On Nov 24, 2006, at 23:22, Fred Bauder wrote:
On Nov 24, 2006, at 9:14 PM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
On Nov 24, 2006, at 8:50 PM, Puppy wrote:
So where is the limit, Fred? Attack women on the mailing list, ok. Call them a cunt, that's ok too. Say all women are idiots, that's ok. As long as we don't out their personal information? Where is your line for "bad behavior" drawn, precisely? There has been a thread for a couple of months about the imbalance of the ratio of men to women editors for months now, and I am saying attacking women /because they are women/ is, to put it mildly, off-putting. Its beyond uncivil. It is, as David Gerard's friend pointed out, "hopelessly patriarchally biased and useless to harmful."
None of that is acceptable.
So what should we do about it?
Do better personally and not tolerate such behavior from others. However, we cannot, by taking thought on it, cause more women to edit. We can only encourage and support.
Fred
There are some who would argue that there is no bias against women in internet contexts because they receive so much more attention and everyone is all "omg grrls" (They're full of crap, btw). However, I'd say on Wikipedia, I get more attention when I want something and little to no attention when I'm saying something.
The attention I do receive in #wikipedia is often what I would consider sexual harassment (I wholly understand that IRC is not Wikipedia, but maybe 200 of our editors are there). In #uncyclopedia, I kickban anyone that I feel isn't respecting me/my gender as they should. However, there I am level 24, bureaucrat and sysop on wiki and generally pull more weight. I am afraid to say anything about feeling harassed on #wikipedia because it seems that I would be told that they were just joking or I need to lighten up or that's not a bannable offense. Not that I hate everyone who does it either, and I don't even know if they know they're doing it, but it's a shame that it's allowed and overlooked. Although I am part of the problem here for not speaking up.
On-wiki the problem of gender discrimination is probably not as pronounced because one often needs to look at the user page and find the area where the user decides or declines to state their gender. I'd be interested to know how well-known females are treated compared to their well-known male counterparts (I mean admins, etc, those that people know are female because they've heard of them), although it would seem with the actions of Wikipedia Review, that the answer is going to be "less well".
Anyhow, it'd seem that to be female and stick around Wikipedia IRC, one has to have very thick skin. I don't know why females, in my experience, feel more intimidated to edit Wikipedia or why they aren't jumping on the editing bandwagon. They certainly /use/ it..
--Keitei, who's just typed more than she'd intended