Wikipedia is one of the most important pages on the
internet. This is where we go when we have a question about any topic and where
we frequently find information to complete reports, jobs or tasks.
But, behind that friendlier and quite useful face, hides a
much less pleasant reality for its editors.
A new report from The New York Times revealed that some
editors, those in charge of creating and supplementing Wikipedia articles; They
are victims of harassment by their peers, either because of their sexual
orientation or positions regarding certain issues that generally cause controversy
among these collaborators.
Of course, since Wikipedia is not a social network - unlike
Twitter or Facebook - these situations occur in what is a kind of behind the
scenes for users who visit the site and many times involve people who do not
receive payment for your contributions.
From The New York Times they say that cases of harassment
within the Wikipedia editor community are replicated around the world, mainly
taking the debate about the treatment of an article to a personal level.
In this scenario, Natacha Rault, an editor of Wikipedia
Geneva, said that the main targets of these attacks are people who declare
themselves as feminists or belong to the LGBT community One point that,
according to the own Wikimedia Foundation, would a major barrier to the gender
equity that the platform aspires to achieve among its publishers.
The harassment experienced by some editors within Wikipedia
can range from insults, for example, due to their sexual orientation, to
outright explicitly sexual harassment, where "users have posted
pornography on the personal page of others and have sent it to them by email”.
According to The New York Times, most of these situations
begin with articles on which a certain portion of the editors do not want to
give ground.
For example, the report highlights that the French entry on
British politics Theresa May sparked a debate about whether to call her
"Prime Minister" or "Prime Minister". What ended in endless
editions of the entry. The same happened in an article about the term
"woman" ("femme"), also in the French section of the site.
On the other hand, entries about transgender or non-binary
people would also be subject to these actions with editors reverting their
pronouns to those assigned at birth. An action that goes directly against the
rules of Wikipedia, which states that editors must write according to the genre
with which the subject of the article identifies.
Wikipedia measurements
Currently, if a Wikipedia editor wants to report a case of
harassment, they must do so on the bulletin boards. Something that often deters
victims from filing claims as their accusations will be subject to public
scrutiny.
After the complaint, the cases are handled by volunteer
administrators who, if they validate the accusations, can prohibit the accused
user from continuing to edit on the site. But, administrators of some Wikipedia’s,
have opted for the “topic ban”, a measure that is defined as "a socially
enforced tool in which other editors are responsible for ensuring that the
guilty user does not participate in the editing of articles that mention Banned
topics. Violating a topic's ban may result in a site-wide ban. "
From Wikimedia Foundation, the company that manages
Wikipedia, they say they are aware of these problems and that they are working
to reverse them, for example, with better functions such as the "partial
blocking" tool, which basically "allows administrators to restrict
users from the editing particular pages where they have proven to be a problem.
But this is not an easy task.
Sydney Poore, a community health analyst at Wikimedia, said
that the profile of users who initially started working on the site in 2001
("tech-oriented men") makes it difficult, as they would not be an
open audience for change.
Although Wikipedia is open to the fact that practically
anyone can collaborate, several editors say that cases of harassment have kept
them away from their work on the site, effectively perpetuating a certain
profile of editors, which is something that Wikipedia has tried to overcome in
favor of a greater diversity among its collaborators and therefore its
articles.
