Good points, Jane Part of a hostile editing environment is the "either
they ignore you or they insult you" phenomena. I'm sure a lot of women
do quit for just the reason Jane describes - being ignored.
I got that quoted phrase from a woman complaining about it in some
mainstream article a few years ago. That made a lot of my experiences in
email finally comprehensible. I found if I came up with a good idea, I
was ignored. If I said something a bit outrageous in conjunction with
that idea, some people might actually note the idea and comment on it,
among all the outraged guys complaining about whatever (unladylike?)
comment I made in conjunction with it.
By the time I came to Wikipedia I was aware of that behavior and trying
to find new strategies to get appropriate attention. Of course, on
Wikipedia one doesn't have to go out of one's way to get attention if
one regularly practices correcting editors, reverting them, seeking
third opinions or going to noticeboards, any of which some editors also
consider outrageous - particularly if the editor is perceived as being a
women.
Of course, if the editors in a specific culture - as where Jane was
editing - choose to ignore women even when they are disagreeing with
them or, in their eyes, acting outrageous, then that observation would
not hold.
CM
On 12/30/2014 10:21 AM, Jane Darnell wrote:
Hmm. I stopped editing the Dutch Wikipedia because it just wasn't any
fun anymore. I would never say I experienced barriers to entry or that
there were barriers to continued participation. It is more that there
was a continuous vacuum of silence that made participation feel like I
was on an island all of the time. I was never invited to the
discussion table on any specific subject, and if I stumbled across
one, once there, my replies to statements were never answered
directly, but indirectly in replies to others. I was never addressed
personally and asked for an opinion. That doesn't happen regularly on
Commons or the English Wikipedia either, but I feel much less on an
island in bth of those projects and much more a part of a community.
Any contribution I made to an ongoing discussion on the Dutch
Wikipedia just stopped the discussion altogether or was simply
ignored. I vaguely remember a few deletion discussions where my
objections were brushed off with ridiculous arguments - so ridiculous
that I wouldn't know what to reply in all seriousness. Of course I
can't back this up with diffs and it is just a feeling, but it's
because of the feeling that I stopped contributing. I guess I also got
tired of always linking to redlinks in my area of interest - there are
just more people working in my area of interest on the English
Wikipedia, so that I feel I can lean more on the work of others.
On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Carol Moore dc
<carolmoor...@verizon.net <mailto:carolmoor...@verizon.net>> wrote:
This point is so important I gave it its own subject line.
Perhaps this language can be worked into the statement of purpose
of all the WMF Gender gap projects... I also think Kerry should
turn her whole excellent statement into an essay for the WMF site
and it should be linked from GGTF main page.
On 12/29/2014 4:07 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
Does it matter? Believe me, a lot of people get really stuck at
this point and frame it as “well, if women don’t want to edit
Wikipedia, does it really matter? It’s their choice, isn’t it?”
This is something that really needs to get reframed. Yes, of
course, many women don’t Wikipedia because they simply aren’t
interested in doing so (ditto many men). But there are barriers
to entry and barriers to continued participation by women who are
interested in doing so compared to men. Try to reframe it “are
women equally able to edit Wikipedia” or “are there barriers to
women editing?”.
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