And now, a guest performance by the Bogglemen

[mme_hardy]

The Anita Borg Institute published an article encouraging women to edit Wikipedia. [e: Whoops, broken link. Fixed.]

The first section, about creating an account, contains the following advice:

Do not use obviously feminine names, such as SuzyQ or Pam I Am.

Do not use feminine titles like Miss, Ms, or Mrs.

Do not incorporate hobbies, interests, family status, religious affiliation, etc. For example, Knit Nut, Fairly Feminist, and Lovemykids are not the best usernames if you want to avoid Wikipedia gender-based harassment.

Another casual comment: "Edit summaries are supposed to be civil and about content, but bully editors abuse them. " What do you do if that happens?

A friendly or neutral-sounding edit summary (look for the words “good faith” or “AGF”) indicates you can safely proceed to discuss the revert. However, if the edit summary uses “you” or “your” aggressively; Wikipedia jargon (that an experienced editor knows a new user would not understand); or obvious insults (often in the form of questions such as, “Are you kidding me?”), it is time to disengage and decide what to do next.

If you thrive (or at least know how to survive) in such a situation, read up on the consensus-building process and go for it. However, if you feel uneasy, either abandon that article and move on to another, or seek help at the Wikipedia Teahouse.

I am bitter and tired, I admit this, but I genuinely don't see why women should invest their scarce time and resources in contributing to a public resource, no matter how valuable, that tolerates the behavior described.

Edit: I missed this gem.

perhaps join the Wikipedia Gender Gap Task Force (GGTF). The task force has been breached by some editors whose motives for participating are questionable, but not all men on GGTF are thugs, just as not all women there are friends. Many rational, civil editors on the task force really do want to discuss and narrow the gender gap.

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

It may be worth remembering that the Anita Borg Institute was notable in 2014 for having a bunch of "male allies" come on stage at their annual conference and tell thousands of women things like how they shouldn't ask for raises and payrises. My current take on this article is that it's a hamfisted, victim-blaming effort on ABI's part, and actually misrepresents a lot of what's going on in the Wikimedia community (as far as I'm aware of it).

I also note that the blog post is headed "best of systers", systers being a closed mailing list for women in tech that tends non-feminist or second wave at best -- last time I was on it, which was admittedly years ago, there was lots of talk about about what women should do to get ahead and not much recognition of the existence of systemic problems that aren't susceptible to individual leaning-in.

On the other hand, although there are toxic parts of the Wikimedia community, there's a strong feminist contingent there (including, importantly, among those who set priorities and budgets at the Wikimedia Foundation), and although it's a long hard slog I think they're doing slow but steady work in fixing some of this cesspool. brainwane for instance was instrumental in implementing their friendly space policy for in-person events, and the foundation is focusing their grants for the next quarter on gendergap-related projects, and doing it in ways that seem appropriate and workable to me. (Disclosure: they've approached me to work on the gender gap grants stuff, I don't know if I'll wind up doing it but I have talked to some of the people involved and like what they're doing.) Mind you, the whole thing is set against the problem that Wikimedia editorship on the whole is declining; this may be a case of evaporative cooling but then again it could be that the measures Wikimedia are taking for overall participation (eg. the visual editor) will also help with gender representation.

Anyway! Too much rambling. Wikimedia is complicated. That ABI blog post is terrible.

[mme_hardy]

I can *easily* believe that the article doesn't accurately represent the situation, given how slanted it is (as you point out) toward "don't annoy the nasty people by existing as a female". It's a terrible, terrible article. That said, trying to fix the acknowledged inherent hostility of Wikipedia (free-floating hostility, not merely hostility to women) is a job for somebody with many, many more spoons than I have available.