In the context of Wikipedia editing, what does it mean to have been "assaulted"?
That's a good question, Nathan. In my workplace, we classify assaults as physical and verbal; I suppose from the WMF-project perspective, we'd be looking at (mainly) verbal assaults, either onwiki or via email.
There have been some genuine, documented stalking situations (in the true sense of the word, with off-wiki contacts that include phone calls and sometimes even a physical presence), but they are presumably quite rare.
I'd also say that neither are limited to being directed at female users; however, particularly given the small number of women editing on the projects, I suspect that they are disproportionately at the receiving end of such behaviour. I have no evidence that this is the case, though.
Risker/Anne
Ok. To ask a follow-up, and I'm sorry if this is a dense question but I genuinely don't have the answer, what is an example of a verbal assault? I understand the wiki-parameters of harassment, and can recognize insults and rude behavior etc., but I'm just not sure what I would classify as an assault among purely text-based exchanges.