When I entered Wikipedia, I discovered a side of the internet I had
never encountered before, and intend never to encounter again; it's a
menacing and combative atmosphere that is extremely aversive to me.  I
recently read somewhere that Wikipedia regulars, as a rule, come from
usenet or from gaming, where that kind of atmosphere is apparently an
integral and desired part of the experience (I wouldn't know, having
no experience with either), and have brought that atmosphere to
Wikipedia.  As long as that atmosphere characterizes Wikipedia, it is
going to drive away anyone who doesn't thrive on that kind of
pugnacious taunting get-the-enemy-before-he-gets-you kind of attitude,
and I suspect a lot of women would be included in those who don't
thrive in that kind of environment.

I'm not singling your post out, Ism, but just quoting this as an example of 
a theme I've seen in other posts here and on the Times' discussions.

This is so *not* the Wikipedia I've been actively involved in for six years 
now. I allow that it exists for some people; I've never been one. I have had 
some intemperate moments in discussions and differences of opinion with 
other editors over article content or policy issues, but I have always kept 
our civility and no-personal-attacks policies in mind and have done my best 
to remain collegial. And by and large I've felt the same reciprocated by 
almost all the other editors involved.

I venture to suggest that perhaps this is because what I'm most interested 
in doing, and what I put a great deal of effort into, is creating, 
maintaining and improving content. When I hear (or rather, read) editors who 
complain about this, it's almost a given that you can look at their contrib 
histories and see very little in the way of recent edits to article 
namespace, and of those even fewer that aren't related to talk-page or 
policy-page discussions they were devoting most of their energy to.

Now, there are some people who are good at online conflict resolution, and 
they should not be discouraged from this type of editing. But there are 
plenty of other editors who let themselves get sucked into long discussions 
on AN/I or elsewhere that have little to do with them directly when they 
really ought to be doing what they came to Wikipedia to do. And I also grant 
that I don't regularly edit in any topic areas, such as those mirroring 
real-life ethnic or political conflicts, that have been notably rancorous.

That said, I recall at WikiXDC a couple of weekends ago one of my best 
Wikipedia moments ever. During the trivia contest at the end, one question 
was "This page, the largest one on the project, takes up an entire gigabyte 
when all of its archives are included." The answer, of course, is AN/I. When 
that was announced, someone near me, a longtime member of the community and 
active editor whom I'd not met or even known of before the event, asked 
"What's AN/I?"

I wish we had a hundred highly active editors who had to ask that question. 
A thousand, even.

And so to bring this back to the gendergap subject, I would pass along my 
observation that I have noticed in most of the female editors I am 
acquainted with who've been part of the project for a long time is that 
they, too, have concentrated primarily on the content areas they've been 
interested in and seem to keep the drama to a minimum.

Daniel Case 



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