Hi Charlotte, I managed to find the dispute and had a look at it. The editor concerned definitely was being a bit of a prat in my view, and should have discussed the matter with you before going on a reverting spree.  I would not have inserted the "sic" in that one quote, but otherwise you were quite correct, and they were wrong, and moreover dealt with it poorly. Hope that helps.  I think what we see here once more is the off-putting effect of templating good-faith contributors. Andreas --- On Thu, 23/6/11, Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com> Subject: [Gendergap] As I was passing through... To: gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thursday, 23 June, 2011, 1:50 Hello, everyone, I joined this list a couple days ago after reading through its archives, which I embarked on after having come across the June 13th article in The Signpost discussing the tiny percentage of self-identified female Wikipedia editors. I'd missed the January New York Times article and all that flowed from it (including this list) until I started systematically looking through the "community" section of Wikipedia for the first time about 10 days ago, to see what my options might be to address my own recent negative encounters with other Wikipedia editors, although I hadn't yet stumbled upon the Wikipedia policies on "canvassing," etc., that apparently preclude any disclosure on this list of such experiences in a potentially identifiable manner. Having learned of that policy from reading this list's archives, I'm accordingly using an email account not associated with my Wikipedia user account, and I'm not disclosing my Wikipedia user name, so as not to arouse any concerns that I might be canvassing for support concerning that situation, which I'm not. In fact, I've even concluded that it's not worth the aggravation of pursuing Wikipedia's dispute resolution process, which from reading through *those* archives has impressed me as likely to be little more than an exercise in futility (if not also masochism!). I'm certainly neither fragile nor easily intimidated, but I prefer not to waste my valuable free time on such exercises, so I've now stopped editing Wikipedia and -- with one foot out the door, the other soon to follow -- am posting to this list now only because I hadn't seen anything its archives that expressed anything close to some of my own thoughts about a few of the topics discussed, which might perhaps be of some value to at least some of you who plan to continue in this effort. By way of background, I'm one of those older staying-at-home professional mothers Sarah Stierch had suggested in February might constitute a potentially fruitful demographic for female recruitment. I'm certainly no "geek," although I've picked up just enough basic HTML code along the way so as not to find Wikipedia's coding basics unduly daunting -- as long as I had the MoS "Cheat Sheet" handy. Well, aside from formatting references... I made my first few edits not quite 18 months ago, I believe, to an article about a park system I'd just been reading about, to which I made a few gnome-like corrections without blowing the place up accidentally or attracting notice. With that success in hand, I started drafting an article about a superb all-female dance company that a niece had recently introduced me to. After seeing them perform and coming to share her enthusiasm, I tried to learn a little more about their history, discovered there was no comprehensive article about them I could find anywhere online (although they would clearly and objectively satisfy WP's notability criteria), and decided that drafting one myself could be a useful exercise in teaching myself Wikipedia's coding and style conventions, while eventually benefiting others with the fruits of my research. I got about half-way finished with it in my userspace (utilizing the Article Wizard), then had to abandon the draft (and Wikipedia) a few days later due to some serious health problems one of my children developed unexpectedly. I didn't return again until two months ago, when a discussion elsewhere pointed me to another Wikipedia article (about whose subject I knew quite a bit) that was seriously deficient, so I signed in again for the first time in 16 months or so, added a number of references to that article, expanded it a bit and began "wikifying" it without generating any controversy or blowing the place up accidentally. I then encountered an egregious usage error a few weeks later in another Wikipedia article that had badly muddled a sentence's meaning, and corrected it, again without generating any controversy. I then checked for similar misuses of that and another commonly misused word on Wikipedia, discovered hundreds of examples, and so began correcting them in gnome-like fashion over the next month or so while watching films with my daughter after school and/or evenings and tracking down some uncommon but needed public domain images for a few other articles, until I unluckily attracted the attention of a chauvinist (in the original sense of the word) member of the "recent pages patrol" whose truculence and devotion to Huggle greatly exceeded his grasp of correct [international] English usage. What ensued persuaded me that my free time from now on would be so much better spent on volunteer projects other than Wikipedia (and so much better for my blood pressure!) that I'm not even going to bother finishing the draft article about the dance company or upload the public domain images I'd located. C'est la vie! Also by way of background, I'm a late-70s graduate of Harvard Law School, now retired from a successful legal career, and studying legal history (a long-deferred goal). The percentage of women in the two classes ahead of mine at HLS was approximately 8%, but it doubled to 16% in my class, which quite a lot of the male students and professors (all but one of whom were male back then) found extremely threatening. I mention this because that "abrupt increase" in female students at HLS had generated a very nasty backlash from many of the men, and at each stage of our early careers many members of my female cohort experienced that backlash repeatedly. I hope that a similarly "abrupt increase" in the percentage of female Wikipedia editors doesn't generate a similar backlash toward them, but given my own experiences, I recommend that those here working to increase female participation brace themselves (and the new recruits), just in case. This has probably been far too long already for a number of folks on the list, so I'll conclude for now and share my thoughts on hosting pornography on Wikipedia; recruiting Girl Scouts as editors; another potential consideration not yet raised as to why the WMF should be concerned, I suspect, about the relative dearth of female editors; bare-breastedness in depictions of "Liberty"; etc., in another email or two, after I've had a chance to look over again a few archived emails that it may help to quote or refer to specifically. I'm using a middle name to post here given that the list is open-archived on the internet, that my recent unpleasant experiences on Wikipedia included what I've concluded was harassment, and that I see no good reason to risk subjecting my family to any such potential consequences due to my participation on this list, however brief, so I will sign off for now just as, Charlotte -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

