Illustration by Matt Daley

Where are the women of Wikipedia?

Author update: When this column was filed, the final decisions regarding Gamergate edits and sanctions weren’t official. Ultimately, it didn’t end up being quite what I wrote here—and it was absolutely more reaching—but effectively, I don’t think it was much better. Their response to the coverage these events received can be read here. I’d also recommend reading Mark Bernstein’s series of posts about Wikipedia and GamerGate (and this follow up), as well as coverage from The Guardian, The Verge, and other sources.

THERE ARE OBJECTIVE TRUTHS in the universe, but they are few and far between. For everything else, we have Wikipedia.[1]

Wikipedia has become the de facto source for information. Stephen Colbert riffed on this idea for years with his “Truthiness” bit.[2] It was funny because it was true. We used to look to Encyclopedia Britannica and back issues of National Geographic to write grade-school essays on Mt. Vesuvius or the human circulatory system, but now we get all the information we need from Wikipedia, and we can reasonably assume that it’s the truth.

The promise of the future is finally realized! Except there’s a problem: women don’t contribute to Wikipedia. They make up less than 15 percent of contributors and as little as 8.5 percent of editors. History might be written by the winner, but truth, it seems, is mostly written by men.

So how does gender disparity manifest inside the world’s largest encyclopedia? After all, isn’t truth absolute?[3]

As a general rule, there are fewer articles about women and the articles that do exist are, on average, much shorter. Topics that might be of more interest to women are also less extensively covered. A few years ago an editor tried to clean up the site’s list of “American novelists” by removing all the women and relegating them to a new list called “American women novelists.”[4] On Wikipedia, as in so many other places, the default is straight and white and very, very male.

To combat gender disparity on the site, Wikipedia created a Gender Gap Task Force, with the goal of getting female participation up to 25 percent. One of its tactics is to hold “edit-a-thons” encouraging women to get involved. These have had limited success since Wikipedia is notoriously difficult for (and even hostile to) newcomers. After a dispute related to the Task Force last year, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee—a volunteer group that’s basically the site’s highest court[5]—banned a prolific female editor after she was accused of promoting an anti-male agenda. The men she was arguing with were also sanctioned: they were told they couldn’t use abusive language anymore.

In the wake of last year’s Gamergate controversy—the most modern of culture wars and, no matter what its supporters say, a debate that’s explicitly vitriolic toward women—Wikipedia became a battleground with people on both sides working to create ostensibly objective articles while fundamentally disagreeing on what the objective facts were. This is known as an “edit war” and they happen all the time,[6] usually resulting in an article lockdown or sanctions against specific contributors/editors. In this case, it was five feminists and Gamergate critics who were banned from making further edits, leaving the pro-Gamergaters free to enshrine their version of events as truth on Wikipedia’s pages.

It would be laughably ironic if it weren’t so ironically tragic.

There is endless speculation on how we got here. Wikipedia has been said to foster a toxic culture with too much bureaucracy[7] to facilitate internal change. And there are more than few accusations of aggressive misogyny. But the female participation rate of 13 percent is only slightly behind the overall rate of 15 percent in other “public thought-leadership forums.”[8] This isn’t a Wikipedia problem, it’s just a problem. Why are women underrepresented anywhere? It’s a complex question and while we’ve gotten better at identifying the problem, we don’t seem any closer to solving it.

Wikipedia’s gender gap has a detrimental effect on its content[9]. But while Wikipedia didn’t create systemic sexism, it’s absolutely contributing to its continuation. More than that, it has a detrimental effect on society and is in and of itself both an impediment to and a sign of sexism.

If owning truth (dubious as it may be) isn’t proof of male privilege, I don’t know what is.

