Shocking to hear that 38% of Wikipedians whine about their being harassed by others.

Why is it that on pg. 12 there are no demographics on gender of survey participants? It seems to me to be fundamental information, as men and women experience online harassment quite differently. Indeed, there needed be two entirely different surveys on this topic, one for men and one for women.

RfB

My other quick comment is that this report appears to be a propaganda document rather than a scientific study, as every page is marred by a multi-colored graph of some sort. It is more akin to a PowerPoint presentation than a serious study.

Hey, there's Kirill Lokshin listed as one of 34 named people behind this document! I'm so not surprised...

RfB

I have many thoughts, but the main quote is this:



The findings of the report are in line with this finding; if anything, the proportion is lower on WP. That does not mean that one shouldn't do what one can, just that this is a hard problem which cannot be solved by taking a myopic view that something is rotten in Wikipedia specially. Or institute some measures just to show that something is being done.

There are also issues about how harassment is defined and how serious it is. For instance only about 10% disagree with the statement that "I find other people helpful and supportive" (pg 7). Many more are neutral and many more agree or strongly agree. This could mean that there are a few assholes ruining the experience of everyone else, but it could just as well mean that the harassment was simply not serious or of long enough duration. As elsewhere on the Internet, assholes are usually simply avoided. Not surprisingly, ignoring was the most popular and rated the most effective (pg 32).

Also, several of the quotes provided do not sound like harassment, but perhaps that is just me. For instance, a quote saying "you don't know the first thing about..." may be condescending but it isn't harassment. Of course it could be part of a pattern, in which case it is fine.

I would say I've never been harassed on the web before making an account on Wikipedia. One reason I made an account was because I kept hearing how awful it was on Reddit (and not just from the gamergate crowd!) I figured I could write a few articles because there really are some big holes on Wikipedia. Turns out, Reddit's wrong, Wikipedia isn't awful . . . it is, in fact, the absolute worst experience I've ever had in my life on the internet. Wikipedia is the internet's version of Hell!

The thing I don't get is why? Why is it such a hell hole? Why doesn't anyone do anything about it? Why don't editors say anything when they observe someone being bullied? Why is harassing everyone acceptable behavior?

And nothing works. There are no rules 'cause they change daily depending on everyone's whim. There's no democracy ('cause I guess it's a monarchy). There's no voting. Editors talk about you as if they believe you can't read. One day, editors must follow essay X. The next day, essay X doesn't apply. That notability works here because editor Y created this article, but not here because editor Z created that article. It's like falling down the rabbit hole with the addition that everyone's armed with ak 47's, and they're all taking aim at you.

All true.

Now imagine if the WMF hired a bunch of experienced community managers from Blizzard and put them in as overseers.

On page 17, it says 1,215 people responded to a 'Forms of harassment' question, with 85% reporting content vandalism as their most frequent form of harassment. 63% are claiming they've been hacked and 61% are claiming they have been targeted for revenge porn, which seems improbable, or I would hope so and there really haven't been hundreds of wikipediots getting hacked and having revenge porn of them uploaded.

Given the pictures coming out of wikimania and other events, I have a very hard time imagining much sexually themed harassment as very likely.

Surely it's only harassment of it's aimed at you rather than being random vandalism or an attack on the article without knowing who wrote it.

What makes you think the editors who responded to the survey were too stupid to understand they were the targets of harassment that was being expressed as vandalism?

Have you been the target of an insane Wikipedia stalker who goes through your edit history and undoes all your edits while leaving edit summaries encouraging others to disembowel or rape you or slit your throat? No, I didn't think so.

OMG! That's horrid!!! I've had a dozen or so editors following me and undoing edits, but I don't believe I thought to read their edit summaries. I just felt bad for the new editors that they decided to harass because of me. Ain't going back to look either!

I think the thing to concentrate on is that Wikipedia is a social media site first and foremost, and that's new and will take a while to settle down like all innovations.


The good guys will win eventually, trust me. Give it a century or two.

If we can assume that there are about 100,000 Wikimedia users who constitute the universe which this study describes as "Wikimedia users", then the data show that there were about 616 Wikimedia users who were victims of harassment by Superprotect (Figure 17).

Which means that the Wikimedia Foundation was guilty of harassing over 600 of its users, and therefore should be investigated and perhaps shut down.

Who is WITH ME?!?!

A substantial number were apparently too stupid to understand what "revenge porn" is, so I dunno, I don't find that so farfetched.

You must be very young, or not get out much. Way back in the late 90s people on usenet would sign up their rivals to multiple porn sites. The Christian fundamentalists tended to sign people up for daily gay porn, the survivalists gay bondage stuff, or anime porn of the type that wikipedia favours.

I responded to that survey.

