[Gendergap] Hello and a (small!) manifesto

[Daniel and Elizabeth Case]

Daniel,

Thanks. This was the most heartening post I've read in relation to
anything to do with Wikipedia in a good while. We chuckled, and it was balm
on my wife's bruised heart -- it made her say, "It makes you think there is
hope for this thing after all."

My reply:

You're welcome (and so is she).

At the same time I do owe myself an accounting of this mentality. Because it 
was once, briefly, mine as well.

Back in the mid-2000s, when both he and I started editing, the public image 
of Wikipedia was a little different than today. That was when a lot of 
coverage focused on the vandalism as a general side effect of "anyone can 
edit". And that was *before* the Seigenthaler incident.

Also at the time, notability hadn't established itself as thoroughly. The 
boundaries of inclusion were not as clearly drawn (and that's saying 
something, considering the criticisms of them that still exist today). There 
was a time when someone tried to get an article about every blog, every 
blogger, every podcast, every MMPORPG into Wikipedia. And that was on top of 
the articles about garage bands and neologisms sourced to Urban Dictionary 
that we still get. (Podcasts in particular were a pain. I only need say 
three words for anyone who remembers: We Hate Tech). The guideline page 
WP:NFT, originally titled "Wikipedia is not for things made up in school one 
day" emerged from this era, although it has since been rewritten and toned 
down from what Uncle G originally wrote 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_for_things_made_up_one_day&oldid=32191186 
is closer to the original tenor. This AfD 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Walking_Game) 
also is indicative of what we were dealing with at the time).

So many of us got militant and vigilantly policed the boundaries of the 
encyclopedia. I was a little bit BITEy, too, at times 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Long_Island_Project_(2006)&oldid=36067423. 
Note that the account trying to keep the article, despite its female 
username, later turned out to be a sock of the film's male director).

But I moved on eventually, as by 2007 times had changed, I found a lot more 
content areas to edit besides those I had originally worked on, we found 
other ways to separate Wikipedia from the larger Internet culture, we became 
stricter about sourcing articles, and so forth.

For some people, however, those times have never ended.

Daniel Case