Hi Kevin,

My apologies it was Carol Moore responding to Sarah Stierch earlier on, I mentioned it from memory, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004397.html 

This was was the quote, which I ought to have looked it up first:
> I was once blocked for a week for asking an editor whether his overwhelming history of editing in articles about bondage of females was related to his obvious and annoying harassment of me on a noticeboard, after which I mentioned the issue on the Wikia Feminism page which I thought was a part of Wikipedia (duh).  The latter evidently was the bigger "no no".

As for the top-down thing, there's an old joke I know:
> A man's driving along and he pulls up near a field and asks the farmer for directions, and the farmer says, "Well I wouldn't start from here if I were you."

I was really just musing that there have been so few women editors for such a long period of time on Wikipedia that the structure of administrators / senior administrators / foundations / boards etc. is quite striking. If Wikipedia had its time over with 50:50 male to female ratio I wonder if it would look quite like that.

Marie

Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 12:11:49 -0700
From: kgorman@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Moderation and the future of Gendergap-L

Hi Marie -

Given the fact that you're talking about men's rights activists, by Sarah, I assume you mean Sarah Stierch?  Both Sarah and myself (we were some of the earlier Wikipedians to really infuriate MRA's) suffered a good bit of harassment at various points as a result of our engagement with them.  We're definitely far from the only people to have experienced harassment by MRA's or various other groups, and both myself, Sarah, and a large number of other contributors have experienced at least some harassment severe enough that I've thought for some time that the Wikimedia Foundation should attempt to create some sort of contributor support system (as was most recently brought up as an idea by Lane Raspberry of WP:MED.)  None of it was at all fun for me to handle, and some of it took significant labor to deal with - both emotional labor and labor as in actually having to explain to targeted associates of mine the back story behind the calls and emails they were getting - and I have significant systemic privilege that makes the same set of situations much easier and less threatening to deal with than many other people do. I agree that harassment of contributors, by fringe elements of the men's rights movement as well as other fringe groups is a serious problem and that both the Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation need to come up with a better way of triaging and minimizing the harm that it causes our contributors.

That said, I do want to be clear in saying that Sarah, to the best of my knowledge, has never been suspended from a position of any sort for making off-wiki comments.  She was a moderator of this list for quite some time, but eventually stepped down because this can at times be a very very very very draining list to moderate - if she ever wanted to become a mod again here, I'd give her a mod bit back in a heart beat, but I really doubt she will ever want to again. She's still an active contributor (and administrator) on the English Wikipedia, and still hosts talks and editathons about our movement's demographic gaps pretty regularly.  She does no longer work for the WMF, but the fact that she no longer works there isn't a result of her political views or offsite comments, and a great number of current WMF staffers still have tremendous respect for her.

I was near the pre-scheduled end-date of an internship at the Wikimedia Foundation right around the time that Sarah and I riled up men's rights activists for the first time (it's been a number of years at this point) through making the article about their movement more in compliance with ENWP's encyclopedic content policies than it previously had been.  It was definitely an issue that came up with me in the office that week (partly because it had made Jezebel; partly because people were contacting the office,) and I will say that I don't think I can fault the behavior of a single WMF staff member regarding the situation.  They were tremendously more accomodating than I can imagine most other workplaces being in such circumstances - the rest of my time there included a large number of people repeatedly making sure that I was doing okay/checking if I needed anything/thanking me for publicly standing up for what I thought was right.

I don't want to dissect past situations in great detail, but I do think the mod team has made significant errors in how we've chosen to moderate the list in the past (and I accept a plurality if not an outright majority of blame for that,) that was significantly detrimental to fostering a free, open, and safe environment where conversations related to the purpose of the list could occur.  We can't change the past, but hopefully we'll be able to help guide the list in a more beneficial direction in the future.

Best,
Kevin Gorman


On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 11:06 AM, Marie Earley <eiryel@hotmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure if I would agree with the word 'error', Wikipedia happens in a context, which is where all these discussions began, with the cautionary tale article about Quora http://www.zdnet.com/quoras-misogyny-problem-a-cautionary-tale-7000030762/

Away from Wikipedia I'm a member of the No More Page 3 campaign trying to get rid of the topless glamour model photo which is published in Murdoch's UK Sun newspaper. The petition reads:
"We are asking David Dinsmore to drop the bare boobs from The Sun newspaper. We are asking very nicely. Please, David. No More Page 3. etc."
The petition is approaching 200,000 signatures and there are NMP3 t-shirts, media attention but our Facebook page gets hit by trolls. Blocking is a last resort by admins but it becomes inevitable. The MRA has set up a Laughing at No More Page 3 Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Laughing-at-No-more-page-3/262437737259691 page and take pictures / posts from NMP3's page and re-post them with personally insulting comments. When you click on the names of those posting comments their other "liked" groups invariably include various humanist societies and Dawkins Foundation.

