Wikipedia Takes On Harassment of Contributors

Earlier this month, Wikimedia, which runs the crowdsourced database Wikipedia, put into effect a global code of conduct aimed at lessening harassment for its underrepresented contributors.

The announcement comes a month after the attempted insurrection on January 6 increased public scrutiny of the toxicity and extremism on social platforms. While most discussions about such behavior have centered on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, Wikipedia — which, like social media, relies on user-generated content — has also been a platform that has allowed sexism and racism to thrive.

Just as Mark Zuckerberg first created Facebook as a website for ranking the looks of Harvard’s women students, Glamour reported that Jimmy Wales helped co-found Wikipedia using money he made from a search engine that relied on “sexy pictures of women”' to increase advertising profits. It’s unsurprising, then, that Wikipedia earned a reputation as a racist and sexist space soon after it launched.

“My first introduction to Wikipedia was, ‘By the way, it’s quite racist and sexist,’” Jess Wade, a U.K. physicist and Wikipedia editor, told Glamour. She tried to shift this dynamic by contributing biographies of notable women to the site, noting that “the first people who contributed to Wikipedia were the kind of white tech bros.”

Chicago doctor Emily Temple-Wood, who has been editing Wikipedia for 14 years, starting at age 12, told Glamour that she has faced harassment for both her gender and autism. The online harassment grew increasingly acute as Temple-Wood added more pages about women to Wikipedia.

According to Reuters, 230,000 volunteer editors oversee the site’s articles and 3,500 administrators have the power to limit editing on specific articles and block user accounts. A 2018 survey showed that Wikipedia’s editors were 90% male and only 8.8% female. This gap has, unsurprisingly, resulted in a culture of hate and discrimination. In 2019, Forbes reported that a significant number of female editors felt unsafe on the site.

Wikimedia’s new conduct rules target this kind of harassment. The Verge reports that the rules list mutual respect and using users’ preferred pronoun choices as part of users’ “expected behavior.” The rules also prohibit users from abusing power, spouting hate speech, and intentionally promoting lies on the site. The rules themselves were developed by 1,500 Wikipedia volunteers, who live in five of the seven continents, according to Wikimedia. Unlike the terms and conditions of other sites, the Wikipedia rules are kept to a brief 1,600 words and written to be easily accessible for the average user.

Given Wikipedia’s popularity, this seems like a step forward for the tech industry. Experts are quick to point out, however, that the creation of Wikimedia’s rules is just that: a step. Wikimedia has yet to develop a plan to implement and enforce these rules, a crucial point where other tech giants have faltered before.

For example, after the 2016 election, Twitter established a Trust and Safety Council to help guide the company on best practices to protect their site from trolls and extremism. Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia and member of the council, explained that the influence of the council waned over the course of Trump’s presidency. Citron explained in an interview on Slate’s What Next podcast that part of the issue was Twitter not “meaningfully applying” its own policies to its site.

Wikipedia says it’s working out how to apply the rules in a second phase of the project, which Forbes notes will start by looking at how to enforce requirements in local and regional Wikipedia communities. Wikipedia says it aims to publish the results of that work by June, while other sources, like The Verge, say the project won’t be complete until late 2021.

While its success still remains to be seen, what Wikipedia decides to do next could chart a new course for the future of women on major tech platforms.