It’s not my job to fix your problem: re: Wikiversity and Wikipedia
I have issues with Wikiversity and Wikipedia. There is stuff I’d like to do on Wikipedia. A lot of this stuff has to do with content and public visibility. The problem is that the backend of both Wikiversity and Wikipedia have cultural and demographic problems. When I talk about using Wikipedia and Wikiversity and a need to externally organise information and create spaces along side them to do internal projects on them, I often feel like I’m being advised to ignore what I see as a need to create a safe organising off those sites and instead use them. I can’t. There are just too many issues with them involving lack of female participation, lack of female administrators, a prevalence of women who prefer working with men to the exclusion of women, an abundance of people who think if you can’t survive the rough and tumble nature of Wikipedia you shouldn’t be editing it, organisational bias in favour of men, an inability to do original research (on Wikipedia), a lack of project wide ethics standards (on Wikiversity), inability to lock pages to allow them to maintain their integrity, lack of a community for the topic I’m working on already existing on these sites. These are all huge hurdles.
I can think of ways to address them while having project needs met off WMF. People appear to suggest that if the above are issues, I shouldn’t create space off Wikimedia Foundation projects to overcome these shortcomings but rather, I should spend my time fixing what is wrong with Wikipedia and Wikiversity to meet my goals. I don’t want to do that. I don’t care to do that. It is not my job to fix those problems. It isn’t even my concern. My concern in this particular case is how to best promote research into neglected women’s sport histories. Wikipedia and Wikiversity are tools, community and content that would be available to this project. It isn’t the be all and end all goal.
If Wikiversity and Wikipedia want to attract academics and get more projects to consider using these sites as the primary bases for research centres that support open content and open communities, it is their job to fix these problems or to work with people who would like to use them but aren’t currently doing so. It isn’t mine: Mine is content and history and a completely different community than WMF.
