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@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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