Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
The UK values freedom of speech but it is on a horizontal plane along with other rights and freedoms, NOT a vertical one with freedom of speech at the top. Hate speech not only gets you blocked in the UK, it gets you jailed, and quite rightly in my opinion. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criadoperez-9083829.html And this is how this works in practice, with relevance to Wikipedia and the issues under discussion here obvious: US: Tape of sports team owner in major market talking with his mistress is released in which he makes racist statements, where said owner has some history of making similar statements in the context of his other business interests, and the group against which the racist statements are made constitutes a disproportionately large share of the league’s players and fan base. League commissioner bans him for life from league events, including his own team’s games; he is later forced to sell team (albeit at market rate). UK: Chief executive of major sports league whose games and teams are followed by a worldwide audience as it is widely considered to have some of the world’s best teams in that sport has emails disclosed in which he talks about women, including some identifiable ones in the office, in a sexist, crude and juvenile way. He is not punished in any way as the emails were supposed to have been private and the woman he talked about (whose continued employment, coincidentally, depends on his goodwill) said she didn’t mind. Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Hi Risker / Anne,
In response to the points you raise:
* A panel suggests a group of people who discuss and decide things, it wouldn't
be that, it would be a pool of adjudicators.
* The home page shows 130,858 active editors, if 15% of those are female then
it means there must be 19,628 female editors to draw the 50% from.
* I don't participate in dispute management, but then I have never been asked
to.
* More people might agree to take part in dispute management if they know that
their input will be kept anonymous.
* Administrators would do what they have always done.
Example of a possible way to approach potential adjudicators:
Those eligible (maybe they've been editing for more than a year and they have
an edit history of 1,000+ edits) are sent a private e-mail, this would be a
circular to all eligible editors. It would say something like:
According to our records you have been with us for more than [length of
time] and have contributed over [number of edits]. We would therefore like to
invite you join our pool of adjudicators which we are currently in the
process of establishing. The purpose of adjudication would to consider
editors requests to block other editors ('cases'). We envisage adjudication
to be the first stage in managing cases with the second stage being handled
by administrators.
Your anonymity as an adjudicator would be protected by us at all times, in
fact one of the conditions of being an adjudicator would be that you have no
direct contact with those involved any of the cases which you are asked to
consider (although you may inform the Wikipedia community that you are an
adjudicator). If you wish to become an adjudicator please click on the link
and fill out the form. (The form would include equal opportunities monitoring
questions
http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector-guidance/employing-people/recruitment/monitoring-forms
).
Example case:
* Editor 'X' wants a block against editor 'Y'.
* Editor X submits a case for adjudication.
* Adjudicator 'A' requests a case, the case is randomly selected from those
pending by computer.
* Adjudicator A reads the details and decides whether X has a point, or whether
Y appears to have behaved reasonably (even if X didn't like it).
* Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, Pass to next stage? Yes [box]
No [box] (perhaps other boxes like I lack the technical knowledge to
adjudicate on this.) and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters.
* The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female.
* If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and
administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out
groundless requests and save administrators and above time).
* Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator could
rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period.
* From time to time there would be a general call, we currently have a backlog
of cases.
I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what
questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal Opportunities
Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't really think about not
being able to just run the query. Having said that, most user pages of active
users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which gender they are. It is
probably possible to go back.
Marie
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400
From: risker...@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
A few points here:
If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast majority of those
do not regularly participate in dispute management, how are you going to
establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so
few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute
management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and
many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because
they have a genuine interest in managing disputes.
What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a hard time
visualizing this. User: made a sexist comment here (link)?What would you
expect administrators to do, exactly? They're directly accountable for the use
of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take
- and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the
block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read
deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a
couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.)
