Coyle's InFormation

One of the main attempts at solutions to the lack of women on Wikipedia is to encourage more women to come to Wikipedia and edit. The idea is that greater numbers of women on Wikipedia will result in greater equality on the platform; that there will be more information about women and women's issues, and a hoped for "civilizing influence" on the brutish culture.

This argument is so obviously specious that it is hard for me to imagine that it is being put forth by educated and intelligent people. Women are not a minority - we are around 52% of the world's population and, with a few pockets of exception, we are culturally, politically, sexually, and financially oppressed throughout the planet. If numbers created more equality, where is that equality for women?

The "woman problem" is not numerical and it cannot solved with numbers. The problem is cultural; we know this because attacks against women can be traced to culture, not numbers: the brutal rapes in India, the harassment of German women by recent-arrived immigrant men at the Hamburg railway station on New Year's eve, the racist and sexist attacks on Leslie Jones on Twitter -- none of these can be explained by numbers. In fact, the stats show that over 60% of Twitter users are female, and yet Jones was horribly attacked. Gamergate arose at a time when the number of women in gaming is quite high, with data varying from 40% to over 50% of gamers being women. Women gamers are attacked not because there are too few of them, and there does not appear to be any safety in numbers.

The numbers argument is not only provably false, it is dangerous if mis-applied. Would women be safer walking home alone at night if we encouraged more women to do it?  Would having more women at frat parties reduce the rape culture on campus? Would women on Wikipedia be safer if there were more of them? (The statistics from 2011 showed that 13% of editors were female. The Wikimedia Foundation had a goal to increase the number to 25% by 2015, but Jimmy Wales actually stated in 2015 that the number of women was closer to 10% than 25%.) I think that gamergate and Twitter show us that the numbers are not the issue.

In fact, Wikipedia's efforts may have exacerbated the problem. The very public efforts to bring more women editors into Wikipedia (there have been and are organized campaigns both for women and about women) and the addition of more articles by and about women is going to be threatening to some members of the Wikipedia culture. In a recent example, an edit-a-thon produced twelve new articles about women artists. They were immediately marked for deletion, and yet, after analysis, ten of the articles were determined to be suitable, and only two were lost. It is quite likely that twelve new articles about male scientists (Wikipedia greatly values science over art, another bias) would not have produced this reaction; in fact, they might have sailed into the encyclopedia space without a hitch. Some editors are rebelling against the addition of information about women on Wikipedia, seeing it as a kind of reverse sexism (something that came up frequently in the attack on me).

Wikipedia's culture is a "self-run" society. So was the society in the Lord of the Flies. If you are one of the people who believe that we don't need government, that individuals should just battle it out and see who wins, then Wikipedia might be for you. If, instead, you believe that we have a social obligation to provide a safe environment for people, then this self-run society is not going to be appealing. I've felt what it's like to be "Piggy" and I can tell you that it's not something I would want anyone else to go through.

I'm not saying that we do not want more women editing Wikipedia. I am saying that more women does not equate to more safety for women. The safety problem is a cultural problem, not a numbers problem. One of the big challenges is how we can define safety in an actionable way. Title IX, the US statute mandating equality of the sexes in education,  revolutionized education and education-related sports. Importantly, it comes under the civil rights area of the Department of Justice. We need a Title IX for the Internet; one that requires those providing public services to make sure that there is no discrimination based on sex. Before we can have such a solution, we need to determine how to define "non-discrimination" in that context. It's not going to be easy, but it is a pre-requisite to solving the problem.

We've all heard that there are gender problems on Wikipedia. Honestly there are a lot of problems on Wikipedia, but gender disparity is one of them. Like other areas of online life, on Wikipedia there are thinly disguised and not-so thinly disguised attacks on women. I am at the moment the victim of one of those attacks.

