7 ms·

Why I do I see the problems of harassment and of lack of representation being conflated here. While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think

Why I do I see the problems of harassment and of lack of representation being conflated here. While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think it is wrong to insinuate that it is a major cause for lack of participation by women in Wikipedia. It is a voluntary effort, and besides editors do not have to declare their names or gender in Wikipedia. Editors need not even have accounts. So the numbers the article cites are likely to be unreliable.

sgillen 8y ago
I’m not sure why you are being downvoted. I do not have any reason to believe men are any more resilient to harassment than women are.
- peteretep 8y ago
  No data to support this assumption, but I’d wager a good chunk of cash on more men being the perpetrators of online harassment.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I claim the opposite with an equal amount of supporting data! I even make my factoid more believable than yours by calling to mind the viciousness of harassment among teenage girls and I point out that they are avid users of social media.
    - coding123 8y ago
      I'm gonna wager a third option with ALL chips in that it's not the gender that's at issue but the gender roles that is at issue and is to blame for the harassment.
  - bubblewrap 8y ago
    There have been studies showing most harassers of women are actually other women. I think it was for Twitter, and perhaps comments on The Guardian website, not sure about the details. I don't know the total numbers for harassment in general. For example if more men than women would use a particular social network, men would likely be more often harassers. In total numbers, not proportions. But I am not sure you would win your bet. I'm pretty sure men are more often the target of harassment than women. Would take that bet. Edit: can't find the exact articles anymore (thanks for nothing, liberal Google), but here is for example one mentioning 50% of harassment women receive on Twitter is from other women: https://www.businessinsider.de/half-of-the-sexist-harassment-women-face-on-twitter-comes-from-women-2016-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.de/half-of-the-sexist-harassment...
    - okcando 8y ago
      I heard on I think Malcolm Gladwell's podcast (and he's hardly infallible and this is second hand so grains of salt and all that) that women tend to harass other women more often when they are underrepresented or subordinated in the group. The context was a diversity hiring push that put a few women in otherwise primarily male offices across the country and saw disappointing results. The idea was that when women (or any minority group) are outnumbered, they will try to defy expectations and stand out by adopting the social habits of the majority and will compete with each other for ratification. And that makes some amount of sense to me, like when a gay man reassures us that he's conservative and subtle and a good dinner guest and not like those oversexed deviants that march in the parades. He's forsaking others in his minority group to get in the club. But it's a thin line. I don't mean to take the position that anything bad that women do is always the fault of men. It's just hard to suss out something this complicated.
  - schwurb 8y ago
    What does the effect of harassment on males have to do with whether males are more likely to be harassers?
- bluescrn 8y ago
  Men are in some ways stuck in their historical gender role, expected to be tough and ‘have a thick skin’. There’s certainly vast amounts of abuse and harassment hurled at men online - politicians in particular. Right now, the US president probably receives more online hate than anyone else in history...
  - FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
    You had me going with a convincing argument till you finished your second sentence.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      I'm not going to wade into the gender roles debate but who "receives" the most online hate Depends on your definition of "receives" The most polarizing US president since the internet no doubt has the most shit talked about him on the internet (I'm sure someone more polarizing will come along eventually though). I don't think he sees much of it. It's not like world leaders fill their free time by browsing /r/politics.
    - JimiofEden 8y ago
      I mean, it doesn't sound completely wrong to me so far in history. Regardless of whether or not that hate is deserved is another matter. But thinking back as to who else receives as much hate: A few other thoughts are Hitler, maybe W Bush back before modern social media took over. There was definitely the whole Shkreli thing, but I don't think that ever reached the average joe as much as the others have.
Animats 8y ago
Don't ask, don't tell. Editors on Wikipedia can be anonymous.
- bjourne 8y ago
  I'd call it being pseudonymous rather than anonymous. It doesn't always shield you from harassment. For example, I edited some articles relating to Sweden and the clever trolls on the site put 2 + 2 together and used that as an attack vector. I can only imagine what the insults would have been had I edited something more sensitive like about transgender issues or sexual fetishes or whatever. I really think the site should have required real names for most editing. Pseudonymity brings out the worst in people.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Facebook shows that people are perfectly capable of nasty things under their real names. Reading Facebook comments on popular videos and groups basically exposed pseudonymity=bad as a myth to my eyes.
    - Tade0 8y ago
      Same here. People are also not that different in person - it's just that some of them don't go out much so you're unlikely to meet them and their horrible personalities.
    - bjourne 8y ago
      But there are degrees of hell. Facebook comments are usually not as nasty as Reddit comments which in turn are not as nasty as 4chan comments.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    How should Wikipedia require real names? And who would validate them?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
scarejunba 8y ago
I have an anecdote to share which has (perhaps unfairly) biased my beliefs regarding underrepresented people on Wikipedia. On /r/twoxchromosomes, a profile of a somewhat accomplished (more like John Aaron, less like Alan Turing) woman was posted. In the comments were some six to ten people lamenting that she didn't have a Wikipedia page. I thought perhaps it had been put up for RFDs or something the way they complained about how a man in the same position would have a page. Anyway, so I waited a day to see if they'd do anything and they didn't. The woman in question did deserve a Wikipedia page so I made one, described her story, and added citations. Within the week, various bots had made it pretty. I was then able to go request a picture for her Wikipedia page. I just checked and the page looks pretty good. Lots of people have contributed. Nothing I did was impossible for any of them to do. So why didn't they do it? Why instead did they write absolute reams of comments about the unfairness when they had the tools to fix it? Why are they so helpless? On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. You can be the change, quietly.
- iagovar 8y ago
  That's exactly my experience. I contributed to spanish Wikipedia several times. I don't really see the barrier. Yet I read about wikipedia and women again and again.
- gsich 8y ago
  And even if the page on Wikipedia got deleted (relevance or content issues or whatever) you can at least say that you tried.
- baud147258 8y ago
  It's a lot of work, you need good sources (better than reddit comment) and write the text; at least it's more work than just complaining on reddit/twitter. Another matter is that adding sources is complicated (at I found the process cumbersome last time I did it).
  - el_cujo 8y ago
    I agree that there is definitely a barrier to entry for making wikipedia articles, it definitely takes a little bit of time and effort. What bothers me is in a situation like the person you're replying to described, its hard to feel like the disgust/disappointment with the fact that this person didn't have an article is obviously overstated by the commenters. Yes, making a wikipedia article requires some effort, but not so much that if you cared at all about making one that you couldn't do it in an afternoon or two. Maybe it's an unfair assumption, but it just pushes me to further think that these people who complain about stuff on the internet don't actually care, they just want to win brownie points for appearing to care.
gsich 8y ago
>While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think it is wrong to insinuate that it is a major cause for lack of participation by women in Wikipedia. This. You participate in Wikipedia because you want to. And like in many tech areas, women tend to not be interested in them.
papermill 8y ago
I've come to the conclusion that everything in "news" has an agenda. You follow it long enough and it's simply obvious. The way journalism works isn't that they want to find objective facts and truth and go where it leads them. Rather they start with an agenda and then seek out the facts. The epitome of modern journalism is the Rolling Stone "Rape on Campus" farce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus There, the journalist had the premise of "mass rape on college campus" and sought out made-up "facts" to defend her premise. Also, women in traditional fashion or social media ( instagram, etc ) get harrassment ( mostly from other women ) as well. And yet, women flock to these industries and platforms. "Harrassment" doesn't seem to deter women from things they actually want.
kristianc 8y ago
> While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think it is wrong to insinuate that it is a major cause for lack of participation by women in Wikipedia. I'd say that if someone left photos of genitals on my userpage, that would be a pretty strong disincentive for me to participate.