How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when the
overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any
consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my
userpage, for example
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
it). * Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, Pass to next stage? Yes [box] No [box] (perhaps other boxes like I lack the technical knowledge to adjudicate on this.) and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters. * The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female. * If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out groundless requests and save administrators and above time). * Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator could rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period. * From time to time there would be a general call, we currently have a backlog of cases. I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal Opportunities Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't really think about not being able to just run the query. Having said that, most user pages of active users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which gender they are. It is probably possible to go back. Marie -- Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400 From: risker...@gmail.com To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists) A few points here: - If less than 15% of editors identify as female, and the vast majority of those do not regularly participate in dispute management, how are you going to establish a panel that is 50% women? This isn't a small point - there are so few individuals generally speaking who regularly participate in dispute management at all (I'd put the number on enwiki at less than 150 total), and many of them are there because of the perceived power gradient, not because they have a genuine interest in managing disputes. - What disputes, exactly, would the panel be analysing? I'm having a hard time visualizing this. User: made a sexist comment here (link)? - What would you expect administrators to do, exactly? They're directly accountable for the use of their tools and have to be able to personally justify any actions they take - and surprisingly, a huge percentage of administrators (almost) never use the block button. (There's a subset of admins who only use their tools to read deleted versions, and another subset that only shows up once a year, makes a couple of edits so they keep their tools, and disappears again.) - How would you develop any statistics based on gender of editor, when the overwhelming majority of editors do not identify their gender at all in any consistent fashion? I've personally never added any gender categories to my userpage, for example, and I have no intention of doing so now. Some thoughts. Risker/Anne On 6 July 2014 04:51, Marie Earley eir...@hotmail.com wrote: I previously described my experience of being a member of Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Labs website http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004388.html I think part of my shock was based on being British, and how the sink-or-swim attitude prevailed by those running and moderating. At least at Wikipedia there is some notion of We have a problem here, let's discuss how best to fix it. The name of one forum at TS was Free for all - enter at your own risk followed by a note that more members had been suspended from that message board than from any of the others, and this is all they have in the way of rules http://labs.triggerstreet.com/labs/Help?faqCat=Message%20Board Having said that, the one thing that I thought worked well was their Hall of Justice. Members earn credits for their reviews (which are randomly assigned by the 'assignment generator') they then spend them on the website. An obvious way of earning a lot of credits is to make up a load of generic comments like, the characters in this screenplay are very interesting, request another assignment, copy and paste, earn credit, and repeat. The HOJ exists for members who think the review that they received was unfair. There is a criteria for the reviews including: not cutting and pasting from other reviews, (if you think it has happened then you include the ref. no. from the other review as evidence), reviews should be constructive and non-abusive, a decent word length (I think the minimum was 100 words), there should also be evidence in the review which shows that the reviewer definitely read / watched the submission. If a member thinks they have been unfairly treated then they send a review to the HOJ. Other members - let's call them arbitrators - with a high enough participation level (like having 'enough' edits in your edit history) can request a - randomly generated - docket, read the review, read the details of the complaint e.g. (I think this review is a cut past of ref. # 'x
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
While I've barely had a chance to read through proposal and comments, I'd like to just ask re the below which applies generally right now: On 7/7/2014 9:35 AM, Risker wrote: I know what it's like to have my inbox flooded with requests for assistance in relation to dispute resolution - just for oversight requests I get an average of 8 emails a day, when I was on arbcom it was over 100/day to various lists for various purposes. (Yes, it's one of the reasons that people burn out.) *Is it possible to establish a group of editors called arbcom assistants who would be admins appointed by arbcom to help with the workflow?? ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On 7 July 2014 09:51, Carol Moore dc carolmoor...@verizon.net wrote: While I've barely had a chance to read through proposal and comments, I'd like to just ask re the below which applies generally right now: On 7/7/2014 9:35 AM, Risker wrote: I know what it's like to have my inbox flooded with requests for assistance in relation to dispute resolution - just for oversight requests I get an average of 8 emails a day, when I was on arbcom it was over 100/day to various lists for various purposes. (Yes, it's one of the reasons that people burn out.) *Is it possible to establish a group of editors called arbcom assistants who would be admins appointed by arbcom to help with the workflow?? Well. It's hard enough to get qualified volunteers to work on Arbcom, and their work is mainly on major cases with a lot of participants about disputes that have been adversely affecting the project for an extended period of months or in some cases years. There are arbcom clerks, whose job it is to keep the (few) cases moving relatively smoothly, and there's a bit of dispute resolution there. It looks like there are four of them - probably an historic low, and looking at the list I'm pretty sure two of them are actually inactive. Arbcom moving out of their very narrow scope has been very loudly and vigorously opposed by the community, and Arbcom itself is looking to try to divest itself of several of its current responsibilities rather than considering taking on anything new. This is absolutely *not* a job for arbcom. It's pretty much the kind of thing that arbitrators kept finding in their mailboxes that someone expected them to solve, but took hours away from the work they were supposed to be doing, and required the individual arbitrators to act on their own because the matter was outside of jurisdiction. Risker/Anne ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Hi there,
I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered.
1) we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any
attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from
a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times
harass them.
2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore
incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the
best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to not feed trolls
is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and
experienced people on the Internet.
3) blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to
immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change
conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often
become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly.
3) there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki software
as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to stop
blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes administrators
to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them.
4) banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go
away.
Sydney
n Jul 7, 2014 3:20 AM, Marie Earley eir...@hotmail.com wrote:
Hi Risker / Anne,
In response to the points you raise:
* A panel suggests a group of people who discuss and decide things, it
wouldn't be that, it would be a pool of adjudicators.
* The home page shows 130,858 active editors, if 15% of those are female
then it means there must be 19,628 female editors to draw the 50% from.
* I don't participate in dispute management, but then I have never been
asked to.
* More people might agree to take part in dispute management if they know
that their input will be kept anonymous.
* Administrators would do what they have always done.