Hi, Sue, On 6/22/11, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi, Sue, Thank you most sincerely for your kind words and your encouragement, but the principal reason I'd mentioned my bad experiences is to try to help you all get a better handle on whatever segment of Wikipedia's disgruntled-non-geeky-former-female-editors I might be characteristic of, because I very much doubt I'm unique. I'd started editing Wikipedia casually, as I'd explained, much the way I straighten out the clean towels in my linen closet when I open the door and unexpectedly discover that one of my children has jammed them in helter-skelter, rather than folding and putting them away neatly, and that attitude is what had continued to motivate virtually all my subsequent edits. I'd joined a WikiProject not long before I first encountered the Recent Changes Patroller, mostly because its umbrella just happened to cover a very narrow set of articles that bear on an arcane scholarly interest of mine and I was thinking of trying to improve them with the public domain images I'd located, but I still wasn't truly "hooked" on Wikipedia yet the way virtually everyone else on this list seems to be hooked. I'm emphasizing that not to be churlish, but because I think you all need to figure out ways to get casual new editors hooked if you're going to retain them after they have what appears to be a nearly inevitable bad experience like mine. The Recent Changes Patroller was only the initiator and dominant actor in the "series of unfortunate events" that caused me to begin interacting with other editors for the first time, and only one of those follow-on experiences was remotely satisfactory; on two article talk pages where I tried to initiate the appropriate discussions I was sneered at by other editors. Neither could offer a reasonable or logical objection to my proposed edit (a usage correction), so one derided it as "hilarious" and the other sneered that "it must be a slow day on Wikipedia." That editor is a long-time contributor with 60,000+ edits who's also an administrator, which doesn't speak at all well to me for the quality of the administrators, who are presumably supposed to enforce and exemplfy the civility policy, not to breach it with new editors. I gave a good deal of thought as I read through the archives in the community section of Wikipedia as to how ostensibly positive policies and guidelines actually seem to end up being twisted into weapons to be wielded by the more entrenched editors against newcomers and those who express a minority viewpoint. It's not really surprising, though, given Wikipedia's adherence to a model of pure democracy. James Madison had explained in Federalist Paper No. 55 that the reason the Framers had rejected pure democracy as the structure for the new U.S. Federal government in lieu of democratic republicanism was because as they studied the ancient Athenian assembly as a potential model, they concluded that, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." That's why I cannot share your optimism that modeling good behavior for the "troglodytes" is likely to produce any significant improvement in Wikipedia's culture. When I joined Wikipedia I agreed to abide by its policies and guidelines (and I will continue to do so, so long as I remain a member), but I frankly think that some of them are outright harmful as applied, probably especially to women. I don't think it's at all healthy, for example, for women to patiently tolerate the kind of treatment I was subjected to on those two article talk pages, because doing so implicitly grants permission to keep doing it. In both cases the incivility was just minor enough that I didn't feel that complaining about it formally would be productive, so I'm not going to pursue anything, as I explained before, but the cumulative effect has been to leave a very, very bad taste in my mouth. Given all this, I'm not convinced that being a "good Wikipedian" is something to aspire to, although I don't mean to be at all snarky in disclosing that. Best, Charlotte