My courtesy email pointing me to the "results" of the time and effort which I thus donated to the cause appears to have gone astray.

First, that's not revenge porn. Second, did you just cite my supposed unfamiliarity with 90s-era Usenet practices as a sign that I don't "get out much"?

Oh posting unwanted images as a way of getting back at someone or harassing them is definitely a form of revenge. If the images are pornographic then the revenge is pornographic. That in the last few years there is a spate of posting nude images of an ex-partner, does not change the other.

Not that wikicomedians think that there is anything wrong with pushing porn in front of people. This is from the then Secretary of Wikimedia Finland:



IOW The whole point of anti-censorship justifies posting pornographic images to people.

And least there be any doubt as to the twisted mindset of the wikicomedian crowd. Calling out the little shit was considered harassment:

The survey did define what it considered 'revenge porn' to be so anyone choosing that was claiming that "Sexually explicit or sexualised photos of me have been published without my consent [Revenge porn]" and not "I was linked to porn or a creepy Commons image" etc.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... experience



And later (while 61% claimed to have been victim of revenge porn, 88% of the respondents said they had Never seen revenge porn harassment against others, 1% said they saw this Often, 2% said Occasionally, and 8% said Rarely):

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... ty_members



Whether the people taking the survey truthfully answered or chose it to mean they had been signed up or linked to something is another matter, of course, but the survey was pretty specific on what that meant.

Wikipedians are more hostile than other Internet users because Wikipedians are fighting a war over what the public reads and believe. Blogger and forum-goers are different because they are upfront about how opinionated they are instead of claiming to represent "neutrality" or "objectivity" ("objecitve" being the most misunderstood yet overused word in Wikipedia arguments). Plus, if people don't like a blog or forum, they could participate in a different one, but on Wikipedia, there can only be one version of an article, so everyone fights over it, and so far, there aren't any viable, general purpose alternatives to Wikipedia, so fighting over Wikipedia is the only option for information warriors.

To put it another way, in the blogosphere and on forums, it's a game of speaking and seeing how people respond, but on Wikipedia, it's a game of capturing and / or holding the top of a hill and pushing anyone else down.

This all means that "harassment" is a product of the fundamental underpinnings (i.e. NPOV) of Wikipedia. Making stricter harassment policies and banning more users isn't going to change that, since those fundamental underpinnings will still be there encouraging the sorts of behavior you experience, yet more policies and more bans is probably the only "solution" Wikipedians will implement.

Congratulations, you won the internet today.

That would come under "you must be very young". Though your retort is very funny.

The problem is that the way questions are phrased makes a very big difference. One can just look at the different estimates of sexual assault prevalence in the real world. They frequently differ by an order of magnitude. For something more nebulous like online harassment, the differences would only be larger.

That does not mean that sexual assault or harassment don't occur. But these are hard problems.

1) A common form of vandalism of a biography article is to replace the infobox photo of the article subject with a pornographic image unrelated to the article subject. When I saw that survey question, I thought that people may be referring to that type of pornographic vandalism rather than going to the trouble of finding a photo of a wikipedia editor, using Photoshop to add the editor's face to another pornographic image, and then distributing that image to extract revenge on the editor.

2) How do you explain this datum:

Now since 57% reported "other" types of harassment, .57 * .34 = 19.3%, which is up there will "revenge porn" in the portion of the population experiencing this form of harassment.

I'm very upset for two reasons. First, they didn't embarrass themselves by not using a single word cloud. I is very deesapointud.

And second, none of MY insults made it into the report. Sad to admit it but one of my crowning achievements in life was when one of the most respectable newspapers in the world announced a change to their comment policy and cited one of my comments as a prime example for the reason for the policy change.

But my medium size ego aside, what good is this report? Even if it were statistically valid (Kohs, isn't this up your alley?) how could they address any of the problems that doesn't blow up the citizen-Stasi-popo class know as Admins and Arbitrators?

Ha$ten the day indeed.

Wow, this figures.

An article about harassment of Wikipedians (particularly women) is published and brought up on Jimbo's talk page.

Various editors refute the validity of these claims, so some editors (including, for disclosure's sake, myself) respond on the talk page to say that we know from experience that this is a serious issue.

People decide that our experiences are not valid because we could not "prove" they happened (generally because they were suppressed or happened offwiki) or we were "special cases" being arbitrators/administrators/etc. (who apparently deserve to be harassed?)

A report comes out saying that harassment is a serious issue (and particularly an issue against minorities), and in this thread people decide to dismiss it as "whining," "propaganda," etc. Great stuff.

I'll highlight the better content of this thread for the benefit of readers searching for posts that aren't so dismissive.

http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171251#p171251



http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171253#p171253



http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171359#p171359



http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171364#p171364



http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171372#p171372



http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=171467#p171467



To be fair, I'm probably this forum's biggest dismisser of harassment, but with my post, I try to identify what makes Wikipedians more hostile than other netizens.

I'd like to publicly apologize for using the verb "whine" in my initial post. That was inappropriate, considering the enormity of the subject matter.

It came out of my frustration with the Wikimedia Foundation's apparent lack of ability in constructing opinion surveys that don't produce wildly out-of-reality results. Their poor survey instrumentation makes even the thoughtful respondents come across as delusional, deceptive, or confused, because their factual responses are clustered in with the responses of the delusional, the deceptive, and the confused.

Also, there is ongoing frustration in my mind, resulting from the unfair ways in which Wikimedians define "harassment".

The study says...



So, perhaps the data contradicts the article you refer to. Maybe you should like to get on board with those who find the WMF's survey administration skills dearly lacking?

GorillaWarfare challenged me on Twitter (by "outing" my Wikipediocracy account, linking it to my Twitter account -- just kidding, Molly) to begin a more thoughtful discussion on Meta.

And so I have.

And already a WMF employee seems to think that a reporting discrepancy can be explained away with "it was a multiple-response question". We know that. But one of the answers was mutually exclusive of all the others.

Thanks for this thread. I have been looking for these results, even today on the WMF site.

I too responded to the survey. Although what I submitted as an example of "Real-life quotes of harassing texts" is not listed, I do have a mention in the 'Harassment in the respondents' own words'.

My quote was better. Since it is still in my talk page archives, I actually wish my attacker could read their remarks once again and spend a day in burning fire somewhere.

Alas, it is true no good will come from any of this. A lame, futile exercise...

It should be noted that not only does that point to Women being harassed it also shows a lot of people feel like admins are doing a lot of the harassing by abusive use of the tools. Dare I say that some of these offending admins are targeting women? Yep, I would say that. I bet no one does anything about those admins though and instead of dealing with that real problem with a top down strategy and policy that is enforced, they will target a few editors that are a nuisance to certain powerful admins as "troublemakers" or "harassers".

The Pew survey breaks down the harassment by gender, and also divides it into "less severe" (name calling and embarassment) and "more severe" (stalking, physical threats etc.) This kind of thing should be done because as the survey notes, men and women experience different types of harassment differently (men experience name calling, embarassment and physical threats more, women experience stalking and sexual harassment more).

Also, young people experience much more harassment. The data should also have been broken down by age.



The question should first be: "Are Wikipedians more hostile than other netizens?". As I noted above, comparing with the Pew study, the proportion on WP is actually lower than the internet in general, at least when it comes to harassment. SneakySasha's anecdote is a data point in the other direction.

If indeed the contention is true, the reason seems to me rather simple. Wikipedia is a social networking site. The Pew study states that the most recent harassment (2/3rds) occurred on social media sites.

More comments:

For "grounds for harassment" (pg 25), most people cite either "political ideas" - 25%, or other - 41% (I leave aside the "don't know"s). Race, gender, sexual orientation all are cited by 6-7%. The major categories in the "other" are "POV/difference of opinion" (25%) and "content" (21%), closely followed by "admin actions" (17%).

This is suggestive of my own opinion that most incivil behaviour (of which harassment is a subset) is really POV fighting in disguise. Of course, Wikipedia admins/ArbCom, in their infinite wisdom, usually disregard content altogether and only look at superficial behaviour.

A full quote would perhaps have provided more context:

As the target of some fairly serious on and off-wiki harrassment over the years, I have to agree that this survey seems deeply flawed. The difficulty is in defining harrassment. To some the bar is apparently as low as seeing something they didn't like. The old "if it feels like it, it is it" aproach to defining abuse. This approach does not account for the fact that some people are extremely over sensistive.

On the other hand, I do hope the WMF moves forward, flawed results or not, in taking a more active role in dealing with the worst of the worst serial abusers/harrassers.

I am certain I come to your mind as one of them but I also hope the WMF takes some action, especially within the admin ranks where there are a number of entrenched abusive individuals who actively damage the project. And just to clarify it before I am accused of anything, I was not directing that towards you in anyway. I am thinking of several of your peers though including Floquenbeam (T-C-L), AGK (T-C-L) and Chillum (T-C-L)/HighinBC, among others, all of which are problematic IMO.:-)

I'm still not seeing how that relates to an assessment that harassment goes against "especially women", but maybe I'm missing something.

I think over time, it will bear out that this particular survey is an interesting thought- or conversation-starter, but that it is not a scientific assessment of what is happening among most Wikimedia project users. And in fact, it may move backward the process of addressing online harassment on Wikimedia projects, because it so grossly overstates the problem, that many readers of the study will conclude that it should be dismissed because it is so far off-base.

Don't flatter yourself.

