Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-06-05/In the media

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Gender gap If my memory serves me (and it does) research showed that women edited more contentious articles on Wikipedia than men. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:20, 5 June 2016 (UTC).[reply]

@Rich Farmbrough: does the effect survive removal of outliers? Link, please? EllenCT (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have dug a little into where the "avoiding conflict" came from: the article says "less comfortable with editing others’ work (a process which often involves conflict)," and the abstract of the study says "expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict)" - while Signpost says " factors such as women's inclination to avoid conflict (resulting in a greater reluctance to edit other people's work). In other words it appears (subject to reading the study itself) that chain of interpretation has moved a posited motivation into being an observed phenomenon. This type of re-writing is not unusual with social sciences, and not unheard of with hard sciences.

The paper with the "more contentious" result is Lam, et al.

We found that 5.20% of the “female” articles described in section 4.2 are protected, while just 2.39% of the “male” articles are protected, c2(1,N =23989)=129.1, p<0.001. Thus, articles that have a higher concentration of female editorship are actually more likely to be contentious than those with more males.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:35, 6 June 2016 (UTC).[reply]

100 million dollars is far too low, unless endowment fundraising is planned for multiple years. Please see e.g. [1] and meta:Talk:Endowment#Goal proposal. EllenCT (talk) 22:03, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- An endowment isn't going to free WMF from needing to go hat-in-hand on a regular basis, as much as we'd like to believe. Some years ago that question came up concerning our local public library (which at the time was a private non-profit), & it was revealed that endowment revenue produce somewhere between 5-10% of the revenue needed by a non-profit. (And when the library was taken over by the county, there was a brief struggle over control of the endowment -- one of the former trustees believed he could spend it better than the county could.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:29, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Why are we perpetuating BLP violations here? Just because The Daily Mail wants to talk about it doesn't mean we should as well. It doesn't matter if we put the BLP violation in quotation marks, we are still perpetuating it (twice in the same article), which is potentially damaging the reputation of the person under discussion. Kaldari (talk) 23:19, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- I went ahead and removed the specific attacks from the image caption. They are still in the article, however. Perhaps they should be removed there as well. Kaldari (talk) 23:27, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@EllenCT: I'll suggest that the WMF *not* try to use the endowment to fund itself in perpetuity. What that would do is insulate it from performing services beneficial to the public and potential donors. It could then become a self-perpetuating, self-indulgent monster over the next few decades. This type of thing has happened often with long-lived foundations. Also, we do not really know what society's needs will be in 30 years. Perhaps something like Wikipedia will not be needed - something better and cheaper may have replaced it. Let me give you an example of a foundation that started with a good purpose and lots of money, has had to change over time. In 1905 Milton Hershey founded the Hershey Trust Company to fund a school for white orphan boys from Pennsylvania who would be trained for basic mechanical and farming jobs. Wonderful as far as it goes, and I won't blame MH for limiting it to whites and boys - back then it would likely have been impossible to include blacks and girls in an overall program like this. Over time the Hershey Chocolate Company expanded rapidly, becoming huge. The trust owned the whole company at one time. They also ran out of Pennsylvania orphans. Today, they recruit single-parent children from the whole east coast (great as far as it goes), and spend more on each one than the best private schools. Then they fund 4 years of any US university for them. They also argue and occasionally get into trouble on how to split up the rest of the money. (In the 60s and 70s, blacks and girls were finally let in).
My point is not that Hershey Trust is good or bad, only that, even 40 years in the future you never know how the goals of the foundation will be changed - or should be changed.
I propose that the interest on the endowment should be able to "keep the lights on" for several decades in the future. We owe it to past editors to keep their work on the internet for at least 10 years. We also may lose potential partners (GLAMs, universities, etc.) unless they know that we have the resources to stay open for several decades.
But other than that, the WMF should be able to go to the public each year with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to keep on funding it. That will keep the WMF lean and relevant.
The principal of the endowment should only be used in cases of ultimate emergency - I believe the word in charity circles is exigency - the near equivalent of bankruptcy in the corporate world. If the WMF shows that it can't come up with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to fund it, then it will be time to change the management and use part of the endowment to give the new management a fair start.
If it looks like the foundation won't have any prospects of being useful or relevant (remember - large changes occur over decades), then the endowment can be used to keep the then current text up on the internet for another 10 years.
$100-150 million should be able to accomplish all of that. I assume something like a 3% return over inflation which will likely be the case in the long term from a basic, no-brainer, index strategy. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Heh, Smallbones, you could have used the example of endowments set up to fight tuberculosis. There was a point in the 1950s where the disease was considered extinct & non-profits were stuck with all of this money they couldn't re-allocate to other worthy causes. Anyway, for reasons I mention above I doubt an endowment could provide more than 10% (at most). Good for funding special projects or covering short-term shortfalls, & an endowment would provide a place to put interest earned on unspent donations. (IIRC, the Foundation currently has tens of millions sitting idle for months; their current practice to keep onhand one year's budget against donation shortfalls.) Otherwise, your points make a lot of sense Smallbones. -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]