Grants:IdeaLab/Build more female friendly computers and software

Inspire campaign

Build more female friendly computers and software

Computers have been invented mostly by male brains for male users.

idea creator• Salix

volunteer• LidiadeBorges

this project needs...

volunteer

developer

designer

community organizer

created on11:00, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

20 % of women in computer science (in Europe at least) = 20 % women in Wikipedia.

What is your solution?

It's not a question of pink flowers or lace background, but more a question of logical approach and categorical organisation, less attractive to many women than aesthetic and usability. Men are thinking folders or categories, women boxes or rooms. Men are thinking confrontations or performances, women prefers friendliness and mutual aid. Wikipedia is suffering of an excess of testosterone : exhausting and repellent for women!

Goals

• Use friendliness and mutual aid as a way to attract women, and retain them, the same way we are already using competition and power tools to attract men. (eg : provide a way to "tag" friendly contributors to be able to remind them next time, or find a way to build friendly teams to get help (discussion pages accessible only to the mutually agreed friends ?) far from the sometimes hostile or ironic environment of the vilage pumps...
• Find other ways to visualize articles, and to group them, than the regular one by one page display or the classical categorisation system : fanned out, notebook pages, drop box, infobox accumulation, image and introduction accumulation...
• Find ways to provide custom "stickers" or "post it" markers or any other personal gadgets
• Find other ways to manage keywords in order to foster intuition and spontaneous contribution : thesaurus, neighbor lexical field...

Get Involved

Participants

• Volunteer Many women have biases against the computer, because men invented a enmity between women and technology. I want to erase that invention. LidiadeBorges (talk) 00:50, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Endorsements

• The idea behind this project draft is interesting. I would like to hear more about how solutions could be created within Wikimedia projects and I am positive this can be developed further. Maybe start with content improvement by portraying relevant issues surrounding this topic in Wikipedia entries: Make visible and accessible on Wikipedia what experts have said about alternatives to existing machines and infrastructure. --C.Koltzenburg (talk) 20:21, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

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