Example of a possible way to approach potential adjudicators:
Those eligible (maybe they've been editing for more than a year and they
have an edit history of 1,000+ edits) are sent a private e-mail, this would
be a circular to all eligible editors. It would say something like:
According to our records you have been with us for more than [length
of time] and have contributed over [number of edits]. We would therefore
like to invite you join our pool of adjudicators which we are currently in
the process of establishing. The purpose of adjudication would to consider
editors requests to block other editors ('cases'). We envisage adjudication
to be the first stage in managing cases with the second stage being handled
by administrators.
Your anonymity as an adjudicator would be protected by us at all times,
in fact one of the conditions of being an adjudicator would be that you
have no direct contact with those involved any of the cases which you are
asked to consider (although you may inform the Wikipedia community that you
are an adjudicator). If you wish to become an adjudicator please click on
the link and fill out the form. (The form would include equal opportunities
monitoring questions
http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/private-and-public-sector-guidance/employing-people/recruitment/monitoring-forms
).
Example case:
* Editor 'X' wants a block against editor 'Y'.
* Editor X submits a case for adjudication.
* Adjudicator 'A' requests a case, the case is randomly selected from
those pending by computer.
* Adjudicator A reads the details and decides whether X has a point, or
whether Y appears to have behaved reasonably (even if X didn't like it).
* Adjudicator A marks a one of two check boxes, Pass to next stage? Yes
[box] No [box] (perhaps other boxes like I lack the technical knowledge
to adjudicate on this.) and a small comments form, maybe 1,000 characters.
* The same case goes to a few more adjudicators, 50% of whom are female.
* If enough rule that the case has merit then it goes forward and
administrators deal with it as they currently do (the idea is to weed out
groundless requests and save administrators and above time).
* Their would be a maximum number of cases that any single adjudicator
could rule on in a 24 or 48 hour period.
* From time to time there would be a general call, we currently have a
backlog of cases.
I must confess, I had to logout of Wikipedia and remind myself about what
questions are asked when joining. I'm so used to filling in Equal
Opportunities Monitoring Forms for statistical purposes that I didn't
really think about not being able to just run the query. Having said that,
most user pages of active users that I've seen do appear to volunteer which
gender they are. It is probably possible to go back.
Marie
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 13:45:34 -0400
From: risker...@gmail.com
To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
A few points here:
If less than 15% of editors
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, I'm flagging the major issues that need to be considered. 1) we can not promise anonymity for the people acting as adjudicators. Any attempt to have anonymous people hearing a case will attract attention from a group if obsessive people who out anyone who is anonymous. Plus at times harass them. 2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to not feed trolls is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet. 3) blocks on Wikipedia are not suppose to be punitive but intended to immediately stop disruptive user behavior. Attempts to use them to change conduct is generally not successful. Instead people who are blocked often become entrenched in proving that they are being treated poorly. 3) there is no way to stop people from editing Wikipedia. The wiki software as used by WMF allows easy access to join, and edit. Attempts to stop blocked or banned users from editing is part of what causes administrators to burn out and ignore problems or over react to them. 4) banning people very engaged in the community rarely causes them to go away. Sydney So we can't bar people from using the site, and we don't have effective moderation tools (or moderators). We also realize that even if we had either, they would be used on only a teeny tiny sliver of all pages, and only by those who know about them and how to take advantage of them. This all suggests that the only cures to civility are to radically restrict how freely users can interact, or change the culture of the Internet. The first is antithetical to the nature of Wikimedia projects, and the second is impossible, so... Perhaps we decide that curing incivility is a bridge too far, and focus efforts to narrow the gender gap on other more practical opportunities. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On 7 July 2014 13:00, Daniel and Elizabeth Case danc...@frontiernet.net wrote: 2) the reasons that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore incivility, harassment, and trolling is because that approach is often the best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to not feed trolls is well engrained into the culture and advise given by mature and experienced people on the Internet. Or you can just block them firmly when they deserve it, escalate if and when you need to block them again, revoke their talk page access if they continue to use it to troll or harass (they can still use OTRS to request unblock; however, it’s amazing to see how much humbler they get when denied an audience), semi-protect pages they continue to use IPs to make the same problematic edits to and generally make it clear to them they are being eased away from the community. I realize there *is* a small percentage of such users that this will not stop, but in seven years as an admin I *have* seen this approach work much more often than not, regardless of whether said trolls were harassing me or someone else. Interesting to hear your experience, Daniel. It doesn't parallel mine at all, but then perhaps we're looking at different groups of problem users. I've never seen anyone humbled by a behaviour block, in my experience they're usually gone for good (those ones, I suppose, were humbled) or come back worse behaved but usually in a much sneakier way. Of course, on enwiki we do eventually manage to ban a significant percentage of really bad players over time; not all of them, but a fair number once they've pushed enough buttons and annoyed enough people and lost their supporters. On some projects, it is essentially impossible to ban community members (as opposed to one-off vandal accounts). Risker/Anne ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
