Message: 2
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:50:38 -0400
From: Charlotte J <ravinpa2@gmail.com>
Subject: [Gendergap] As I was passing through...
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <BANLkTimK-G9DLgdURpEOXo6LAhaBt-A3gQ@mail.gmail.com>
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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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