On 4 June 2012 13:34, Nathan <nawrich@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch@gmail.com> 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