involved in the case that they have been allocated it * 50% of those asked to consider a case would have to be female (other quotas might be relevant for other demographics) * there would be a limit to how many cases an arbitrator could ask for in a certain time period (I actually envisage it being more like a cross between jury service and those user talk page notices that there is a discussion taking place somewhere These might be more technically difficult: * cases would only go to arbitrators whose edit history is generally in a different subject area - so someone complaining about a dispute about a particular scientific point would have their complaint go to an arbitrator whose edit history is in, say, historical BLPs * a limit to the number of times you could go through the arbitration process with the same case Cases would only go forward for administrators to get involved with if enough arbitrators agreed that it merited being put forward. On a slightly different note: Everyone seems to be mentioning the different ways in which the rules are applied to male vs. female editors. Is it possible to run a query or get hold of statistics for the average length of time female editors get blocked for, versus how long male editors are blocked for? Perhaps a table that takes account of the editors' participation levels prior to the block? Marie Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:23:18 -0400 From: carolmoor...@verizon.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists) When I was a little girl in the 1950s and 60s we were told to be passive and pray for what we wanted. Thank heavens self-actualization and womens liberation came along and we discovered well-behaved women seldom make history. (Nicely covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Thatcher_Ulrich ) If we want the guys to change we gotta keep busting their chops about being civil, within the limits of civility of course. On a one on one basis, day after day after day. And even though no matter how civil we are, SOME of them still will think it is we who are being uncivil. It's a dirty job, but it's gotta be done. And the more guys who help promote civility and are willing to counter the good-old-boy mentality, the better... :-) On 7/3/2014 3:18 PM, Sydney Poore wrote: There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable. I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Being relatively new to this list, I dip my toe into what seems to be a somewhat fraught mailing list with some trepidation. (Read: please don't bite this newbie). I think we need to understand where the problems lie and therefore what problem(s) we are seeking to solve. If I understand it correctly, we are looking at the low proportion of female editors. Presumably we need to understand what is happening to women in different phases of the lifecycle, noting that not all of these phases may occur for any individual woman * Initial recruitment - women clicking edit for the first time - what does/doesn't motivate? * Newbie phase as anonymous editor (may or may not occur) * Newbie phase as registered user * Active editor * Active editor self-identifying as female (can take many forms) * Editor taking wiki-stress break * Blocked editor * etc I note that a major difficulty in working at the earlier stages of the lifecycle is that we simply do not know whether the editor is male or female until there is some self-identification. Other than the choice of a obviously-gendered user name, we often have no way of guessing the sex of the user until they are experienced enough (e.g. know about User page, etc) *and* choose to self-identity in some form. A second and not-entirely-dependent but not-entirely-independent set of issues relates to gender of articles. There is data to suggest that certain topics are more of interest to women and therefore less well-developed on WP because of there being fewer women editors. Therefore, there is the possibility of slicing the problem on another axis in relation to: * Ungendered article, by which I mean there is nothing gendered about the subject matter nor any reason to think it is more likely to interest editors of either sex * Gendered-topic article, by which I mean the subject matter has gender but this doesn't necessarily alter relative editor interest * Gender-attracting topics, which disproportionately attract editors of one sex * Gender-controversial topics, which I draw out because this seems to be a particular battleground, by which I mean articles about feminism, women's rights, abortion, etc and other issues which are real-world controversial topics that have definite gender issues and create major POV issues. * etc I note that a machine-analysis of the edits of self-identified male/female editors we can identify those articles/categories which appear to be neutral or biased in terms of editor interest. Machine-analysis can also show us which articles/categories have high levels of activity (in particular high levels of reverts and low levels of text survival and probably high levels of Talk page activity and User Talk page of editors involved) that suggest they are controversial (although breaking news can manifest similar activity patterns without being controversial in the real world) and how self-identifying editors fare during these processes (simply, do female editors exhibit different patterns of behaviour to male editors?). And there are probably other criteria by which we can slice this issue up. I think we have to recognise this is not just one problem requiring one solution. But rather that there are potentially many scenarios where we may have a problem and, if we do have that problem, we need a solution appropriate to that lifecycle phase and that kind of article. Or to put it another way, there is a world of difference between the anonymous female editor who attempts her first edit on a living person biography, has it reverted because there is no citation, and can't understand why her edit disappeared (noting she probably doesn't even know that she can view the edit summary that may explain why, assuming she can figure out what the cryptic letters WP:BLP means if she did) and the experienced female editor harassed on a talk page in a sexualised picture-of-the-day dispute. Both situations could be the straw that breaks the camel's back and both women might never edit again, but clearly the problem is different and the solution has to be too. Solutions like the existing ArbCom (or Hall of Justice as proposed) are both mechanisms that depend on the editor involved being 1) sufficiently experienced to know they even exist 2) know how to engage with them and 3) are comfortable engaging with them. Despite editing WP on and off for several years, 1) I did not know of ArbCom for many years 2) I still don't actually know how to engage with it, and 3) I am not disposed to solve my problems that way (don't like the conflict that I rightly-or-wrongly presume is part and parcel of it). A Hall of Justice solution might work for particular scenarios (although I concur with the practicalities of staffing it with a 50% female representation) but is probably irrelevant for many others. Or to put it another way, I suspect the membership of this list is not
