Hi, Sue, On 6/22/11, Sue Gardner <sgard...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Charlotte, thank you for writing this, and welcome to the list. > > I don't want you to stop editing Wikipedia. I have spent a lot of time > immersed in Wikipedia culture, and for what its worth I can tell you > that your e-mail exemplifies the best of Wikipedia culture. I don't > know anything about your work as an editor, but this mail is > thoughtful and articulate and beautifully-written, and it's obvious > from it that you've got a good understanding of Wikipedia's policies. > I bet you are a terrific Wikipedian, and I bet you're contributing > information that would otherwise not get written about. > > I am so sorry you had a bad experience with the Recent Changes > Patroller. But you should stay! Obviously it's your decision, and > obviously when Wikipedia loses people by treating them badly, that's > our fault and our problem to solve. So I am not trying to imply that > you have any kind of obligation: clearly you don't. But seriously: you > can make (and presumably have been making) an enormous, important > contribution here. You have no obligation or responsibility to keep > editing, but I really, really wish you would. > > Thanks, > Sue > Hi, Sue, Thank you most sincerely for your kind words and your encouragement, but the principal reason I'd mentioned my bad experiences is to try to help you all get a better handle on whatever segment of Wikipedia's disgruntled-non-geeky-former-female-editors I might be characteristic of, because I very much doubt I'm unique. I'd started editing Wikipedia casually, as I'd explained, much the way I straighten out the clean towels in my linen closet when I open the door and unexpectedly discover that one of my children has jammed them in helter-skelter, rather than folding and putting them away neatly, and that attitude is what had continued to motivate virtually all my subsequent edits. I'd joined a WikiProject not long before I first encountered the Recent Changes Patroller, mostly because its umbrella just happened to cover a very narrow set of articles that bear on an arcane scholarly interest of mine and I was thinking of trying to improve them with the public domain images I'd located, but I still wasn't truly "hooked" on Wikipedia yet the way virtually everyone else on this list seems to be hooked. I'm emphasizing that not to be churlish, but because I think you all need to figure out ways to get casual new editors hooked if you're going to retain them after they have what appears to be a nearly inevitable bad experience like mine. The Recent Changes Patroller was only the initiator and dominant actor in the "series of unfortunate events" that caused me to begin interacting with other editors for the first time, and only one of those follow-on experiences was remotely satisfactory; on two article talk pages where I tried to initiate the appropriate discussions I was sneered at by other editors. Neither could offer a reasonable or logical objection to my proposed edit (a usage correction), so one derided it as "hilarious" and the other sneered that "it must be a slow day on Wikipedia." That editor is a long-time contributor with 60,000+ edits who's also an administrator, which doesn't speak at all well to me for the quality of the administrators, who are presumably supposed to enforce and exemplfy the civility policy, not to breach it with new editors. I gave a good deal of thought as I read through the archives in the community section of Wikipedia as to how ostensibly positive policies and guidelines actually seem to end up being twisted into weapons to be wielded by the more entrenched editors against newcomers and those who express a minority viewpoint. It's not really surprising, though, given Wikipedia's adherence to a model of pure democracy. James Madison had explained in Federalist Paper No. 55 that the reason the Framers had rejected pure democracy as the structure for the new U.S. Federal government in lieu of democratic republicanism was because as they studied the ancient Athenian assembly as a potential model, they concluded that, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." That's why I cannot share your optimism that modeling good behavior for the "troglodytes" is likely to produce any significant improvement in Wikipedia's culture. When I joined Wikipedia I agreed to abide by its policies and guidelines (and I will continue to do so, so long as I remain a member), but I frankly think that some of them are outright harmful as applied, probably especially to women. I don't think it's at all healthy, for example, for women to patiently tolerate the kind of treatment I was subjected to on those two article talk pages, because doing so implicitly grants permission to keep doing it. In both cases the incivility was just minor enough that I didn't feel that complaining about it formally would be productive, so I'm not going to pursue anything, as I explained before, but the cumulative effect has been to leave a very, very bad taste in my mouth. Given all this, I'm not convinced that being a "good Wikipedian" is something to aspire to, although I don't mean to be at all snarky in disclosing that. Best, Charlotte _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
