On 16 July 2015 at 22:25, Sarah (SV) slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote: ...
None of that answers your question, though, namely why it's worse on Wikipedia than on other websites. Sarah
Just to emphasize that based on experience rather than hard statistics, patterns of harassment and the perception of harassment vary significantly across Wikimedia projects. The project with the most 'visible' problems is the English Wikipedia, there have been troubling claims of harassment and discrimination at a personal level in a few other language Wikipedias, but with most projects having no obvious problems of this type.
If a project has a small community, then the dynamics are different, perhaps there is a greater sense of "being known". At the same time, on the large international/multi-language projects, though there is trolling or disruption from time to time, this is rarely a demonstrable issue of intentional discrimination. As someone who is now mainly known for my contributions to Commons, I find the community there much more accepting of mistakes of language, as there is no presumption that anyone has English as a first language, and a general awareness that contributors come from a highly varied set of cultural backgrounds and this cultural gap is bound to cause misunderstanding and tensions from time to time.
A slightly tangential, but potentially useful parallel, is how often maps cause bitter debates and some "revert-wars" on Commons. I created a real-time weekly report to track contentious cases[1], but even though these debates can contain fundamental disagreements based on politics and religious bias, once a mediator has time to explain that all points of view can be expressed (as the mission of Commons allows for all useful variations of maps to be published, without judging which is "right") then on-project arguments dry up. Whether this way of seeing the community, as viewpoints that may not need to be resolved in order for all parties to contribute to knowledge, can provide an insight into mediation on other projects, I have no idea.
Links 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/SignificantReverts
Fae