Jimmy Wales told civilsociety.co.uk he will be "very unhappy" if the governance overhaul at Wikimedia UK does not go according to plan, and advised of the importance of gender diversity at a meeting of techies last night.

The Wikipedia founder was speaking at the Tech Hub in the City of London, where he advised of a forward push to encourage more women volunteers into the movement:

"We know that at Wikipedia we have a real shortage of female editors. I can see here at the tech hub also there is a real shortage of females and those two things are related, because we do come from the tech world and the tech world tends to be male-dominated. We know that we have a shortage of women but that’s something we really feel needs to change, it’s really important to us that we have a more diverse community. Us male tech geeks, we’re quite knowledgable about some things but we have huge blind spots," said Wales.

On the English-language Wikipedia, surveys indicate around 9 to 13 per cent of editors are female, while a spokesman for Wikimedia UK advised that the figures for female volunteers elsewhere in the movement was around the same.

Wales added that "In terms of board diversity, we have 30-something jurisdictions, it is something that is definitely on everybody's agenda but how people are going about it is different in different places."

Wales said that he was "very enthusiastic that we should do a full transparent review" on the Wikimedia UK board after a number of conflicts of interest arose and a number of board members, including one of only two female members to have sat on the board, resigned. He said he was "very happy" to see that the review had been undertaken and that its implementation was "well in hand". "I would be very unhappy if it doesn't follow through correctly," he said, "So you've got me saying I'm gonna keep an eye of everything and make sure everything goes well," he added.

Filling the gender gaps

Undertaken by Compass Partnership the review was the first of its kind into any chapter of the movement. Published last month, it made 50 recommendations, including increasing the size of the board and allowing for three co-opted trustees to join. Jon Davies, chief executive of the charity, said that this would provide a great opportunity to "fill the gaps" on the board, because elected trustees, of which there will be seven, tend to be heavily involved in the movement already, and tend to be men.

Wikimedia UK has had 16 separate board members since 2008, two of whom have been female. The charity addressed this matter in its advertisement for the charity's upcoming open day where prospective trustees will meet the current board, specifying that it would "particularly welcome female applicants as we currently have no female trustees". Since placing the advert have so far been 14 expressions of interest in becoming a trustee, at least four of which are female, the charity advised.

Wikimedia UK recently announced the appointment of Katie Chan as volunteer support organiser. Davies said he hopes Chan's appointment will be instrumental in encouraging more females into the movement, and therefore feeding the chain up to the board.

Speaking with civilsociety.co.uk Chan said that her appointment was not a progressive step, because she's "not a typical female editor". "I've been involved heavily for eight years," she said. Further, she said the issue of diversity in the Wikipedia movement is not just about women, but also about geography. Participation in the UK chapter of Wikipedia, which is also one of the largest in the world, is heavily concentrated in the South East of England she advised, saying there has only ever been one event held in Scotland, a conference in Edinburgh in 2008. 

Chan said the upcoming challenge for Wikimedia UK is to "turn readers into editors, donors into volunteers".

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