpa, etc.; this happens because a partners accompany, "support" (and control!) each other in their wiki activities or because the couple met thanks to Wikimedia.
During the December 2011 fundraising appeal by the Wikimedia Foundation, no Italians, men or women, were featured as part of the appeal.
In December 2011, there were 22,720 women of all ages from Italy who were interested in Wikipedia on Facebook.[1]
In April 2018, for the first time the Wikimedia Italia assembly elected a board with no women. The electoral system doesn't allow to express one's preference for gender representation, and two women running in a "ticket" happened to not reach the required majority.
- Italian women perspective to free knowledge
- Women in Italia