Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/IdeaLab

Session: Siko Bouterse // Ideas into Action: IdeaLab Diversity working session

Idea:Lab: [1]

A list of ideas that came up in earlier conference sessions that group might choose to work on:

• Develop diversity guides, portals, safe spaces for new editors
• Massive Open Online Course (Webinars)
• Research on diversity and quality of articles on WIkipedia
• Create a portal on WIkimedia India for gathering resources for women editors
• Host international womens conference in India
• Tutorial videos (country/language specific?)
• Turn workshops like the Swedish fashion edit-a-thon into ongoing events, on a regular basis
• Social media outreach (Facebook groups, etc)
• Setup environmnent on wikipedia focusing on respect, compromise, tolerance
• Wikimedia LGBT: Wiki Loves Pride (inspired by Wiki Loves Libraries) - trial run in 2014
• Wikimedia LGBT: Research projects - How many LGBTs do we have on Wikipedia? (etc.)
• Wikimedia LGBT: Conferences (getting more involved in planning/supporting Wikimania, Diversity Conference, etc)
• How to change the greater Wikimedia community perceptions about Africa and African communities (don't even know that local language Wikipedias are available)
• Address challenges faced by African working groups with AffComm (most have been trying to form for 2 years; is AffComm doing enough to support them? figure out what's keeping them from forming)
• Address challenges of doing volunteer work in Africa and how to overcome these (motivations)
• Address gender equality in African Wikimedia (increase in interest in chapter activities from women -- already seeing these with Ghana and South Africa, but how do you replicate that to other African communities?)
• Consider events (edit-a-thons, etc) to improve our coverage of transgender topics
• Educate our volunteers about transgender topics
• Improve the Wikiproject experience to make them more fun, social, easy to join, engage and acknowlege more contributions
• Writing success stories (showing diverse editors, or successful programs)
• Mentorship programs to make editing fun
• Affiliated user group: let's form a Wikimedia gender gap/diversity group
• Monthly hangouts with various open source organizations working on diversity, to share solutions and hold each other accountable
• Creating new private gender_gap mailing list
• Organize special events for women
• Use scholarships, friendly space, and other methods for encouraging more diversity at our conferences
• Expand monthly "women edit" sessions beyond German Wikipedia
• Campaigns to encourage people to add to Wikidata (this can be a basis for determining what articles are missing and needed to encourage more representative content in many many languages)
• Plan a Teahouse for your language of Wikipedia
• Women's leadership program development

A list of new ideas that the group brainstormed in this session: 1. synergy between Wikidata & Wikipedia 2. international user-group focused on gender 3. social-network that-group which is better than facebook 4. community leadership mentoring project 5. research project on diversity in Russian Wikimedia projects 6. adopter-user-dyk-structured approach 7. actionable research around support strategies around mental illness in our community 8. writing-class for readers of Wikipedia 9. igniting Wikiproject feminism

Systemic bias & wikidata: Do query on women scientists: easier on en-wiki, but harder on other languages: use wikidata to connect it all together. Also use other databases like VIAF. Consider which entries should be created. Pywikibot can bee used to do automated queries against wikidata. Next steps: Hard to commit to it, but could volunteer some time. Maybe next step is to put it on the mentored projects page on [] for use by the OBW [sp?] project.

Project plans we made today, and the next steps we have in mind (looking at https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ANewPages&namespace=200&tagfilter=&username= ) :

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Community_Leadership_Mentoring - written first draft, will come back in Jan after sabbatical and then get flamed on WM-L
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/WikiData_Game_with_a_Purpose - Game to make it easy for users to get started with micro-edits. Next steps:
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Gamified_GettingStarted
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Russian_Wikipedia_diversity_research - Russian Wikipedia diversity research: Conduct a survey like the WMF annuals survey: some difficulties: strage rules in RU which prevent us from getting funding from the WMF. so have to recognize themselves as a polling agent (like a spy). Culture in ru is different from global culture: females often identify as males to get their opinions taken seriously. So hard to measure. Had problem reachng out to people: people who signed up for the research may not be representative of the community. Too few people [] Translation issues: too few engaged volunteers. Activators so far have so far not convinced the others that it's valuable.

Next steps: Lvova wants to contact the WMF to find out what can be done to desig the survey. Hard to find out what is relevant to diversity. Needs help from WMF to pull out the data and create structure for the survey.

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Contributions_Dashboard
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Global_Gender_Gap_Group
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/WikiProject:_Mental_health - Next steps: flesh out the proposal some more: give some more detail.
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Writing_Class_for_readers_of_Wikipedia - Make a abstract guildline of the course and seek the community opinions to improve it. And get advice from the profeesional instructor