On 4 June 2012 13:34, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
I do believe that sexual harassment directed towards women does effect
the gender gap - perhaps not so much, but, after my Women and Wikimedia
Survey almost half of women did state that they were assaulted or harassed
on Wikipedia in some context and almost half said no, that's more than
women said a sexualized environment was impacting them. For me, this is
more deterimental then the accidental stumbling upon of porn on Wikipedia.
There have been moments in my Wikipedia-existence that I have wanted to
leave the community due to harassment, and I know I'm surely not the only
woman on this list who feels that way. I always like reading about how
people are handling situations like this on the internet, as I can only
learn from them.
So, whether it's deterring current or future editors, I do think it's
more relevant than pornography at this time.
But, perhaps I'm wrong!
-Sarah
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.
~Nathan