Wikipedia runs on a set of policies that are used to help make decisions about content and to govern behavior. In a sense, this is already a very male approach, as we know from studies of boys and girls at play: boys like a sturdy set of rules, and will spend considerable time arguing whether or not rules are being followed; girls begin play without establishing a set of rules, develop agreed rules as play goes on if needed, but spend little time on discussion of rules.

If you've been on Wikipedia and have read discussions around various articles, you know that there are members of the community that like to "wiki-lawyer" - who will spend hours arguing whether something is or is not within the rules. Clearly, coming to a conclusion is not what matters; this is blunt force, nearly content-less arguing. It eats up hours of time, and yet that is how some folks choose to spend their time. There are huge screaming fights that have virtually no real meaning; it's a kind of fantasy sport.

Wiki-lawyering is frequently used to harass. It is currently going on to an amazing extent in harassment of me, although since I'm not participating, it's even emptier. The trigger was that I sent back for editing two articles about men that two wikipedians thought should not have been sent back. Given that I have reviewed nearly 4000 articles, sending back 75% of those for more work, these two are obviously not significant. What is significant, of course, is that a woman has looked at an article about a man and said: "this doesn't cut it". And that is the crux of the matter, although the only person to see that is me. It is all being discussed as violations of policy, although there are none. But sexism, as with racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., is almost never direct (and even when it is, it is often denied). Regulating what bathrooms a person can use, or denying same sex couples marriage, is a kind of lawyering around what the real problem is. The haters don't say "I hate transexuals" they just try to make them as miserable as possible by denying them basic comforts. In the past, and even the present, no one said "I don't want to hire women because I consider them inferior" they said "I can't hire women because they just get pregnant and leave."

Because wiki-lawyering is allowed, this kind of harassment is allowed. It's now gone on for two days and the level of discourse has gotten increasingly hysterical. Other than one statement in which I said I would not engage because the issue is not policy but sexism (which no one can engage with), it has all been between the wiki-lawyers, who are working up to a lynch mob. This is gamer-gate, in action, on Wikipedia.

It's too bad. I had hopes for Wikipedia. I may have to leave. But that means one less woman editing, and we were starting to gain some ground.

The best read on this topic, mainly about how hard it is to get information that is threatening to men (aka about women) into Wikipedia: WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia

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I have left Wikipedia, and I also had to delete my Twitter account because they started up there. I may not be very responsive on other media for a while. Thanks to everyone who has shown support, but if by any chance you come across a kinder, gentler planet available for habitation, do let me know. This one's desirability quotient is dropping fast.

I have recently attended a few Wikipedia editing sessions and become interested in contributing more to Wikipedia. There is much editing to be done on pages relating to libraries and librarians; some of those pages are quite inadequate, and many have been marked as such using the Wikipedia coded messages that point out problems. The page for the LCCN is a stub, for example. Search on Sears Subject headings and what you get is a pretty poor page for Minnie Earl Sears with some information about the subject headings. Lately I've been updating the page on the Dewey Decimal Classification, which had little background information and did not have appropriate citations. I hope to move from there to the rather strange page that "compares" DDC and the LC Classification.

I estimate that I spent between 20 and 40 hours doing the research for my updates to the DDC page. The reason for that is that the Wikipedia standard requires that all facts be sourced. Add to that the requirement for a neutral point of view (called NPOV in wiki-speak), and a good Wikipedia page is a set of sourced facts, with some clear writing connecting them. (And, yes, there are a lot of not-good Wikipedia pages.)

It occurred to me that if I were a teacher I could use Wikipedia as a learning experience. Wanting your favorite topic to be well-represented in Wikipedia is a great motivator. Having to source all of your facts (and being pretty much limited to facts) means having to do research. Doing research becomes a good activity for discussing how to find sources and how to evaluate them.

Then I thought: wouldn't it be great to run a Wikipedia editing session in a library? What better place to have access to the sources? An editing session in a library with reference librarians on hand sounds like a Wikipedian's dream, and it could be used to teach people how to use the library.

Have you done this? I'd like to know.