[Gendergap] Drama issue ... not my experience

[Ism Woonpton]

I've thought long and hard about responding to this; my usual
tendency, when challenged personally  (I'll fight for sources or for
data,  but never for myself) is to back off and let it go, but in this
context, where the goal is ostensibly to understand why women don't
choose to edit Wikipedia,  it feels important to insist on being heard
rather than having my experience dismissed and discredited.

Daniel's response suggests that maybe I wasn't completely clear as to
what I meant by the "menacing and combative" atmosphere of Wikipedia,
the take-out-the-other-guy-by-whatever-means-necessary aggression that
I find so aversive.  Aggression takes many forms, and it's not
necessarily the most direct forms that are the most destructive and
effective, in my experience.  The goal of aggression is to take out,
neutralize, discredit or drive off the other party by whatever means
seems most likely to be successful, and passive aggression, rather
than overt aggression, seems to be the  preferred strategy on
Wikipedia.  So if you want to neutralize or diminish someone's point,
instead of directly arguing the point, especially if you don't have a
good counterargument to argue on the merits, you say things in such an
indirect way as to insinuate and suggest something about the other
person but also to give you plausible deniability;  if the person
reponds to the insinuations and suggestions with denials, you can say
"oh, but that's not what I meant," or "But of course I didn't mean
you."  People who adopt this strategy  are invariably polite, but
every bit as destructive to the project and to the social environment
as those who are outright rude, IMO, and this passive-aggressive
indirect method of taking out anyone you don't want taken seriously
prevails throughout the project and not particularly on pages like
AN/I.   It's the aggression and the "playing-to-win-at-all-costs"
attitude that is aversive to me, whatever form it takes.

So just to take a hypothetical example,  let's say "someone" wanted to
discredit or diminish or discount my account of my experience on
Wikipedia, and let's make clear from the beginning that I don't mean
Daniel here; even though I've quoted his post below,  I'll just repeat
what he said when quoting me:  "I'm not singling you out, just using
your comments as an example."

That person could suggest that when people encounter aggression on
Wikipedia it generally means that they seek out drama centers like
AN/I and that if these people would devote themselves to content that
they're  interested in,  they would find a more congenial atmosphere.
 No doubt that hypothetical person would look at my contributions and
ascertain that I have few article edits before making this suggestion,
and would ignore the fact that I have almost no edits to AN/I, because
that would interfere with the suggestion he was trying to leave, that
I (or at least people "like" me, who say the things I say) tend to
hang around AN/I.

I had already explained why I have few article edits, because when I
attempted to work in content areas of my interest I found that there
were entrenched forces working against the insertion of neutral
content, making it impossible for a neutral editor to work there, that
if one tried to, it would just turn into an endless revert war, and
there was no point; besides I wasn't interested in playing this battle
game.   I hate conflict, and if it takes fighting to insert neutral
content, I won't edit.   Banning, or topic-banning, those editors
makes no difference, because of ideological, financial, or political
interests that guarantee an endless supply of replacement editors to
continue the effort.  I mistakenly believed in the beginning that
there was a governance structure in place that once aware of what was
going on, would act to support and reinforce neutral editors, but I
have since become completely disillusioned on that score.

But just to make myself absolutely clear, the only thing that has ever
interested me on Wikipedia is content, trying to ensure that the
content reflects the consensus of the best sources. I have no interest
in drama whatever, and the only time I've ever been to AN/I in three
years was when an editor, who not long after that was site-banned,
moved my vote on an article-talk poll to an option I hadn't voted for
and insisted that he knew better than I did which version I wanted the
article reverted to, and in fact that no one could possibly be so
stupid as to actually mean to vote for the version that I did in fact
mean to vote for.  It seemed important at the time to make that stand
to try to ensure the integrity of the poll results, even though the
effort wasn't terribly successful in the end.