sgillen 8y ago

I’m not sure why you are being downvoted. I do not have any reason to believe men are any more resilient to harassment than women are.

peteretep 8y ago
No data to support this assumption, but I’d wager a good chunk of cash on more men being the perpetrators of online harassment.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I claim the opposite with an equal amount of supporting data! I even make my factoid more believable than yours by calling to mind the viciousness of harassment among teenage girls and I point out that they are avid users of social media.
  - coding123 8y ago
    I'm gonna wager a third option with ALL chips in that it's not the gender that's at issue but the gender roles that is at issue and is to blame for the harassment.
- bubblewrap 8y ago
  There have been studies showing most harassers of women are actually other women. I think it was for Twitter, and perhaps comments on The Guardian website, not sure about the details. I don't know the total numbers for harassment in general. For example if more men than women would use a particular social network, men would likely be more often harassers. In total numbers, not proportions. But I am not sure you would win your bet. I'm pretty sure men are more often the target of harassment than women. Would take that bet. Edit: can't find the exact articles anymore (thanks for nothing, liberal Google), but here is for example one mentioning 50% of harassment women receive on Twitter is from other women: https://www.businessinsider.de/half-of-the-sexist-harassment-women-face-on-twitter-comes-from-women-2016-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.de/half-of-the-sexist-harassment...
  - okcando 8y ago
    I heard on I think Malcolm Gladwell's podcast (and he's hardly infallible and this is second hand so grains of salt and all that) that women tend to harass other women more often when they are underrepresented or subordinated in the group. The context was a diversity hiring push that put a few women in otherwise primarily male offices across the country and saw disappointing results. The idea was that when women (or any minority group) are outnumbered, they will try to defy expectations and stand out by adopting the social habits of the majority and will compete with each other for ratification. And that makes some amount of sense to me, like when a gay man reassures us that he's conservative and subtle and a good dinner guest and not like those oversexed deviants that march in the parades. He's forsaking others in his minority group to get in the club. But it's a thin line. I don't mean to take the position that anything bad that women do is always the fault of men. It's just hard to suss out something this complicated.
- schwurb 8y ago
  What does the effect of harassment on males have to do with whether males are more likely to be harassers?
bluescrn 8y ago
Men are in some ways stuck in their historical gender role, expected to be tough and ‘have a thick skin’. There’s certainly vast amounts of abuse and harassment hurled at men online - politicians in particular. Right now, the US president probably receives more online hate than anyone else in history...
- FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
  You had me going with a convincing argument till you finished your second sentence.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    I'm not going to wade into the gender roles debate but who "receives" the most online hate Depends on your definition of "receives" The most polarizing US president since the internet no doubt has the most shit talked about him on the internet (I'm sure someone more polarizing will come along eventually though). I don't think he sees much of it. It's not like world leaders fill their free time by browsing /r/politics.
  - JimiofEden 8y ago
    I mean, it doesn't sound completely wrong to me so far in history. Regardless of whether or not that hate is deserved is another matter. But thinking back as to who else receives as much hate: A few other thoughts are Hitler, maybe W Bush back before modern social media took over. There was definitely the whole Shkreli thing, but I don't think that ever reached the average joe as much as the others have.

