Strange attendees you have there in NYC! Though I have never
experienced anything like what is described here, I can say we get
some strange attendees over here as well, and last year I experienced
some highly uncomfortable moments in January of 2012 during the
Teylers meetup to celebrate the New Year. We had posted a general
notice rather than the usual one to logged in users and we got some,
uh, interesting people in attendance. We had a backstage pass followed
by drinks in a local bar, and the less-museum inclined skipped the
museum and joined us there, but not all of them! I was a "Wikimedian
assistant" accompanying one of the groups being led around the museum,
and to my astonishment there were people picking up artefacts to look
at them. When I explained that they should just look and don't touch,
they seemed surprised but admitted they "had never been in a museum
before".
Since the Teylers opens its doors for free at least three times a
year, these people came to ogle Wikipedians, I think. Once they were
told, they kept on opening cupboards and leaning on cabinets and so
forth, so I was very relieved when we finally left the building. I
never felt so embarrassed about being a Wikipedian! After discussing
this with other "groupleaders" we concluded that we should never use
the general notice for meetups anymore, only the notice for logged in
users.
2013/6/26, Sydney <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>om>:
I think that both of these situations are a
significant problem and are
rooted in the same apathy on the part of Wikipedia community.
Both of these situations can be reversed by people who are motivated to stop
it from happening.
I challenge the folks in the NYC Chapter to make their events welcoming all
people.
I see it as a positive sign that this being discussed by folks in the
Chapter. This needs to be a priority and not go to the back burner when the
media coverage ends.
Thanks everyone for raising it here.
Sydney
User:FloNight
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 24, 2013, at 9:30 AM, Katherine Casey <fluffernutter.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
For what it's worth, I have not found that
wolf-whistles and aggressive
questioning, like the situation described in the article, are typical of
any Wikipedia meetups that I've been to (and I'm an active member of
Wikimedia NYC, which is what's being described there, though I was not at
the meetup in question). It is not uncommon for there to be creepiness,
especially of the type where someone who makes female attendees
uncomfortable isn't spoken to/removed even after complaints (and that's
absolutely a problem), but overt aggression of the type described here is
foreign to my experiences with not only Wikimedia NYC, but multiple
Wikimanias.
If we're going to zero in on what makes meetups uncomfortable for women,
I'd say we'd do more user-retention good trying to head off the "random
creep attends meetups apparently solely to ogle the women" problem, which
is common, rather than the "women are overtly treated like shit when they
are giving a public presentation" problem, of which this article is the
first I've heard.
-Fluffernutter
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011(a)reagle.org>
wrote:
Interesting take/story on
medium.com :
https://medium.com/better-humans/11acd4a7f44c
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