This hypothetical person might also suggest in an  indirect way that
people who encounter drama or hostility may not be adhering to the
rules against incivility and personal attack.  Just so there's no
mistake about it, my interactions with other editors have been  civil
and I don't make personal attacks.  The person might also suggest that
always remaining congenial toward others will result in a congenial
atmosphere all around.  Well, that's a lovely idea but simply not true
when not everyone has the same goal.  When half of the people working
on an article are  trying to write an encyclopedia and the other half
are using Wikipedia as a platform to advance an agenda, there can
never be a congenial atmosphere, and until/unless Wikipedia finds a
way to effectively deal with advocacy toward non-neutral content,
this situation of endless battle will continue unabated, and as I said
before, I want no part of it.  This IS about content, as far as I'm
concerned.  And please don't tell me to  edit articles that should
interest women, like fashion articles or articles about friendship
bracelets or dolls, instead of the articles that actually interest me.
 This always fascinates me, the response when I mention the problem
that confronts me where I want to edit, Wikipedians always say, "Well,
just don't edit those articles."  Well, can't you see that if no one
who is interested in neutral content edits those articles, the result
is that we abandon them to the interests who are determined to keep
them non-neutral?  Is that okay with the people who say "just don't
edit those articles," or have they just not thought their argument
through to its logical conclusion?

This is all a bit off the topic, as it has less to do with gender than
with what happens to people who try to work for neutral content in
areas where vested interests patrol articles, except that, as Sue
says, women may be more averse to the "fighty" aspects of Wikipedia.
But it's where I'm coming from, and I don't want my position to be
misunderstood.  No, I'm not being uncivil and inviting counterattack
by my incivility; that's not my style.  And no, I don't seek out
drama, I hate it.   I have spent some time in Wikipedia space trying
to raise awareness about how much advocacy for vested interests
compromises the integrity of our content,   but have not made a dent,
and have pretty much given it up.  That I still care is evidenced by
the fact that I still say "we" and "our" when referring to Wikipedia,
but I don't see any way that I can be of use.

Woonpton










On 2/3/11, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase at frontiernet.net> wrote:
>> When I entered Wikipedia, I discovered a side of the internet I had
>> never encountered before, and intend never to encounter again; it's a
>> menacing and combative atmosphere that is extremely aversive to me.  I
>> recently read somewhere that Wikipedia regulars, as a rule, come from
>> usenet or from gaming, where that kind of atmosphere is apparently an
>> integral and desired part of the experience (I wouldn't know, having
>> no experience with either), and have brought that atmosphere to
>> Wikipedia.  As long as that atmosphere characterizes Wikipedia, it is
>> going to drive away anyone who doesn't thrive on that kind of
>> pugnacious taunting get-the-enemy-before-he-gets-you kind of attitude,
>> and I suspect a lot of women would be included in those who don't
>> thrive in that kind of environment.
>
> I'm not singling your post out, Ism, but just quoting this as an example of
> a theme I've seen in other posts here and on the Times' discussions.
>
> This is so *not* the Wikipedia I've been actively involved in for six years
> now. I allow that it exists for some people; I've never been one. I have had
> some intemperate moments in discussions and differences of opinion with
> other editors over article content or policy issues, but I have always kept
> our civility and no-personal-attacks policies in mind and have done my best
> to remain collegial. And by and large I've felt the same reciprocated by
> almost all the other editors involved.
>
> I venture to suggest that perhaps this is because what I'm most interested
> in doing, and what I put a great deal of effort into, is creating,
> maintaining and improving content. When I hear (or rather, read) editors who
> complain about this, it's almost a given that you can look at their contrib
> histories and see very little in the way of recent edits to article
> namespace, and of those even fewer that aren't related to talk-page or
> policy-page discussions they were devoting most of their energy to.
>
> Now, there are some people who are good at online conflict resolution, and
> they should not be discouraged from this type of editing. But there are
> plenty of other editors who let themselves get sucked into long discussions
> on AN/I or elsewhere that have little to do with them directly when they
> really ought to be doing what they came to Wikipedia to do. And I also grant
> that I don't regularly edit in any topic areas, such as those mirroring
> real-life ethnic or political conflicts, that have been notably rancorous.
>
> That said, I recall at WikiXDC a couple of weekends ago one of my best
> Wikipedia moments ever. During the trivia contest at the end, one question
> was "This page, the largest one on the project, takes up an entire gigabyte
> when all of its archives are included." The answer, of course, is AN/I. When
> that was announced, someone near me, a longtime member of the community and
> active editor whom I'd not met or even known of before the event, asked
> "What's AN/I?"
>
> I wish we had a hundred highly active editors who had to ask that question.
> A thousand, even.
>
> And so to bring this back to the gendergap subject, I would pass along my
> observation that I have noticed in most of the female editors I am
> acquainted with who've been part of the project for a long time is that
> they, too, have concentrated primarily on the content areas they've been
> interested in and seem to keep the drama to a minimum.
>
> Daniel Case
>
>
>
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