[Gendergap] Wikipedia's gender gap: discussion on Metafilter

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:30 PM, jessamyn c. west <jessamyn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ole, could you invite Jessamyn? It would be terrific if she would
>> spend a little time here :-)
>
> Hi!
>
> Ole invited me and I'm happy to stop in and say hello. My full-time
> job is working at MetaFilter as a community manager or whatever you
> call it. When I'm being fancy I'm COO, when I'm being informal I'm a
> mod.

Hi Jessamyn! Fancy seeing you here :) Very nice to have you.

> I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise
> a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat
> when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female
> members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how
> we want the community to run. We also have a Q&A part of the site, Ask
> MetaFilter which has probably more female contributors than male ones.
> Though I am the only female moderator out of the three of us--we also
> have one additional male programmer and one part time mod from a
> different time zone who is also male--we're all very very on message
> that we don't want MetaFilter to be a place where random drive-by
> racism and sexism is okay. That said, this is easy to enforce because
> we're a small site with a small mod team.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the specific techniques the
MeFi mods have used in visible norm-setting, and how much help you get
from community members "self-policing"; has this changed over time? Do
you have specific policies or is it all cultural?


 Most recently I participated in a very long
> and drawn out conflict [not mine] with a user who had been a long time
> [to my mind] problematic user. This is a user whose comments often got
> personal and would trail me to my own website to leave annoying
> comments. I left Wikipedia for huge stretches of time to avoid this
> user who I felt was editing with a serious conflict of interest and
> yet I personally found working through channels exhausting and
> resulting in unwanted attention from this user. Nothing scary, just
> more of a "why bother" situation.

This sucks. But I'm also curious if you'd ever had to deal with [for
yourself or others] similar situations at MeFi, and if so how? (so
many questions, sorry!) I know the community dynamics over there are
quite different from Wikipedia's, and I've always gotten the
impression that people at MeFi are really supportive of their fellow
community members.

cheers,
Phoebe

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