Hmmm, interesting. I've often wondered whether I would have had a less pleasant experience fitting into the wiki(p|m)edia IRC channels if I had an obviously-gendered nick. As it is, I get maybe one random pm a month, if that, and most of those are of the vague "hi"-followed-by-silence sort. None that I can remember have ever been sexually explicit, though I think I might have gotten threats once or twice. Maybe one day I'll run my own little experiment and masquerade under a clearly-female name and see how that changes...

-Fluffernutter

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:

I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study that was conducted regarding IRC: http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdfhttps://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf&embedded=true&chrome=true

The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they received. The bots themselves were completely silent.

The bots with male names received an average of 3.7 private messages per days that were sexually explicit or threatening. The bots with ambiguous names received an average of 24.9 such messages per day. The bots with female names received an average of 100 such messages per day!

This is a very sad statistic, and probably goes a long way towards explaining why there aren't that many women on IRC these days.

On a happier note, if you want to hang out on IRC and not get sexually harassed, you can always join #wikimedia-gendergap!

Ryan Kaldari

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I haven't had any problems, but, I don't hang out in rooms where perhaps things might happen or certain types might hang out (i.e. #Wikipedia-en, where I have seen some really sexist and gross things said.) - and I go by my real name (SarahStierch).

When I was younger and used IRC (in the early 1990's) I used the username "Grrrl" and did get a numerous amount of sexual DM's, from what I can remember, and that was during a time when BBSes and "the internet" was even more male dominated than it is (dial up and fidonet anyone?), and hanging out in alternative community rooms often led to people seeking some pretty obnoxious things (i.e. hanging out in the goth room meant "normal" guys coming in looking to "do hot goth girls".). I remember being a teenager hacking free accounts on AOL and oh god, sometimes it was just out of control and I'd have to literally cease having gender specific names.

The report put the bots in generic rooms like #teens and #wow (for World of Warcraft) - and it doesn't surprise me that the bots would get bombarded with horny IRC dudes.

I still think the fact that Wikimedia relies on IRC as it's "main chat service" is rather archaic. (But I don't have a more brilliant idea, yet.)

-Sarah

On 12/14/11 12:30 PM, ChaoticFluffy wrote:

Hmmm, interesting. I've often wondered whether I would have had a less pleasant experience fitting into the wiki(p|m)edia IRC channels if I had an obviously-gendered nick. As it is, I get maybe one random pm a month, if that, and most of those are of the vague "hi"-followed-by-silence sort. None that I can remember have ever been sexually explicit, though I think I might have gotten threats once or twice. Maybe one day I'll run my own little experiment and masquerade under a clearly-female name and see how that changes...

-Fluffernutter

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org mailto:rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study
that was conducted regarding IRC:
http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf&embedded=true&chrome=true>

The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some
female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in
several high
traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages
they
received. The bots themselves were completely silent.

The bots with male names received an average of 3.7 private
messages per
days that were sexually explicit or threatening. The bots with
ambiguous
names received an average of 24.9 such messages per day. The bots with
female names received an average of 100 such messages per day!

This is a very sad statistic, and probably goes a long way towards
explaining why there aren't that many women on IRC these days.

On a happier note, if you want to hang out on IRC and not get sexually
harassed, you can always join #wikimedia-gendergap!

Ryan Kaldari

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Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

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* Ryan Kaldari wrote:

I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study that was conducted regarding IRC: http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf

The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they received. The bots themselves were completely silent.

It seems only some of the bots were silent. I could not find how they determined there were humans on the other hand. If I ran spambots that tried to lure people on malicious web sites or whatever, I would make them pick out new users or users with unusual nicknames, as they would otherwise be quickly discovered and probably only hit experienced users who are not too likely to fall for this kind of thing. Also, a channel like "#poker" sounds more like a nest for spambots. Similarily, my im- pression is that the networks they used do not require anything special to send private messages. In contrast, on Freenode these days you have to authenticate to services which in turn requires registration which in turn requires confirming an e-mail address, as I recall it anyway. If you don't have that, spambots should not be a big surprise. In the ten years I've hung out on freenode, I got maybe one or two messages that might fall vaguely in any of the categories here, so this isn't telling me much really.

Long before freenode, pretty much the first IRC channel I got on was by invitation. My internet service provider was sending out incorrect bills to users of a recently introduced service and I was looking for other victims and was told several people in that channel had the same trouble so I went there and chatted with folks in the channel. Turned out that the vast majority of people there were lesbians. Don't recall attacks on that network either, but that was in the 1990s before spam was a notable problem.

Everyone might know about this already, but the Brooklyn Museum has set up their own Wiki for The Dinner Party: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/about_wiki.php