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
I have a class of many women who have an optional editing assignment,. Many try to edit but leave out of concern about bullying by (probably) male editors. You are right that they are lost before they get here. My attrition rate is 70%. I do not want women to go where they do not feel safe. I do not see any problem in identification. It would help a great deal to diminish the aggression. Kathleen McCook On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 7:12 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote: Being relatively new to this list, I dip my toe into what seems to be a somewhat fraught mailing list with some trepidation. (Read: please don’t bite this newbie). I think we need to understand where the problems lie and therefore what problem(s) we are seeking to solve. If I understand it correctly, we are looking at the low proportion of female editors. Presumably we need to understand what is happening to women in different phases of the lifecycle, noting that not all of these phases may occur for any individual woman Initial recruitment – women clicking “edit” for the first time – what does/doesn’t motivate? Newbie phase as anonymous editor (may or may not occur) Newbie phase as registered user Active editor Active editor self-identifying as female (can take many forms) Editor taking wiki-stress break Blocked editor etc I note that a major difficulty in working at the earlier stages of the lifecycle is that we simply do not know whether the editor is male or female until there is some self-identification. Other than the choice of a obviously-gendered user name, we often have no way of guessing the sex of the user until they are experienced enough (e.g. know about User page, etc) *and* choose to self-identity in some form. A second and not-entirely-dependent but not-entirely-independent set of issues relates to “gender” of articles. There is data to suggest that certain topics are more of interest to women and therefore less well-developed on WP because of there being fewer women editors. Therefore, there is the possibility of slicing the problem on another axis in relation to: Ungendered article, by which I mean there is nothing ”gendered” about the subject matter nor any reason to think it is more likely to interest editors of either sex Gendered-topic article, by which I mean the subject matter has “gender” but this doesn’t necessarily alter relative editor interest Gender-attracting topics, which disproportionately attract editors of one sex Gender-controversial topics, which I draw out because this seems to be a particular battleground, by which I mean articles about feminism, women’s rights, abortion, etc and other issues which are real-world controversial topics that have definite gender issues and create major POV issues. etc I note that a machine-analysis of the edits of self-identified male/female editors we can identify those articles/categories which appear to be neutral or biased in terms of editor interest. Machine-analysis can also show us which articles/categories have high levels of activity (in particular high levels of reverts and low levels of text survival and probably high levels of Talk page activity and User Talk page of editors involved) that suggest they are “controversial” (although “breaking news” can manifest similar activity patterns without being controversial in the real world) and how self-identifying editors fare during these processes (simply, do female editors exhibit different patterns of behaviour to male editors?). And there are probably other criteria by which we can slice this issue up. I think we have to recognise this is not just “one problem” requiring “one solution”. But rather that there are potentially many scenarios where we may have a problem and, if we do have that problem, we need a solution appropriate to that lifecycle phase and that kind of article. Or to put it another way, there is a world of difference between the anonymous female editor who attempts her first edit on a living person biography, has it reverted because there is no citation, and can’t understand why her edit disappeared (noting she probably doesn’t even know that she can view the edit summary that may explain why, assuming she can figure out what the cryptic letters WP:BLP means if she did) and the experienced female editor harassed on a talk page in a “sexualised” picture-of-the-day dispute. Both situations could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and both women might never edit again, but clearly the problem is different and the solution has to be too. Solutions like the existing ArbCom (or Hall of Justice as proposed) are both mechanisms that depend on the editor involved being 1) sufficiently experienced to know they even exist 2) know how to engage with them and 3) are comfortable engaging with them. Despite editing WP on and off for several years, 1) I did not know of ArbCom for many years 2) I
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Janine, Ryan, Pete and Moriel, these are great ideas. I love the idea of a button that anyone can press to send an alert to a Wikiquette team. How can an idea like this be moved forward? There could be different levels of urgency (low: general incivility; medium: sexism, racism, homophobia; high: harassment, outing, threats). In the forum, we made it so that while no one sees the report publicly, the moderators do see the name (or user name) of the reporter (we don't share that outside the moderation team, though) We found that this helps us mediate problems of harassment-by-reporting and to spot potential underlying issues with a repeat offender. So, for example, we can recognize when a user consistently over-reports another user for no reason (or petty reasons) which can also be harassment. I'm not sure if this is possible in Wikipedia itself, we might want to see if we need another tool just for that. Do you think that having to use an external tool is realistic for a Wikipedia group, though? We use external tools for development (like bugzilla) but I am not sure what the reaction would be for something like this when an on-wiki team is involved. (I might be missing an option of having this semi-closed/hidden space on-wiki) -- No trees were harmed in the creation of this post. But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly inconvenienced during its transmission! ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
