> 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