I'm quite certain I'm not the first here to note that your self obsession and belief that everything somehow relates to "your case" is one of your biggest problems.

I do not suffer from the same ailement, thank you.

Hail and well met, Beeblebrox (T-C-L).

You created your questionnaire on civility c. 2012, which elicited comments from Risker (T-C-L) and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FCivility_enforcement&diff=526224002&oldid=526211176

Given this history, your comments on the latest WMF report interest us.

No your certainly not and just to clarify it's not that I think everything relates to my case, but I have seen (and done) enough to cover a large percentage of those things we discuss on here. So I can often draw on my own experiences to relate or empathize with many of the topics. Especially with regards to the Arbcom, the conduct of various admins, doxing editors, using the admin tools to intimidate others, etc. If it wasn't for a couple people who didn't like me continuously submitting ban requests over and over I would still be a high output editor. As it is, I can't get more than a couple thousand edits a month because I have to sneak around and vary my edits and unfortunately that means I cannot work on Medal of Honor recipient articles even when several have had vandalism for months and no one has reverted it.

Here's the weird thing with that questionnaire: Several people felt the questions were "leading". Yet most of them wouldn't say where they thought they were being led. Those that did contradicterd one another. I took this to mean that they were projecting their own biases onto it and seeing something that wasn't actually there. Each question left open every possible response, ranging all the way from "immediate indef block" to "ignore completely".

All that was desired were ansers, any answers. I have no idea what the response might have been should this actually have garnered the widespread participation I was hoping for, but there are still several dozen answered questionnaires out there, including my own, that have never been analyzed.

It isn't as if I wasn't fully aware that I was taking on a nearly impossible task when I opened that RFC, but some of those criticisms were ridiculous. Because I framed it as a series of questions instead of the usual RFC format, people suddenly seemed to feel I wasn't being "scientific" enough. I defy anyone to present any policy discussion, ever, on Wikipedia that was based on scientific methods of inquiry. How do you collect hard data on something you can't even clearly define?

All I was looking for was a result, any result, that reflected some tiny smidgen of consensus on at least one tiny part of what is arguably one of the most divisive issues on Wikiepdia. Unfortunately, I failed to acheive even that modest goal.

However, what the WMF is talking about, or at least what they should be talking about, is not local policy on incivility or rudeness, it is outright harrassment. Following someone around, socking to post abusive messages, revenge porn on external websites, etc, are a far cry form whether or not we should do somerthing or not if someone says "fuck you, asshole" once or twice.

Headshot.

If I were them, I'd request a better prize!

I'm simply pointing out that your choice to quote only the fragment of the sentence about the type of harassment men experience more than women or other genders does not reflect the study's entire findings on the distribution of types of harassment by gender.

I think you're perhaps reading my comments as an attempt to use this study to support the claim that women are harassed more than men on Wikipedia. According to this study, that is not always the case (and in the case where it is, 59% vs. 55% does not seem all that significant). I am surprised at the results, but I'm not trying to twist them.

The most informative part of the survey on the amounts of harassment experienced by gender and cultural diversity are really these two graphics. It's interesting they didn't reflect those results in the prose.

The 3% "other gender" includes people who may not accurately state their gender. So, this group of respondents is not necessarily transgendered individuals. Indeed, a number of transgendered individuals would respond with their current gender, rather than "other gender." The number of people in the "other gender" group is so small that a comparison with the "male" and "female" populations presented in the bar graphs above is not statistically significant.

We can conclude from the survey that there is too much harassment on Wikipedia. There is not sufficient data to conclude that it is based in gender.

Wikipedia does not handle POV-pushing wikiwarriors very well. The POV-pusher views the community's efforts to contain the POV-pushing as harassment. POV-pushers have also been known to play the harrassment card against those who are pushing for an opposing POV. Now, society has a number of disputes that relate to gender:
* Gamergate.
* Abortion.
* Whether wrestling (a male-only sport) should be continued in the Olympics.
* Whether netball should be added to the Olympics as a female-only sport.
* Whether laws are needed to address gender differences in salary.
* Whether women should have an equal role in the structure of the Roman Catholic and other churches.
* Whether women should have combat roles in military organizations.
* The extent to which universities should combat sexual assault on their campuses and the disclosure of their data.
Society continues to evolve on all of these issues, and these battles have spilled over to WP with understandable conflict. It is not surprising that people come to these Wikipedia topic areas with POV-pushing. The question is whether POV-pushing in both directions raises legitimate claims of "harassment based on gender."

Bottom line: This survey was not designed to determine whether harassment should be attributed to the gender of the person harassed or the subject areas which prompted the harassment. Because we don't gain actionable data about gender-based harassment here, let's focus on the 19% of all harassment that is administrator-WP sanctions based.