I entered "Wikipedia" and "male rights activists" and got this http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/fighting-wikipedia-corruption-censorship/ which has a comments section at the bottom with current Wikipedia members mentioning other Wikipedia editors by name and talk of a great conspiracy at work against them, if Sarah was suspended for her off-site comments then how is this permissible?

The same website has an article suggesting the compulsory sterilizing of women before they reach child-bearing age so they are unable to take the escape hatch 'soft-option' of exiting the workplace to raise them http://www.avoiceformen.com/women/workplace-inequality-when-one-side-has-an-escape-hatch/

They group are becoming increasingly well organized and have just finished their first conference in Detroit http://www.avoiceformen.com/international-conference-on-mens-issues-detroit-june-26-28-2014/

Wikipedia and society as a whole need to recognise the shift in sand and what a growing threat groups like these are.

Marie

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 12:28:49 -0700
From: kgorman@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Gendergap] Moderation and the future of Gendergap-L


Hi all -

Currently, Gendergap-l only has two active moderators - in the past, we've usually had at least three. After talking with Liz, we'd both like to bring on at least one additional active moderator. Please drop us a note if you'd be interested in taking on such a role.  It's worth knowing ahead of time that at times moderating the list can involve significant emotional labor; that said, moderating the list also allows you the chance to more actively help make positive change in the environment of the list.

In the past, many productive discussions have occurred on this list, but over time the number of such discussions has fallen greatly, and a lot of valuable contributors now either contribute far less frequently than they used to, or have just outright unsubscribed.  We think that a lot of this is related to how the list has been (or rather, mostly how it has barely been) moderated in the past. Historically, there's been a lot of reluctance among mods, both past and present, to take aggressive mod actions - this is a Wikimedia list, and the background that comes with that generally stigmatizes the idea of significant moderation.

We feel like the reluctance on the part of Gendergap mods to strongly actively moderate in a way that tries to ensure that the list is a safe space for contributors has been a significant error - a balance has to be maintained between liberty and hospitality (to borrow some terminology from Sumana's keynote at WikiConference USA [1],) and we don't feel like we've gotten that balance right in the past.  To be clear, since I'm the longest standing gendergap mod (besides for Sue, who generally doesn't take part in moderation discussions,) a lot of what I mean in the former sentence is that I have personally made significant errors that have contributed substantially to the general feeling that this list is not a safe space for contributors.

Moving forward, we'd like to change how we moderate the list in order to try to make it a list where contributors consistently feel safe in contributing.  Over the next few days, the mods will be having an internal discussion about how we think we can best go about doing this, and we'd also like to start a discussion on the broader list about how we can best go about ensuring that this is a safe and productive list while staying in line with the general values of the Wikimedia movement.

This email is intentionally sparse on details - mostly because we haven't talked amongst ourselves enough to have a solid grasp of what the details will look like, and also because we don't feel we can fully form a new moderation policy without feedback from list members. There are a couple things we're already more or less sure of.  The moderation won't be draconian; we understand that everyone makes mistakes and think that most mistakes represent learning opportunities - we aren't looking for reasons to kick people off the list.  At the same time, members whose behavior consistently (or in some circumstances, presence) on the list makes other members feel unsafe or we feel are inhibitory to open, safe, productive discussion occurring will not remain on the list. As list mods, we haven't followed the list as closely as we should have in the past; we will be in the future.  

And, as a major change, we will also be adopting an explicit set of community guidelines, which we haven't had in the past. Within the pretty immediate future, we'll be posting a starting set of guidelines on an appropriate wiki that will incorporate our thoughts, the thoughts of list members, and best practices adopted from other groups (likely including significant content from Geek Feminism's example statement of purpose for communities including men - [2].)  Once we have draft guidelines up, we'll be inviting all list members to contribute to them, although the mod team (including any new mods we recruit) will have the final say over their contents.  They'll also only be guidelines - we won't take action over everything that violates their letter, and equally, we may take action on some things that aren't included in the guidelines as they come up - we just intend them to serve as a basic template for moving forward.

Best,
Kevin Gorman
For the moderators


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