On 16 July 2015 at 22:25, Sarah (SV) <slimvirgin(a)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
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae