P.S. I echo Sue's sentiments. :)
Welcome, and thanks for your articulate letter.
Andreas
--- On Thu, 23/6/11, Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [Gendergap] As I was passing through...
To: gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Thursday, 23 June, 2011, 1:50
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
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