Talk:Diversity

Thoughts on Diversity

I wrote these up at Diversity Conference. Maybe they can be incorporated in some useful way. Cheers,

The meaning and importance of diversity

As a movement with the mission of sharing the sum of all human knowledge with every person on the planet, Wikimedia's community should be a mirror and representation of the rich diversity that exists in human society.

Diversity is about fostering equality and inclusion across all cross-sections of age, gender, sexual orientation, language, nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, geography, physical ability, psychological condition, and other types of variety. Diversity in the Wikimedia movement means that we are not only welcoming and supportive to people from all variety of backgrounds and types, but that we actively invite, support, and engage diverse contributors in building our projects and advancing our mission.

Encouraging diversity ensures that no people are excluded from our projects. Encouraging diversity means that we hold having a diversity of contributors as a great strength in achieving our goal of sharing knowledge.

People come to our projects with different backgrounds, views, styles, and experiences. The more points of view we have, the better able we will be to reflect the full diversity of human knowledge, and to represent it completely and fairly. The power of crowds is greater when there are a diversity of voices adding to the conversation, and the power of crowds is greatest when the whole crowd is represented rather than just a sub-group of it. Each person is a part of the human crowd, and each person should be represented in developing humanity's shared source of free knowledge.

When we talk about gaps in diversity on Wikipedia, we mean that we are missing people. We are losing out on the full breadth and depth of human interests and perspectives. We will be better able to share knowledge with the world when we are drawing on the strengths and talents and views of more people from more backgrounds.

Encouraging diversity is not about disparaging existing contributors, or anyone being "wrong"; it's about adding and amplifying more voices, especially those that have been left out thus far. Exclusion is not always intentional--indeed, it's often completely accidental--but we are still better off and better able to share knowledge when we include more people in that process.

Ocaasi (talk) 16:24, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

These are great! how shall we incorporate them? Siko (WMF) (talk) 09:40, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I've made a pass on both images/layout and also incorporating some of the above points. I need someone else to go through and do a thorough iteration on the new style/content. I think some pieces are worth keeping but I need some new eyes on the suggestions to really integrate them well. Cheers! Ocaasi (talk) 16:40, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Awesome to have the images too! I made a pass through the copy and moved some bits around. See what you think :) Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

LGBT?

There are some statistics in the "Known diversity issues" section of the page. Are there any statistics about the LGBT community? --Another Believer (talk) 22:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there are - but I think it would be lovely to add more stats to that section, if people have them! Siko (talk) 05:23, 6 December 2013 (UTC)