QUOTE(thekohser @ Fri 3rd December 2010, 2:21pm)
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This thread and the other one about Sue's visit to the BBC should go in that "Worth Discussing" folder. Mods?
Done!
The thing the BBC is focusing on here, namely that
the WMF needs women, isn't really what Sue Gardner is addressing when she evasively answers the relevant questions. Her evasiveness isn't surprising based on what we know about Sue and the other WMF executives, but if we paraphrase the exchange somewhat, it looks like this:
Sue Gardner: Most of our donors are small donors, right? Big donors don't get special treatment. Most donors are also editors, right?
Interviewer: What do the editors look like? (i.e., demographically)
Sue Gardner: Most editors are grad students in their 20's, but our editors are very male, and we're not happy about that. We're trying to recruit more women.
Interviewer: How?
Sue Gardner: Women are more responsive to requests for help than men, right? So we're just going to ask them to help us, on each page. If we try to recruit people by asking for help in this manner, that will naturally balance our demographic, right?
In fact, what Sue Gardner is saying here is utter nonsense.
Unfortunately, the interviewer doesn't follow this up by pointing out that they've been "asking for help" in this way since Day One, with template boxes and such on article pages saying "you can help by expanding this article," etc., and yet after ten years the editors are
still only 13 percent female. She's saying that if they don't do anything differently from how they've always done it, their percentage of women will actually go up
precipitously - a whopping 37 percent increase achieved by their doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And the interviewer, being an overly polite Englishwoman, doesn't question this.
In fact, even if women do indeed respond more favorably to "requests for help" (which I don't really question) the
overwhelming majority of participants, both new and retained, will still be males - drawn to Wikipedia because they enjoy conflict and self-ego-stroking, and they will
by necessity drive out most females, who IMO are less inclined to aggressive, anti-social, or just-plain-asinine behavior.
And finally:
Interviewer: Is there any connection between Wikipedia and WikiLeaks?
Sue Gardner: No. We just use vaguely-similar software, is all.
So here, she's simply lying, which
should cast doubt over everything else she says in the interview - again, assuming people are actually paying attention.