[1] And Google.
[2] Truthiness has its own Wikipedia article.
[3] Nope.
[4] These women were eventually returned to the primary list.
5] It’s a group, unshockingly, made up primarily of men.
[6] Previous edit wars of substance include articles related to the Israel/Palestine conflict, Pluto’s ever-changing planetary status, and whether or not Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker should be two entries or one.
[7] “Kafkaesque” is a word that’s been repeatedly used.
[8] The term “public thought-leadership” comes from the New York-based OpEd Project.
[9] I know this is true because I copied that sentence entirely from Wikipedia.

Illustration by Kris Noelle

The feminist battle for Gamergate victory isn’t done

When it comes to feminism and Gamergate, I want to say that feminism—unquestionably—won. But then I think: at what cost? Maybe it’s better to say: we know unequivocally we are on the right side of Gamergate.

There was a Mission Accomplished moment in October 2014, when the New York Times published an article that seemed confused about what Gamergate was and why it was happening—not in a fumbling, tech-illiterate sense, but more of a sense of incredulity. The writer, Nick Wingfield, appeared to be saying: “So you’re harassing women … for liking video games. Huh.” The article was published right after Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic best known for her YouTube series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” cancelled an appearance at Utah State University after she received an anonymous threat of a shooting massacre were the talk to go ahead (as a concealed carry state, security at the event could not guarantee no one with a gun would be allowed in the building while Sarkeesian was speaking).

Sadly, Sarkeesian has long been the target of sexist attacks—ever since she first launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to support the series. “The threats against Ms. Sarkeesian are the most noxious example of a weeks-long campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture,” Wingfield wrote. New York Times may have been removed from the specifics and scope of the Gamergate conflict, yet it was clear the only response could be “this is baffling and terrible.” As an outsider’s perspective, it was invaluable and it illuminated something that was at once crucial and deeply disheartening: that it was even more terrible, and equally baffling, for the women caught up within Gamergate—we are on the wrong end, in the middle of something incomprehensible and horrific. And since October, Gamergate has only become more ridiculous.

Even former avowed Gamergaters have hung up their trilbies and abandoned their positions as everything became more extreme and untenable—or they suddenly found themselves on the opposing side of the harassment campaign. Those within the industry openly made statements against Gamergate, including: gaming companies such as Blizzard and the Entertainment Software Association (commonly know as the ESA and gaming’s top trade group); publications like Game Informer, Polygon, and Giant Bomb; and creative luminaries such as Tim Schafer and Damion Schubert. Some statements where measured, like the ESA’s assertion that “There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats.” But others weren’t. Schubert called it “an unprecedented catastrofuck,” which remains one of my favourite combinations of words ever. Even the vaguest of questions about the legitimacy of the movement seemed to evaporate.

And yet—and yet—it is still happening. On January 11, Zoe Quinn wrote a piece called “August Never Ends” on her blog Dispatches from The Quinnspiracy. It charted her struggles to get the legal system to do something about the avalanche of hate spewing her way. She talked about how demolished her life was and continued to be by the campaign. She wrote, in full: “The same wheels of abuse are still turning, five months later. I’ve been coming to terms that this is a part of my life now, trying to figure out what to do about it, and how to move forward with so many people trying to wrap themselves around my ankles. It’s been hard to accept that my old life is gone and that I can never get back to it. But I’ve found purpose in the trauma, in trying to stop it from happening again, to use my experience to show how these things are allowed to happen, and to further a dialog on how to actually stop it. If I can’t go home, maybe I can at least get out of this elevator shaft. Maybe I can help end August. Maybe you can, too.”

As much as there is hope here, and grim determination, and a strength of will that is barely fathomable, there is also so much pain and loss. Quinn’s piece is not the sort of thing that gets written looking back on a hard and well-fought victory—it’s the barest beginning, starting to see the light at the end of the darkest tunnel, the way out of the elevator shaft. Quinn has since gone on to found Crash Override Network, an anti-harassment network that attempts to help victims of Gamergate rebuild their lives and careers after the threats, doxing, and sabotage—a way to provide the support Quinn found lacking in the community. Today, she is taking the extra step to help others. That is victorious. That is what willpower is.

