I've lost Daniel's response, but need to correct one last important misunderstanding and then I hope I'll have done.
The response doesn't address the main point of my post, about passive agression being just as aggressive and offensive as active aggression, but I trust the point was taken, and I appreciate the more straightforward nature of this latest response.
But there seems to be a significant misunderstanding about what I mean by areas where vested interests work tirelessly to advance agendas. I'm not talking about areas of real life strife and controversy, goodness; I wouldn't think of editing in such areas. Areas like Israel-Palestine, climate change, intelligent design, abortion --- I wouldn't go near those political minefields. But I think it's worth noting that those areas differ materially from the areas I'm talking about, in that in those political areas there are reliable sources on both sides and the question is how to negotiate neutrality between contradictory sources.
What I'm talking about is areas where the consensus of research literature is unequivocal and clear but where vested interests continually remove scientific literature reviews and replace them with blogs or promotional literature or other less reliable sources, in the interest of promoting unscientific or pseudoscientific claims, most often to serve a financial interest. It's like trying to bail out the ocean with a teacup to keep those articles neutral, and there's little help from anyone on the project; when one of these topic areas goes to ArbCom it's most often someone on the side of the encyclopedia rather than on the side of the vested interests that is banned for becoming frustrated and losing their temper. Occasionally an editor that is seen as too close in a COI way to the interest that's being served by the POV edits is banned, but as I've said before, there are always more where those came from.
As I've said before, this is all somewhat off the topic of gender, except that it may be that women are less interested in getting into the mud and duking it out with people who are so invested in their cause that they will take the fight out into other parts of the internet and one finds oneself (thankfully identified only by a fake Wikipedia name, but still) vilified and misrepresented in odd corners of the web. I don't know about other women, but I know for sure I don't like it at all, and am very sorry that I opened myself to this kind of smear campaign by innocently trying to improve a couple of Wikipedia articles that were not accurately representing reliable sources. Knowing what I know now, I would never click on that "edit this page" button, and I urge everyone I know to stay far away. Now, I'm done. I appreciate the indulgence and patience of the list.
Woonpton
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap