Let's talk about this particular brand of garbage behavior on Wikipedia, because this is why I precisely why I stopped editing. Something very similar happened to me a number of years ago when I tried to increase the coverage of children's literature on Wikipedia. [Thread]
Having read about the gender problem on Wikipedia & experienced the terrible coverage of young adult literature, I gave myself a QUEST to help! The first thing I did was create a new page for a NYT bestselling author for whom there was a page for one of her books but not for her.
Within 2 minutes an editor erased most of the text I’d written, including the bibliography & all links, then erased all the text on the page for the book that had already been on Wikipedia for a year, and redirected to the author page - which now had virtually no information.
In other words, within just a few minutes, a random editor had not only undone my attempt to add to Wikipedia, but actually ensured that there was considerably LESS information about this author and the book than there had been when I started.
I calmly did what most Wikipedia newcomers probably would not do: I fought with them. I edited, compromised, left comments in the edit notes explaining why I thought I was right. I undeleted the book page they deleted so I could improve it, and they immediately deleted it again.
I reverted an italics change because they were wrong (it was the title of an anthology), was reverted again with a comment informing me my reversion was “silly," then when I re-re-reverted they acquiesced but with a snarky complaint that I should have made myself more clear.
Eventually, my changes stood. After 2.5 hours of my life and a lot of unpleasant conflict. Who, without my righteous indignation (not to mention my confidence in how Wikipedia works, which most newcomers would not have) would actually submit themselves to that?
But wait, it gets better! BEFORE I added that new page, the first thing I'd done was go to a page for a book series I’d recently become fan of, and improve it, b/c it was terrible - no sources, a rambling summary, etc. I formatted it properly, added an image and references.
At some point during the 2.5 hours in which I was trying to appease this editor, they went to that book series page (which had already been on Wikipedia for months) & nominated it for deletion. They stalked my edits, found the other thing I’d done, and decided to destroy it, too.
I get that sometimes newcomers mess things up. But even though my account was new (because I'd lost the one I used when I was an MS student in a lab studying Wikipedia in 2004), I CLEARLY knew what I was doing. This was not a case of me screwing up.
Regardless, this was the worst possible way to handle this. Instead of attempting to help someone who clearly had good intentions and wanted to do well, their strategy was to just destroy all of my work. Gosh, no wonder Wikipedia has a newcomer problem AND a gender problem.
That book series page is up now, though, because another editor (coincidentally, with "girl" in the username) stepped in and helped in Articles for Deletion. We worked on additional edits together; it took hours more of my time. After that I didn't hear more from my edit stalker.
I thought I might try to help others in the same way so I hung out in AfD to improve articles. With even more fighting, often because others assumed I didn't know what I was doing because my account was new. As opposed to, you know, me spending a lot of time looking things up.
I kept editing Wikipedia for a while but every time I got an email notifying me of a change to one of the pages I was watching, I got a little sick feeling, sure that I was about to have to fight with someone.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop, but it definitely made me feel more anxious than productive. Now it’s been years since I’ve edited with the exception of reverting vandalism on the pages about young adult literature I'm still trying to protect.
The ironic thing is that trying to help with the gender gap on Wikipedia resulted in me understanding exactly why it exists. There is research that shows that this acrimonious, conflict-driven environment is less likely to bother men. (Same problem with open source.)
There are a lot of smart wonderful people both inside Wikipedia and outside in academia who have been working on this exact problem for a long time, but it's really challenging when some of the most garbage people on the platform are also some of the biggest contributors.
Because if your reaction to seeing more coverage of women scientists or women authors on Wikipedia is "probablynot important enough to be here" then "let's see what else this editor who wants to increase coverage of women has done so we can delete all of it" then, yep, garbage.
Gatekeeping doesn't make Wikipedia better. None of the behavior I've described in this thread makes Wikipedia better. It just makes fewer people comfortable contributing, which means e.g. not enough people who know about children's literature, and that makes Wikipedia WORSE.
Anyway, that's why I'm not a wikipedian. As an epilogue, a couple of years ago I was sitting next to @jimmy_wales at a conference dinner and (for some reason?!) I told him this story and he sighed at another example of this known problem, and apologized.
@jimmy_wales But to end on a POSITIVE note, a reminder that there are spaces that are the opposite of this. When I studied the development of AO3 and women who learned to code while working on it, it was described as "loving" compared to open source communities. slate.com/technology/201…
@jimmy_wales So this thread inspired me to revisit what I'd actually done on Wikipedia during that time, and turns out I was the first person to add anything on Wikipedia about @rainbowrowell or her books, so despite the ultimate frustration etc.,I think that was an important contribution. :)