But the cost—my god, the cost. Crash Override Network and services like it are necessary. Certainly, people are going to be suffering the ramifications of this trauma for years, if not their entire lives and careers. In the games publication Giant Bomb’s discussion forums, game developer and tech writer Brianna Wu wrote “I was talking to Zoe Quinn this week, who told me about a folder on her computer called, ‘The ones we lost.’ And it was young girls that wrote her saying they were too scared to become game developers. I started crying because I have another folder just like it.” Wu went on to excoriate those who had not yet spoken out about Gamergate or who were not actively making policies to hire, support, and defend the women targeted, stating “I would suggest every man in this industry has a hell of a lot of soul-searching to do about the part they played in creating this situation.”

For every visible woman who has stepped away from their platform, how many less vocal or less well-known participants have we lost? In the wake of Gamergate, for instance, Kathy Sierra, a tech writer who was once the target of hacker and horrible person weev, walked away from the online persona she’d built as Serious Pony to insulate herself from further violence. Jenn Frank, who had built a nine-year career out of writing about games and was deluged with hatred for a Guardian piece about how women in the games industry are attacked, announced publicly that she was leaving the industry out of fear for her family’s safety. How many young women have chosen not to enter the industry at all? How many game developers have left the industry? How many journalists? How many women stopped participating in online communities and massively multiplayer online and co-op games? How can we possibly know the real numbers of the ones we lost?

The thing is, we can’t. It’s going to take years to sort out the impact on the industry, on the community, on the way games are made and played. Years before we figure out what games journalism can possibly look like in a post-Gamergate world. Years before we can even begin to get a grip on the personal trauma suffered by so many after such a massive campaign of harassment and violence. And before any of that work can be done, Gamergate has to end first. It’s an inevitable victory, perhaps, but one that’s going to leave deep, presently unfathomable scars.

Our March/April issue is now on newsstands, and we’re super excited. Check out the editor’s note from Lauren McKeon, where she shares our motivations for publishing the issue, and also what you can expect to see inside its pages and online at this.org!

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t identify as a feminist. From the moment I first heard it, the word feminist fit me like the perfect pair of jeans. I learned it as if by osmosis, the way geese know to migrate south for the winter or dogs to bark at strangers. I know many people who feel the same way I do, and many who don’t. Some days, lately, I’m not sure which side has the higher tally.

Feminism has taken over our national conversation and the results are both encouraging and discouraging. As feminists get more ink and airtime, so too do anti-feminists—our current clickbait-centred media culture ensures it. We debate merits and viewpoints, all the while obscuring this pervasive attitude that women’s life experiences aren’t worth being taken at face value. It’s not enough to simply testify these things are happening to us, to say we are oppressed, abused, and disadvantaged: we must prove it. Again and again and again.

Well, f*@k that. Here at This Magazine, we believe Canada needs more feminism—now. In this issue, we also give a big f*@k that to the popular culture that fostered Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby, and the boys at Dalhousie’s Dentistry school; the one that cultivated mansplaining, manspreading, and street harassment; and the one that encourages apathy toward threats to abortion access, the pay gap, and our country’s Indigenous murdered and missing women.

But it’s not all raised fists: We also explore what we need from feminism now, and ask the tough questions: Is feminism too middle-class and white? (Answer: Yes. “The trouble with (white) feminism” by Hana Shafi) Where do men fit into the movement? (“Allied forces” by Hillary Di Menna) Does hashtag activism work for feminism? (“#Feminism” by Stephanie Taylor) And more.

While we can’t cover all the myriad ways in which we need more feminism, we hope this issue can add to our great Canadian feminist conversation, as well as spark a few new conversations. Because now, perhaps more than ever, we need to examine the current state of—and need for—feminism. We need to look at what we can do better. So, please, pick up up a copy of This and stay tuned to this.org and, where you can join us in saying, “F*@k that.”

Can’t find This on newsstands? Contact publisher Lisa Whittington-Hill at publisher@thismagazine.ca