All of the WMF materials, and all of our staff interviews, were clear: WMF prioritizes addressing gaps in participation by women and people in the Global South. However, TLP researchers were surprised to find that in our survey of committee members, those concerns ranked at the bottom of the priorities list in survey responses. In our survey, 25% of respondents ranked "|ncrease participation in the Global South" to be a 1 or 2 on the scale of 1-5 with 5 being most important. For "Decrease the gender gap," 32% chose a 1 or 2. While this survey doesn't represent the opinions of all committee members, it did raise a question for us: are the committee members truly on the same page as WMF staff about organizational priorities? Is more committee training necessary in order to achieve the organizational goals?
Staff also reported that 23% of committee members are female, and 77% male.[1] While this number clearly reflects unequal gender representation, it is an improvement from the gender-gap in the overall Wikipedia editor community[2]—one of the representation issues that Wikimedia Foundation seeks to address in its funding.
WMF is committed to having a diverse population editing, a diverse amount of content, and diverse readership. This means targeted grantmaking priorities to increase the community of editors, the content, and the readership in alignment with WMF goals. Staff know that meeting the strategic goals will require significant cultural and structural shifts at Wikimedia Foundation and throughout the movement. Meeting the organizational goals will require expanding the community to welcome new contributors who don't share same the technical or cultural backgrounds of those already present, says Anasuya Sengupta, "in a way that continues to keep our values, and does not get us co-opted." She continues, "What does it mean for the Wikimedia community that has largely been self-propelled and self-organized from the Global North - primarily the US and Europe - to see itself as being facilitators of a truly empowered emerging conversation in the Global South? How do people step in, step back, step away, step sideways? How do you share power in a way that truly can be transformative?"
While the strategic plan has a 2015 benchmark goal that 54% of visitors to Wikimedia projects will be in the Global South[3], the bigger work of these cultural shifts will likely be a long-haul process. Sengupta reflected that "Community change and cultural change are very, very difficult to do, and they happen on a different timeline than technological change." This point is illuminated by comments from Katy Love about the ways Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking will need to adjust to engage with innovation coming out of the Global South. Love reports that Wikipedia use in the Global South tends to vary from other regions in terms of how people access Wikipedia, how the content is created, and the kind of communities being created. And, in order for the Foundation to fund programs in the Global South, there must be Wikipedia communities - individuals and organizations - to make proposals. "We're really being very careful about not going in and setting up our own programs and then hoping that the community will follow," says Love, "We're trying to fund indigenous efforts, but we must first find them and help seed their work, and then help to expand and grow it."
- ↑ Staff survey results.
- ↑ A 2011 Survey showed that only 9% of editors were women, and 1% identified as Transgender. Grantmaking Overview, June 2014. Page 23.
- ↑ http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Increase_Reach
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