Hi, Carol,

Thanks for pointing this out: I hope that what you and Fred are considering doing ends up helping other new female editors.

I'd actually found Wikiquette myself before I'd joined this list and had looked through the Wikiquette archives to see how past complaints about snide comments were received, but the results were so discouraging that I decided not to bother approaching them about my own experiences. For example:

"Yea, I can see some condescending and snide comments there. Doubt any of it is actionable though. I'd probably just take a deep breath and chalk it up as a <sarcasm> "thanks a bunch guys" </sarcasm> type of thing. Sometimes you have to have a little bit of a tough skin around here - especially if you're posting to pages like RfA, AN, AN/I, etc., etc., etc.. If you try to push it Ipatrol, it's probably just gonna get nastier. Take the high road and chalk it up to experience. I don't think there was anything that awful, just keep working, and trying."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts/archive61#Mockery_of_my_proposal_and_me

"Oh, please. There's nothing to address here. If we brought everyone who was a bit snide towards everyone else in discussion to here, then WQA would be overloaded with trivial complaints. In any case, what do you honestly think you're going to get out of this? He's not going to apologize and there's going to be practically nothing concrete that will stop his behavior, so this report is fairly pointless"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Majorly

"I am going to archive this since additional commentary seems unnecessary. I remind all editors that to make unfounded accusations of incivility is itself a breach of our civility guidelines."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Majorly

Anyway, at this point it's water over the dam for me, but I hope you can get the message across there on behalf of others.

Best,

Charlotte

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 10:02 PM, <carolmooredc@verizon.net> wrote:

The below is a reminder of how useful it would be to put more emphasis
on letting new editors know that Wikiquette Alerts exist, encouraging
them to complain and then encouraging admins to just go to editors who
attack others, even with minor snide remarks, and encourage them not to
do it. That's the kind of peer pressure that works best.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts

Even as a very assertive person and a relatively bold editor, it took me
almost two years before I started going to such venues for help. Sadly,
I didn't often get it. I think it would be the one single thing that
could keep women who start editing from stopping. The bad boys might
call it "snitching." We should call it empowerment - or maybe,
considering the average age of the perpetrators, good parenting! ;-)

It really has to be it's own little wikiproject, or subgroup, or
something. I haven't been paying much attention to wikipedia last could
months myself so can't remember the various options.

Carol in dc