I think the closest thing we have with these capabilities is the Wikimedia OTRS system: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS Specific queues can be customized in many ways, I believe, though others will know more about this. Thanks, Pharos On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 2:02 AM, Moriel Schottlender mor...@gmail.com wrote: Janine, Ryan, Pete and Moriel, these are great ideas. I love the idea of a button that anyone can press to send an alert to a Wikiquette team. How can an idea like this be moved forward? There could be different levels of urgency (low: general incivility; medium: sexism, racism, homophobia; high: harassment, outing, threats). In the forum, we made it so that while no one sees the report publicly, the moderators do see the name (or user name) of the reporter (we don't share that outside the moderation team, though) We found that this helps us mediate problems of harassment-by-reporting and to spot potential underlying issues with a repeat offender. So, for example, we can recognize when a user consistently over-reports another user for no reason (or petty reasons) which can also be harassment. I'm not sure if this is possible in Wikipedia itself, we might want to see if we need another tool just for that. Do you think that having to use an external tool is realistic for a Wikipedia group, though? We use external tools for development (like bugzilla) but I am not sure what the reaction would be for something like this when an on-wiki team is involved. (I might be missing an option of having this semi-closed/hidden space on-wiki) -- No trees were harmed in the creation of this post. But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly inconvenienced during its transmission! ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
What if... Wikiquette assistance were resurrected as a list of volunteer admins that you could privately email about problems rather than a public noticeboard? Ryan Kaldari On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 4:05 AM, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: I would assume that WMF has an ombudsman who would do just that, but I see that there is only this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Sarah slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case danc...@frontiernet.net wrote: A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think. Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful. I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations. Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at? Daniel Case Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention. Sarah ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Online communities can allow anyone to report problem posts or PMs. Only the moderators see these reports, not the general membership or public. For example, Simple Machines Forum has a report link on every post. I've been part of the moderation team in scienceforums.net for the past 6-7 years, and I can account for this from the other side (of a moderation team member) --- it really depends on how well the moderation team handles these reports, but from my experience, the system has great advantages- 1. It allows users to complain about anything from bias to bad attitude to stalking *privately* and without repercussion (no one other than the moderators knows that something was reported) and when we take action, we take care not to imply that anyone reported the post. 2. It also allows users the freedom to check their concerns before they become disasters. We sometimes get reports about a thread that isn't a problem *yet* but might very well get there without intervention, and we keep that thread in sight and try to intervene when possible to steer things back to normal. However, these reports and moderation-action can also have some negative side effects - 1. It can look like Big Brother is Watching when moderators respond to a report but no one knows that there even was a report. 2. It requires that there *is* a sort of moderation team and that people know who the moderators are. It also requires that people are able to complain *about* the moderation team in the reports, so the team has to have internal rules about how to inspect one of its own members. 3. Some (not all) of the forums and moderation-driven systems also have some sort of history about troublesome users. This is extremely helpful to spot a user that is borderline on trolling or harassment, those are very easily flying under the radar and hurting others. So history in that aspect is very helpful. However, that can easily devolve, especially when/if these are public (in which case they can trigger worse behaviors) The entire idea of reporting posts can be a tricky to make right and effective. I don't know how this can be implemented in a project like Wikipedia, where the idea of some moderation authority is generally frowned upon (and justly so) Maybe we can have a faux-moderation-team, a team that can get (private!) reports and then go and intervene. So even if they have no teeth or authority for actual action it can show users that they have support and they're not alone -- which seems to be one of the main issues with the gendergap and participation of minorities in general. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php Now in many cases the harasser can blame the victim, but that happens whether it is the truth or not. I have run into a problem of neutrals feeling as though reporting is being a snitch. Haven't figured out a way around that yet. Janine ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- No trees were harmed in the creation of this post. But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly inconvenienced during its transmission! ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
I'm European (from Ireland) and clearly identify this as a major issue. -- Allie (User:Alison) On Jul 4, 2014, at 11:53 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote: do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this? rupert Am 03.07.2014 21:13 schrieb Leigh Honeywell le...@hypatia.ca: Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as micromanagement but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things. -Leigh On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki. As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else, it's the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's also only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when the Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy or rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we can see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as personality rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does try to intervene, it's often ineffective.) Risker/Anne On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell le...@hypatia.ca wrote: The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken up the chain? -Leigh On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a casebut nobody wanted to do that... Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Alastair_Haines_2oldid=360884518 Ryan Kaldari ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On 7/3/2014 1:40 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy. The other problem is double standard enforcement. A bunch of guys may complain about mild incivility by a female and she'll get warned by an admin at an ANI. A guy can get away with a lot of bullying, insults and harassment before complaints are taken seriously and there is even an admin comment on an ANI. That's why it's important to have the talk page of the gender gap task force page open to a listing of various ANIs and enforcement actions involving editors known to be women. A couple women going to each one and pointing out when these gender gap double standards obviously exist, over and over again would be a big help. That way there's some hope editors and admins especially will understand that double standards exist and are bad! Same with Harassment, incivility, etc. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Going to Admins talk pages directly after the rule wrong can be helpful. I've seen some obnoxious individuals get away with stuff because they'd chummy up to the Admin on their talk page and explain the righteousness of their behavior ad nauseam, as if to brainwash the admin. More squeaky wheel stuff. CM ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:56 AM, Carol Moore dc carolmoor...@verizon.net wrote: On 7/3/2014 1:40 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy. The other problem is double standard enforcement. A bunch of guys may complain about mild incivility by a female and she'll get warned by an admin at an ANI. A guy can get away with a lot of bullying, insults and harassment before complaints are taken seriously and there is even an admin comment on an ANI. I agree, policies against harassment can be co-opted to further harass marginalized people and there is a long history of this in other areas (see SLAPP and anti-SLAPP in U.S. law for example). People on this list might be interested in some experiments in other open tech/culture communities where people are extending any policy about harassment to take into account the surrounding power structure of society. That is, they explicitly say that they will take into account the power imbalance between parties before deciding whether something is harassment. In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. The Geek Feminism Anti-Abuse Team is not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response. http://geekfeminism.org/about/code-of-conduct/ A supplemental goal of this Code of Conduct is to increase open source citizenship by encouraging participants to recognize and strengthen the relationships between our actions and their effects on our community. Communities mirror the societies in which they exist and positive action is essential to counteract the many forms of inequality and abuses of power that exist in society. http://opensourcebridge.org/about/code-of-conduct/ -VAL That's why it's important to have the talk page of the gender gap task force page open to a listing of various ANIs and enforcement actions involving editors known to be women. A couple women going to each one and pointing out when these gender gap double standards obviously exist, over and over again would be a big help. That way there's some hope editors and admins especially will understand that double standards exist and are bad! Same with Harassment, incivility, etc. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Going to Admins talk pages directly after the rule wrong can be helpful. I've seen some obnoxious individuals get away with stuff because they'd chummy up to the Admin on their talk page and explain the righteousness of their behavior ad nauseam, as if to brainwash the admin. More squeaky wheel stuff. CM ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Valerie Aurora Executive Director You can help increase the participation of women in open technology and culture! Donate today at http://adainitiative.org/donate/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Even if it is an en-wiki only issue, it's having a clear impact on editor retention and therefore the long-term sustainability of the project. I think trying to fix that is easy to dismiss as micromanagement but sometimes it turns out that fixing the big picture /does/ require organizational leadership to address specific things. -Leigh On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Well, here's the issue. It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue. The overwhelming majority of people participating on this list work almost exclusively on enwiki, and almost every single experience discussed here involves enwiki. As important as we all know English Wikipedia to be (if nothing else, it's the fundraising driver from which the bulk of donations derives), it's also only one of hundreds of projects. There are issues with the Board micromanaging a single project directly, and pretty serious issues when the Board tries to fix a problem on one project by creating a global policy or rule that may actually be counterproductive in other areas. (And as we can see from the obtuseness that Commons shows about such issues as personality rights - a major gendergap issue in my mind - even when the Board does try to intervene, it's often ineffective.) Risker/Anne On 3 July 2014 14:58, Leigh Honeywell le...@hypatia.ca wrote: The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken up the chain? -Leigh On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a casebut nobody wanted to do that... Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Alastair_Haines_2oldid=360884518 Ryan Kaldari ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
There was an attempt to address the civility problem on Wikipedia English with a top down approach at the very start of Sue Gardner's time at WMF. Sue, Jimmy Wales, myself, and a group of half dozen other people talked about it in a closed group. It failed because a top down approach is not effective on Wikipedia because policies can not be enforced from the top. Policies need to be made that a large part of the community agrees at proper and enforceable. I would be willing to assist a group that wants to take another run at it. But there are significant challenges with enforcing a civility policy on a global community where cultural norms differ at great deal. So, we need to be careful that an attempt to assist one group of users does not make it harder for other groups of people who are also under represented on Wikipedia English. Sydney Sydney Sydney Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Leigh Honeywell le...