Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/economy of diversity

Session: Ting Chen // The economy of Diversity

Abstract

Nothing is for free, except Wikipedia. Diversity is also not for free. The discussion aims to answer the following questions: What is the price? To which cost the Wikimedia movement is ready to pay that price? What is the benefit and to which benefit can the Wikimedia movement get out of that price?

Starting point / Insights

• Everything has price
• Need to work hard, cost energy
• How much effort? how much you get?

If you want more diverse community, some will benefit, some will suffer from change

Changing the rules is challenging; requires community buy-in for changing rules, and that is hard.

Some programs work well in some places, not so well in others

Costs can be high. Example: Pune Pilot of education program in India; everyone was excited about it up-front because it could bring diversity to Wikipedia, but when students added copyvios, the program was deemed a diaster and it seemed the cost of diversity was too high.

Examples where diversity brings concrete benefits:

• Git - diversity in user community forced change to hard-coded software problem of not being able to change names
• Education Program in Germany - female students added high-quality content to German Wikipedia
• Chapters - Wiki Loves Monuments, Wikidata
• Script coversion - enabling contributions from non-Latin scripts (e.g., Chinese)

Challenges

What do we need to pay for the diversity and how much are we willing to pay?

• Change brings cost.
• Diversity initiatives cost money.
• Openness in a closed space (conflict in values)
• VisualEditor (makes it easier for diverse people to contirbute, but power users dislike it -- usability vs. freedom of function.)
• People who have a strong mindset may feel alientated.
• Net effect is we should take in more diverse editors than we lose experienced editors opposed to diversity -- where do we draw the line? How do we keep this balanced?

Nothing is black and white - we don't want diversity at any cost; difficult balance.