Thursday, November 19, 2020

Harassment Threatens Diversity Among Wikipedia Editors

 


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.

Harassment Threatens Diversity Among Wikipedia Editors

  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 fre...