@hypatia.ca wrote: The more I hear about this, the more I think this is something that WMF needs to address at an institutional level (Board etc.) to resolve these process issues and loopholes. Has this ever been taken up the chain? -Leigh On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: You know, I sat on Arbcom for five years, and there were several occasions when I practically begged those complaining about the behaviour of certain individuals to initiate a casebut nobody wanted to do that... Well, you know I did actually take one of the worst misogynists on en.wiki to ArbCom,[1] and it was such a horrible experience that I decided to never do it again. After giving up a month of my life to the case and enduring constant harassment during the process, all of the evidence that I painstakingly assembled, presented, and defended was completely ignored by ArbCom, and instead he was banned for a year for making a legal threat. He is now free to return on the condition that he simply agrees not to make any more legal threats. You were actually on that ArbCom panel, Risker, so I don't really understand your argument that taking incivil editors to ArbCom is a good idea. To me it is worse than a waste of effort, it is actually counterproductive and an invitation to be relentlessly harassed. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Alastair_Haines_2oldid=360884518 Ryan Kaldari ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Dear Val, I've now read and reread your message (quoted below) several times, and want to thank you for putting this important concept in such clear and tangible terms. I have just one thing to add: It seems to me that this points to a broader issue that's deeply connected with the social dynamics of collaborative communities that value public communication, and is not restricted to gender-related topics. In the Wikimedia world, we have lots of people who are willing, even eager, to offer help and advise in a wide variety of areas, but that don't feel any special *responsibility* to meet specific expectations for help and advice. So frequently, we encounter frustrations when people seeking help (analogous to your example of men with poor social skills -- but I'm trying to look at it broadly, as people lacking XYZ skills) encounter some kind of resistance on our projects, and assume that the people around them will take the time to educate them. This dynamic can lead to all kinds of discord, but in many cases, it isn't really any one person's fault. I think this is something worthy of some careful thought, and probably research. It would be great if we could think through how expectations of assistance play out throughout our projects; I suspect that we would start to see some ways to improve not only the gender gap, but perhaps some other general negative dynamics in the movement. -Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]] On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Valerie Aurora vale...@adainitiative.org wrote: Hi Phoebe, Thanks for your thoughtful and carefully explained comment! The perspective I am coming from here is over 13 years of experience with spaces for supporting women in open tech/culture, starting with LinuxChix in 2002. A pattern that groups like this have found over and over again is that a spaces designed to support women in these areas inevitably attract men with poor social skills, who then ask the group for (unpaid) help improving their social skills. In most open tech/culture groups, such requests would be unthinkable, but we are often socialized to expect women to provide emotional support and help to others (especially men and children) on request, without consideration for the value of their time and energy. The result is that, without a strong awareness and guarding of the original purpose of the group, the group dedicates an ever-larger portion of its time to teaching men social skills. Many of the people who are interested in the original purpose of the group tend to lose interest and depart. This is exactly what happened to LinuxChix - our IRC channel became primarily about counseling various men who had found a welcoming and supportive environment, and our mailing lists were more enjoyable and fulfilling for men looking for emotional boosts than for women looking for a supportive environment where they could talk about Linux. In short, I agree with you that there is some potential benefit to providing free social skills counseling to men who are interested in supporting women in open tech/culture. In my experience, the cost is much greater: the time and emotional energy of many women that could be used much more effectively on other projects. -VAL -- Valerie Aurora Executive Director You can help increase the participation of women in open technology and culture! Donate today at http://adainitiative.org/donate/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
Daniel and Elizabeth Case wrote: A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think. I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations. Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at? Daniel Case Online communities can allow anyone to report problem posts or PMs. Only the moderators see these reports, not the general membership or public. For example, Simple Machines Forum has a report link on every post. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php Now in many cases the harasser can blame the victim, but that happens whether it is the truth or not. I have run into a problem of neutrals feeling as though reporting is being a snitch. Haven't figured out a way around that yet. Janine ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Addressing incivility (was: men on lists)
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:55 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case danc...@frontiernet.net wrote: A major problem with our dispute-resolution processes is that the person being harassed has to endure more harassment to draw attention to the problem. This is, of course, hardly unique to Wikipedia or even online communities in general, I think. Hi Daniel, the very public nature of it on Wikipedia makes it unusual and very stressful. I have long thought the Foundation ought to employ a team of specialists who can take up those cases when they see them, so that the pursuit of sanctions is not laid at the victim's door. This is perhaps similar to Sumana's suggestion that communities need dedicated helpers who will do the emotional labour in conflict situations. Would there be a good existing example of such a program we could take a look at? Daniel Case Sumana talked https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned about the situation at Hacker School: If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don't ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don't bring everyone else's work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen. The idea of having people paid to do this is very attractive for Wikipedia. I think they would have to be professionals with appropriate training, otherwise there's a big risk of making things worse. The Foundation probably has enough of an income to consider this, given the potential impact on the atmosphere and editor retention. Sarah ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