Wikipedia is equipped to deal with particular editing issues. Every edit is logged and can be viewed and discussed. Without specifics we assume everyone, you and those you had trouble with, was editing in good faith and had some more or less good reason for their edits or comments. You do seem like the ideal editor, although as a legally trained person you may not fully grok the flexible nature of how policies and guidelines are applied. For example, the canvassing guideline which has been discussed by others. We do want to grapple with whatever problems arise but don't want use the list to gang up on anyone who happens to get crossways with one of our participants. Fred

hahaha, charlotte, i really like your attitude and passion! let me give a completely different example where i fell into a similar trap. at that time, when i was young, stupid and idealistic .... at that time, it bothered me a little that articles contained miles, foot and inches. so i started to convert it slowly to the metric system. i even started to search for miles and converting it systematically. and it ended up, that i did not make any other edits but these ones. of course it attracted "real americans" who made clear that this is not the right way forward. and it attracted admins. then, beeing young, idealistic and stupid, it started to bother me more. my reasoning was, to formulate it strong: "these measuring units do not exist in the world, but only in the united states. the united states is maybe 2% of the worlds population, and these 2% of people fuck up the whole contents of the most popular wikipedia, the english one." but of course such an attitude did not go well with some people, including admins. but i guess i got wiser, and i remembered why i like wikipedia: because of the contents. and i stopped worrying about such details. and i stopped worrying about americans. and i stopped worrying about the fact that somebody reverts what i am writing. and, most importantly, i stopped making a point twice. the person reverting my change is not stupid enough to not understand it the first time :) the cause is a differing opinion. and that is fair enough. if somebody else thinks like me she will make the same edit. if not, its good thing the other person reverted mine. and ... i continue editing. i am a lazy editor, i created only a hundred or 200 articles in different language editions. and i know i only created them because i want the contents of wikipedia. and i know if everybody on this earth was like me then we would have 6 billion times 100 = 600 billion articles. and i know if everybody would be like you than wikipedia would not exist. which would be a good thing as you would not have had that problem described in this mail thread, isn't it? i am going back to take care about our children, work or, write a new article, my last priority. and my really last priority in life is writing an mail. but of course that is not fully true ... otherwise i would not be subscribed here :) but, i really admire your attitude and passion, this is the perfect ingredient to be a productive wikipedian. rupert. On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 21:22, Charlotte J <ravinpa2(a)gmail.com> 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 On 6/23/2011 5:22 PM, Charlotte J wrote:

Yes, I could follow that regularly. It seems manageable. Fred

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard This is a one month trial. Check it out. I don't think it can supplant wikiquette alerts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts_ But a possibly good option, if people keep on top of the discussion to prevent flame wars there!

Probably the best place to put a plug would be the in templates used by Huggle. "If you think this warning is inappropriate, report it [[here]]" That way people that insist on using off-putting templates in edge cases are automatically directing any offended parties to the attention of people who will respond to there concern more carefully. Maybe that could short-circuit the escalating defensiveness that often occurs between newbies and patrollers. BirgitteSB On Jun 25, 2011, at 1:41 PM, carolmooredc(a)verizon.net wrote:

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_… "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/Wikipedia:CIVIL> .*" 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, &lt;carolmooredc(a)verizon.net&gt; wrote:

Hi, Kath, Thank you very much for the kind response and good wishes. I'm very pleased to hear that your Wikipedia editing experience has been so pleasurable and rewarding for you and, naturally, I hope it continues to be so. It's great that you've found a congenial group of other editors to work closely with, too! Like you, I discovered the "inclusionists" and "deletionists" during my brief visit to the AfD "netherworld". For some reason they brought to mind the young gangs of the houses of Montague and Capulet, brawling through the streets of Renaissance Verona -- and Mercutio's dying verdict: "A pox on * both* your houses!" ;-) Best, Charlotte On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Kath O'Donnell &lt;aliak77(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: