User:The Vintage Feminist/GGTF's re-boot

This essay has been written in response to a number of recent comments about "feminist agendas" and concerns about what the WP:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force – according to some – "has become".

Background

In June 2014 a member of the Gender Gap mailing list posted this link concerning an harassment case involving the question and answer website Quora.

There then followed a discussion between members which can probably be best summarized as – an implicit commitment by Gender Gap list members towards:

• making efforts to ensure that a similar situation(s), as outlined in the above link, do not happen on Wikipedia
• greater recruitment and retention of female editors
• pursuing technical solutions that would assist in welcoming all new editors regardless of gender
• pursuing technical solutions that would assist in creating an environment where editors would feel safe
• addressing wider civility issues

What follows is a set of quotes from the Gender Gap list for June, July, August and September 2014, i.e. they pre-date both the Arbcom case: Interactions at GGTF which was opened at the beginning of October 2013, and the case discussion page: Interactions at GGTF, proposed decision, which started at the same time.

Please note:

• the posts below are from both male and female members of the list
• that none of the posts are from Carolmooredc
• that none of the posts are from Neotarf (who was not even a member of the list between June and September 2014)
• that none of the posts are from me

Quotes from the Gender Gap list

June 2014

For more information see the gender gap archive for June 2014.

• "If we want a forum that is more effective, I think we should adopt some of the ideas from the Teahouse. Primarily, by having the responders be vetted volunteers that are expected to provide a minimum level of helpfulness."
• "...the wiki etiquette board was not helpful in many situations largely because people who regularly patrol the board are often people formerly brought to the board with issues about civility."
• "we could do something with, and WP:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender bias task force which has members but hasn't been active."
• "Also, bear in mind that the WP:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender bias task force can be whatever we want it to be. It doesn't have to focus only on articles."
• "I can see the point that a typical wikiproject oriented around a particular subject area (rather than to fostering diversity in general) might be a somewhat limiting definition."
• "We keep being told we're going to get this wonderful new communication system called "Flow" to replace talk pages. Features that allow users to control who posts to their "page", or even to let non-admin users remove individual threads or posts from their "stream", aren't included - and I'm not sure they're even under consideration. And I'm going to be honest - I've seen more people blocked for "homophobic" comments than "misogynistic" ones."
• "The most important, fundamental problems facing the Wikimedia projects... Then addressing it should be built into literally every feature development process, including Flow. It should be tested against female user groups, scrutinized on whether it helps address the gender gap or not, and revamped to do so if its found it doesn't."
• "I think there's something to be said for downvoting. Not in the reddit "i disagree" sense, but in the slashdot/ meta filter 'comments downvoted/flagged past a certain point will be hidden/deleted' sense. ...it would probably save tons of grief and derails if the worst of the worst comments were limited by crowdsourced review."
• "I feel as though the reputation system of Stack Exchange, combined with the way that Slashdot shows comments, and the verbiage and mannerisms of Daily Kos, might allow for a pretty robust system."
• "I will ... try to help ensure that any obstacles that currently discourage women from participating in this list are mitigated, moderated, or if push comes to shove, removed from this individual community at least."

July 2014

For more information see the gender gap archive for July 2014.

• "Just to let you know that a few of us are trying to revive WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender bias task force ... and there is a requested-move discussion ... about moving it to "gender gap task force" to clarify the scope."
• "I hear almost no one say that the typical state of (in)civility on wiki or on Wikimedia-l is good enough or that people are being hypersensitive, so I get the sense that there's a lot of agreement that we have a cultural problem. Ideas for solutions seem to be in short supply, so any "realistic changes" that you can suggest would be good to hear, either on this list or in IdeaLab."
• "I will say that, thus far, what I’ve heard, seen, read, etc. points toward cultural problems—some aided and abetted by policies, some aided and abetted by underlying technologies. ... I’m also concerned with how the dominant culture on EN may be discouraging participation amongst those (all genders) who aren’t part of it."
• "One of the biggest causes of the gendergap is the lack of reliable sources to move new articles through the Wikipedia 'recent changes page patrol' on any given project. The academic bias inherent in women-related subjects (and I mean anything from knitting patterns to health issues) means that it is very hard to locate such material. I have met time and again very creative male Wikipedians who not only find such sources, but who can do so quite easily."
• "The problem on en.wiki at least is that a vocal minority effectively prevent any enforcement of the civility policy. This includes a significant group of admins that are willing to overturn blocks for all but the most blatant violations of the policy."
• "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. Geek feminism, code of conduct"
• "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. All experts in harassment will tell you that this is the wrong thing to do. Almost always, the best thing for a victim of harassment is to do nothing further to attract the person's attention. But that leaves the problem editor free to choose the next victim."
• "There was a point in time where there was an "editor advocacy" group that proposed to take these sorts of cases to Arbcom. The basic idea was fairly good. The problem was that the couple of individuals bringing it forward were...ummm...highly combative in their own right, shall we say? As in, it might have been hard for Arbcom to tell whose behaviour was worse..."
• "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."
• "​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)... 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 think the closest thing we have with these capabilities is the Wikimedia OTRS system: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS Specific queues can be customized in many ways, I believe, though others will know more about this." (Essay note:, see also: OTRS)
• "Yes, there are plenty of per-queue settings... before deciding on a tool we need to know how the tool is intended to work."
• "What if... Wikiquette assistance were resurrected as a list of volunteer admins that you could privately email about problems rather than a public noticeboard?"
• "This sounds similar to a proposal from a couple years ago to create a new queue at OTRS for women concerned about images depicting themselves. there was some discussion on the OTRS List... I don't think there were any objections to the idea."
• "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 case....but nobody wanted to do that... Arbcom isn't a core part of the community - partly because when it messes up, it REALLY messes up... It only gets requests for 20 or so cases a year anymore, half of which are clearly not in their scope, and accepts about 8-10 cases a year."
• "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'?"
• "It's never been clear to me whether this is a WMF-wide issue or it's an English Wikipedia specific issue."
• "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."
• "Do you know women outside the north american culture, i.e. US and CA, affected by this?"
• "As A Canadian I would dispute that there's a "North American" culture that's the same for the US and Canada :) But yes, I do know women outside of those two countries which are affected by this."
• "I have spoken to women from several other projects who have identified it as an issue."
• "I'm European (from Ireland) and clearly identify this as a major issue."
• "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 are 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."
• "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."
• "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."
• 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."
• "Commons is a terrible and demoralizing place. The women's Commons revolution won't happen anytime soon....."
• "Twice during my short discussion about how to start a civility board, which turned into a long discussion about the word c*nt, an Admin gave the link to the Commons search results for that word, saying that showed that the text' of the word isn't very offensive. WTF?!"
• "what a joke... I'm sorry you were "exposed" to such a search.."

August 2014

For more information see the gender gap archive for August 2014.

• "I do find that in person hand-holding and social support are the most effective factors in getting women to stick around. I don't know how to translate that from the real-world environment I teach newbies in to the virtual environment of new users' talk pages."
• "Lots of SKYPE mini- seminars!!! (Women only.)"
• "I'm leaning towards thinking we as a community should (for now) focus more on the retention gap than the recruitment gap. Then we're not recruiting people just to (mostly) lose them in a month or two. But would be interested to hear thoughts on that from someone with a more rigorous analysis."
• (Essay note: There then followed various messages on the technical side of newcomers experience of Wikipedia e.g. the merit / lack of merit of IRC and #wikipedia-en-help)
• "This conversation motivated me to join back in at the Teahouse."
• "Research data about the chatroom concept would be good before committing to develop it."

September 2014

For more information see the gender gap archive for September 2014.

• "In my opinion, women should look to organising off-wiki."
• "Frankly, I see little value in creating a site whose goal includes attracting journalists - particularly given the poor quality, sensationalistic journalism that we've all seen "reporting" on anything Wikimedia."
• "I hear you, but I would very much like to see some good newsrooms (real journalists) do regular reporting on Wikipedia. I think it would be hard on the community at first, but ultimately would help. WP is a hostile work environment and I for one am tired of it."
• "A lot of journalism is badly researched for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia or Wikimedia. It has to do with limited resources, the need to make a splashy headline, and nowhere near enough sexy stuff. ...the overwhelming majority of 'news' articles relating to the monkey selfie really missed the point of the copyright issue that was at the heart of the discussion."

Concluding remarks

What I find sad when reading back over these comments is the view put forward by some – entirely disingeniously and spuriously in my opinion – that none of the above should be allowed to get off the launch pad. As soon as any of this was brought onto Wikipedia itself the project found itself in a sniper's alley of editors insisting that they knew better what the GGTF was always meant to be and it is not this.

From the initial optimism and determination not to be put off, some editors have found themselves blocked, and others questioning whether it is worth going on at all, as they see themselves fighting on two fronts: (a) fighting sexism – as a part of incivility (but that is not an excuse to sweep it under the carpet by saying, "this is incivility and not sexism"); and (b) fighting the system, or at least fighting to change the system in a responsible way without facing accusations of "only imagining the problem" or general pedantry.