Animats 8y ago

Don't ask, don't tell. Editors on Wikipedia can be anonymous.

bjourne 8y ago
I'd call it being pseudonymous rather than anonymous. It doesn't always shield you from harassment. For example, I edited some articles relating to Sweden and the clever trolls on the site put 2 + 2 together and used that as an attack vector. I can only imagine what the insults would have been had I edited something more sensitive like about transgender issues or sexual fetishes or whatever. I really think the site should have required real names for most editing. Pseudonymity brings out the worst in people.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Facebook shows that people are perfectly capable of nasty things under their real names. Reading Facebook comments on popular videos and groups basically exposed pseudonymity=bad as a myth to my eyes.
  - Tade0 8y ago
    Same here. People are also not that different in person - it's just that some of them don't go out much so you're unlikely to meet them and their horrible personalities.
  - bjourne 8y ago
    But there are degrees of hell. Facebook comments are usually not as nasty as Reddit comments which in turn are not as nasty as 4chan comments.
- icebraining 8y ago
  How should Wikipedia require real names? And who would validate them?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

scarejunba 8y ago

I have an anecdote to share which has (perhaps unfairly) biased my beliefs regarding underrepresented people on Wikipedia. On /r/twoxchromosomes, a profile of a somewhat accomplished (more like John Aaron, less like Alan Turing) woman was posted. In the comments were some six to ten people lamenting that she didn't have a Wikipedia page. I thought perhaps it had been put up for RFDs or something the way they complained about how a man in the same position would have a page. Anyway, so I waited a day to see if they'd do anything and they didn't. The woman in question did deserve a Wikipedia page so I made one, described her story, and added citations. Within the week, various bots had made it pretty. I was then able to go request a picture for her Wikipedia page. I just checked and the page looks pretty good. Lots of people have contributed. Nothing I did was impossible for any of them to do. So why didn't they do it? Why instead did they write absolute reams of comments about the unfairness when they had the tools to fix it? Why are they so helpless? On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. You can be the change, quietly.

iagovar 8y ago
That's exactly my experience. I contributed to spanish Wikipedia several times. I don't really see the barrier. Yet I read about wikipedia and women again and again.
gsich 8y ago
And even if the page on Wikipedia got deleted (relevance or content issues or whatever) you can at least say that you tried.
baud147258 8y ago
It's a lot of work, you need good sources (better than reddit comment) and write the text; at least it's more work than just complaining on reddit/twitter. Another matter is that adding sources is complicated (at I found the process cumbersome last time I did it).
- el_cujo 8y ago
  I agree that there is definitely a barrier to entry for making wikipedia articles, it definitely takes a little bit of time and effort. What bothers me is in a situation like the person you're replying to described, its hard to feel like the disgust/disappointment with the fact that this person didn't have an article is obviously overstated by the commenters. Yes, making a wikipedia article requires some effort, but not so much that if you cared at all about making one that you couldn't do it in an afternoon or two. Maybe it's an unfair assumption, but it just pushes me to further think that these people who complain about stuff on the internet don't actually care, they just want to win brownie points for appearing to care.

gsich 8y ago

>While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think it is wrong to insinuate that it is a major cause for lack of participation by women in Wikipedia. This. You participate in Wikipedia because you want to. And like in many tech areas, women tend to not be interested in them.

papermill 8y ago

I've come to the conclusion that everything in "news" has an agenda. You follow it long enough and it's simply obvious. The way journalism works isn't that they want to find objective facts and truth and go where it leads them. Rather they start with an agenda and then seek out the facts. The epitome of modern journalism is the Rolling Stone "Rape on Campus" farce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus There, the journalist had the premise of "mass rape on college campus" and sought out made-up "facts" to defend her premise. Also, women in traditional fashion or social media ( instagram, etc ) get harrassment ( mostly from other women ) as well. And yet, women flock to these industries and platforms. "Harrassment" doesn't seem to deter women from things they actually want.

kristianc 8y ago

> While harrasement is deplorable and needs to be tackled, I think it is wrong to insinuate that it is a major cause for lack of participation by women in Wikipedia. I'd say that if someone left photos of genitals on my userpage, that would be a pretty strong disincentive for me to participate.