Thanks for the sources Charles. Having previously chatted with Jess during an LGBT+ event about the Wikipedia "experience", it is entirely fair and factual to say that the environment is hostile. When running and planning newbie events, we have to be honest about how deeply unpleasant things are promoted on Wikipedia under the guise of "free speech" and how the effective protection of trolls drives away minority viewpoints. Though one can play the system and work around many of these issues, you are still treated as a biased lobbyist or extremist if you are seen as undermining the dominant view which keeps male and heteronormative as the central tone and default "normal" of Wikipedia. The situation is worse in most non-English Wikipedias. That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess. Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running perception of Wikipedia culture. Fae On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: receiving ongoing media attention. It would be a good idea to get the facts straight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incid… who is known for her work on STEM and the gender gap. blocking an IP address. Nothing is said there about any actual deletions. It would be helpful if it could be confirmed that nothing was actually deleted on grounds of lack of notability. incident. She began with comments about WP demographics that made me wince a bit. She made clear her positive feelings about WP, editing and Wikimedia, but that of course is less sensational than the narrative of a "hostile environment". There was quite a lot of Twitter comment, with some people swearing off editing WP: which is pretty much what the spree was designed to achieve, surely. Others indicated they were inspired to edit. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/07/physicist-embroiled-sexism-row-… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7769415/Physicist-accuses-white-me… appears to me that the enWP admin response was perfectly adequate, rather than there being a systemic problem there. I think the point here is that good intentions aren't enough to curb the latter: the Mail's article of 2 January about Jess's project https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6544657/London-scientist-creates… job in December. -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk

<snip> From Jess: https://twitter.com/jesswade/status/1203583885369630721 Jess does not subscribe to the narrative found in the Telegraph and Mail, for sure. That narrative has been around for ten years, during which time much progress has been made on English Wikipedia. I think in fact around 2011 the community realised there needed to be a more positive effort with newbies; and as recently as 2016 some kinds of knee-jerk deletionism started to receive serious deprecation. I don't doubt that more work needs to be done. As far as I know, the editor retention issue is much less pressing than it used to be. In 2009 the Murdoch press was pushing the line that the 2007 decline in editors, which had just come to light in terms of stats rather than anecdote, was an existential threat. No longer. So, informed and accurate coverage of Wikipedia stories is also to be wished for. If a single idiot adding templates can cause a media furore, it is either trivial or non-trivial. If it isn't trivial ... well, the link to ANI I gave has to be interpreted. In a past furore I helped a Guardian journalist to understand exactly what had happened, via a page history. We see shoddy journalism based on the vaguest ideas of fact-checking. We should call that out. Charles _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk

On 10 December 2019 at 03:06 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 10:32, Charles Matthews &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: Not on this occasion no. The IP has no deleted edits and in any case they were throwing up notability tags not prods or AFDs. Previously some of Jess Wade's articles have been deleted.