I've looked into this a bit. The page history is difficult to interpret,
because it now shows non-contiguous edits as contiguous (a side effect of
the attending administrator trying to delete versions that contained
copyright violations and keep ones that didn't), but the upshot is that the
content of the article that was being reverted was an extremely close
paraphrasing of a 2009 book called *The Library: An Illustrated History *by
Stuart Murray (it's available in Google Books in the US, but I can't figure
out how to link directly to it). The article did cite this work as a
source, but represented the Wikipedia text as the article author's own (it
did not enclose any of the copied text in quotations, and even if it had,
we're not permitted to wholesale-copy others' work). That's a pretty clear
violation of Wikipedia's copyright policy (<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COPYVIO>)t;), and it looks like people
did try to explain that on the user's talk page but it just wasn't coming
through clearly, for whatever reason. I do not think the onwiki portion of
this situation had anything to do with the gender of the contributors.
All of that, however, is quite apart from Kathleen's point about how women
can be more easily driven away by criticism and aggression. Almost all of
us made mistakes as new editors (and continue to make mistakes as old
editors!), and how those mistakes are responded to - and how we, in turn,
interpret those responses - can very easily sway whether we stay or go.
-Fluffernutter
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Derric Atzrott <datzrott(a)alizeepathology.com
wrote:
One especially
disturbing event was a student editing the entry on the
national library of Pakistan. Someone claimed she was violating
copyright and deleted her work. it was even deleted from the history
logs somehow. I went to the library and added a number of citations
to strengthen the entry. These, too, were deleted claiming copyright.
Someone just DID NOT want that entry edited. This kind of experience
discourages people and in my teaching it seems to discourage women
more than men.
Do you know what admin it was? I'd love to hear their rationale and
perhaps bring up some type of discussion on-wiki about them if their
deletions were inappropriate.
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott
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