Wikipedia:Subject Recruitment Approvals Group/Requests/GenderAndElections

GenderAndElections

Contact Information

• Real name: Paolo Massa
• Wikipedia account: phauly (talk) 17:26, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
• Affiliation: Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italy - SoNet group http://sonet.fbk.eu

Previous work

A list of references to my previous work is at http://www.gnuband.org/papers/

I worked mainly on trust and reputation while I moved to social networking and Wikipedia recently. We have presented "The hidden layer of online collaboration: The social network and functions of the user talk pages on Venetian wikipedia" at Sunbelt conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis and submitted other papers about Wikipedia to other conferences (Internet Research conference and CyberPsychology

The question is: does gender has an impact in outcomes in elections for adminship?

For this reason, we need to know the gender of Wikipedians who were candidated to become admins. We tried looking for the templates User:UBX/male and User:UBX/female but only 4 admins use it. We also used the API for getting the gender field in the profile but, out of 1744 admins, only around 400 have filled this field. But we would benefit from a larger coverage, i.e. possibly knowing the gender of 100% of candidates.

So we would like to ask it directly to this sample of Wikipedians. Admins and candidates are, possibly, more willing to contribute to a extremely short survey (just indicate your gender).

We will then parse RfA pages such as Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Connormah_3 automatically parsing who voted for whom and how. We will then run statistical regressions against those data to see if there is a correlation between gender and success/failure in RfA.

Possible harms to Wikipedia/Wikipedians

The question is about gender so it might be too personal. We make it very clear in the text that the Wikipedian is not forced to answer of course, and the answer can be sent via email and treated anonymously.

Moreover we restrict our sample to candidates and admins that might be already more willing to take part in research aiming at understanding better how Wikipedia works.

Admins are currently around 1800 so the total sample could be around 3000 to 4000, I didn't check the precise numbers yet.

Recruitment message text

Survey on gender

Hi! I'm Liria Veronesi (User:Akoha77) and, together with Paolo Massa (User:Phauly), I'm starting an empirical research on "Gender and votes in requests for adminship". For this reason, we need to know the gender of Wikipedians who were candidated to become admins.

We tried looking for the templates User:UBX/male and User:UBX/female but only 4 admins use it. We also used the API for getting the gender field in the profile but, out of 1744 admins, only around 400 have filled this field. But we would benefit from a larger coverage, i.e. possibly knowing the gender of 100% of candidates.

Thus, would you be so kind to write your gender [Male / Female / Other], together with a text comment if you want, on my talk page at User_talk:Akoha77? If you prefer to send me this information privately, you can send me an email, the information will be kept confidential and never shared.

Thanks!

User sample criteria

We are interested in asking only to candidates for adminships, both successful (around 1800 admins) and unsuccessful. I'm able to create the sample with scripts. If it is complicated to put up the bot, I can do the work by hand. In fact I can generate automatically the links for writing the message on selected user talk page, then I only need to click on them and I can do some each day to keep under control the process. Of course if instrumenting the bot is very easy and already in place, I would prefer going that way.

Publication of results

In International Journals, both about gender and about online collaboration.