Hi, Ashwin,
Thank you very much for your very kind and thoughtful response. I
sincerely appreciate it and will give your suggestions some thought.
Best,
Charlotte
On 6/23/11, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Charlotte,
>
> My only suggestion to you would be that if you loved editting and had a good
> time till you had this experience, don't let that spoil things for you. Best
> to stop that particular type of editting that attracted the Recent Changes
> troll and concentrate on those edits where you faced no opposition and
> continue to enjoy yourself. Typically most editors face such incidents early
> in their experience. If they are able to put it behind them, they are able
> to then learn to "navigate" the system and have fulfilling editting
> experiences. From what I read, you still have not got the happiness of
> seeing your article come to life in Mainspace. I would recommend you hang
> on, develop your article, move it into mainspace and enjoy Wikipedia.
>
>
> Warm regards,
>
> User:AshLin
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------
>
>>
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:50:38 -0400
>> From: Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com>
>> Subject: [Gendergap] As I was passing through...
>> To: gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Message-ID: <BANLkTimK-G9DLgdURpEOXo6LAhaBt-A3gQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Hello, everyone,
>>
>> I joined this list a couple days ago after reading through its archives,
>> which I embarked on after having come across the June 13th article in *The
>> Signpost* discussing the tiny percentage of self-identified female
>> Wikipedia
>> editors. I'd missed the January *New York Times* article and all that
>> flowed
>> from it (including this list) until I started systematically looking
>> through
>> the "community" section of Wikipedia for the first time about 10 days
ago,
>> to see what my options might be to address my own recent negative
>> encounters
>> with other Wikipedia editors, although I hadn't yet stumbled upon the
>> Wikipedia policies on "canvassing," etc., that apparently preclude any
>> disclosure on this list of such experiences in a potentially identifiable
>> manner.
>>
>> Having learned of that policy from reading this list's archives, I'm
>> accordingly using an email account not associated with my Wikipedia user
>> account, and I'm not disclosing my Wikipedia user name, so as not to
>> arouse
>> any concerns that I might be canvassing for support concerning that
>> situation, which I'm not. In fact, I've even concluded that it's not
worth
>> the aggravation of pursuing Wikipedia's dispute resolution process, which
>> from reading through **those** archives has impressed me as likely to be
>> little more than an exercise in futility (if not also masochism!). I'm
>> certainly neither fragile nor easily intimidated, but I prefer not to
>> waste
>> my valuable free time on such exercises, so I've now stopped editing
>> Wikipedia and -- with one foot out the door, the other soon to follow --
>> am
>> posting to this list now only because I hadn't seen anything its archives
>> that expressed anything close to some of my own thoughts about a few of
>> the
>> topics discussed, which might perhaps be of some value to at least some of
>> you who plan to continue in this effort.
>>
>> By way of background, I'm one of those older staying-at-home professional
>> mothers Sarah Stierch had suggested in February might constitute a
>> potentially fruitful demographic for female recruitment. I'm certainly no
>> "geek," although I've picked up just enough basic HTML code along
the way
>> so
>> as not to find Wikipedia's coding basics unduly daunting -- as long as I
>> had
>> the MoS "Cheat Sheet" handy. Well, aside from formatting references...
>>
>> I made my first few edits not quite 18 months ago, I believe, to an
>> article
>> about a park system I'd just been reading about, to which I made a few
>> gnome-like corrections without blowing the place up accidentally or
>> attracting notice. With that success in hand, I started drafting an
>> article
>> about a superb all-female dance company that a niece had recently
>> introduced
>> me to. After seeing them perform and coming to share her enthusiasm, I
>> tried
>> to learn a little more about their history, discovered there was no
>> comprehensive article about them I could find anywhere online (although
>> they
>> would clearly and objectively satisfy WP's notability criteria), and
>> decided
>> that drafting one myself could be a useful exercise in teaching myself
>> Wikipedia's coding and style conventions, while eventually benefiting
>> others
>> with the fruits of my research. I got about half-way finished with it in
>> my
>> userspace (utilizing the Article Wizard), then had to abandon the draft
>> (and
>> Wikipedia) a few days later due to some serious health problems one of my
>> children developed unexpectedly.
>>
>> I didn't return again until two months ago, when a discussion elsewhere
>> pointed me to another Wikipedia article (about whose subject I knew quite
>> a
>> bit) that was seriously deficient, so I signed in again for the first time
>> in 16 months or so, added a number of references to that article, expanded
>> it a bit and began "wikifying" it without generating any controversy
or
>> blowing the place up accidentally. I then encountered an egregious usage
>> error a few weeks later in another Wikipedia article that had badly
>> muddled
>> a sentence's meaning, and corrected it, again without generating any
>> controversy. I then checked for similar misuses of that and another
>> commonly
>> misused word on Wikipedia, discovered hundreds of examples, and so began
>> correcting them in gnome-like fashion over the next month or so while
>> watching films with my daughter after school and/or evenings and tracking
>> down some uncommon but needed public domain images for a few other
>> articles,
>> until I unluckily attracted the attention of a chauvinist (in the original
>> sense of the word) member of the "recent pages patrol" whose
truculence
>> and
>> devotion to Huggle greatly exceeded his grasp of correct [international]
>> English usage. What ensued persuaded me that my free time from now on
>> would
>> be *so* much better spent on volunteer projects other than Wikipedia (and
>> *
>> so* much better for my blood pressure!) that I'm not even going to bother
>> finishing the draft article about the dance company or upload the public
>> domain images I'd located. C'est la vie!
>>
>> Also by way of background, I'm a late-70s graduate of Harvard Law School,
>> now retired from a successful legal career, and studying legal history (a
>> long-deferred goal). The percentage of women in the two classes ahead of
>> mine at HLS was approximately 8%, but it doubled to 16% in my class, which
>> quite a lot of the male students and professors (all but one of whom were
>> male back then) found extremely threatening. I mention this because that
>> "abrupt increase" in female students at HLS had generated a very nasty
>> backlash from many of the men, and at each stage of our early careers many
>> members of my female cohort experienced that backlash repeatedly. I hope
>> that a similarly "abrupt increase" in the percentage of female
Wikipedia
>> editors doesn't generate a similar backlash toward them, but given my own
>> experiences, I recommend that those here working to increase female
>> participation brace themselves (and the new recruits), just in case.
>>
>> This has probably been far too long already for a number of folks on the
>> list, so I'll conclude for now and share my thoughts on hosting
>> pornography
>> on Wikipedia; recruiting Girl Scouts as editors; another potential
>> consideration not yet raised as to why the WMF should be concerned, I
>> suspect, about the relative dearth of female editors; bare-breastedness in
>> depictions of "Liberty"; etc., in another email or two, after I've
had a
>> chance to look over again a few archived emails that it may help to quote
>> or
>> refer to specifically.
>>
>> I'm using a middle name to post here given that the list is open-archived
>> on
>> the internet, that my recent unpleasant experiences on Wikipedia included
>> what I've concluded was harassment, and that I see no good reason to risk
>> subjecting my family to any such potential consequences due to my
>> participation on this list, however brief, so I will sign off for now just
>> as,
>>
>> Charlotte
>>