Katherine Maher

“ But if you start from a place with understanding around belonging and understanding about community norms and behavior, then you can actually start to bring people back into those community behaviors. And so I’m hopeful that, based on the fact that we have a sense of commitment to norms and behaviors around what we want in the community, it’s about strengthening them, and seeing them succeed. ”

“ So everything on Wikipedia is openly licensed. We very rarely find for example violations of that because community members are very good at identifying issues when they arise and addressing them right away. One of the things that we’d like to move towards is a community culture where there’s this same attention to toxic behavior and harassment in the communities, as there is, for example, to licensing violations. ”

“ In a 2012 evaluation, by the Oxford Internet Institute, they found that more than half of the articles on Wikipedia are about places, events, and people, that only represent 2.5% of the world’s land area. And of all the geo-tagged articles on Wikipedia, only 2.6% actually represent anything on the continent of Africa, which holds 14% of the world’s population. At the Wikimedia Foundation we know that representation and quality of articles improve when more people contribute, and when more diverse people contribute. ”

“ Identify the people who are not here yet, the people that you want to work with. And go and talk to them, listen to them--more importantly than talk. You have to understand why they are not working with you yet, what are their objections, what are they—why aren’t they here, and not dismiss those objections because this is the way that we work and this is the way that our communities work and our cultures work, but actually reflect on them, and think about where we need to make changes. ”

“ Part of our model is community grants. In the last two years we’ve set aside half a million dollars to fund resources for increasing gender diversity and addressing tools and initiatives to support healthy culture. We’re working with our community members in order to understand what the issues are that they see and give them training and tools so they can identify toxic behavior and take effective action on their own. ”

“ Secondly, one thing I hear a lot is that when people talk about the importance of an open internet, these negative examples of harassment are shown sometimes in such a light so as to say, Oh look this is what happens when you have a completely open community, we can’t have that. ”

“ You know, from our perspective, it is actually about bad, it’s that we believe that most people who participate in our community and in the open web are generally there because they are appreciative of the good parts about it, the creativity, the innovation, the connection. ”

“ For us to have all knowledge, we require the participation of all people. We need all voices together so that we can create something greater than the sum of our individual parts. Which brings me back to Molly. ”

“ So we have a support and safety team that works with individuals who experience issues of harassment, and those individuals are deeply involved in the communities, they work alongside community members, and what our goals are over... right now...what we’re working to do, and what we’re anticipating doing in the future, is actually building resources for community leaders, so that they can identify some of these issues from the beginning. ”

“ And one of the things that we have found is that we actually think that addressing some of these issues, for us, is possible---I think there’s a feeling that these are really pernicious issues and they could be impossible to address, but one of the things that we found is that by starting in a place where we have a culture around expectations, around what the things are that the community actually wants and what the, sort of, guidelines are for participation, it’s around clarifying within that culture that expectations, and building and strengthening and reinforcing it. ”

“ Respectful, diverse, inclusive communities don’t just happen because you want them to. You actually have to resource it. We used to do this thing, where we sat around and we talked about having a more welcoming community for women and people of color and people from the global south. ”

“ In addition to letting people know that you want them to join your community, it has to come from the community as to what the rules of engagement actually are, so that you can identify when people are acting outside of those barriers and of those rules. ”

“ I think that if you start from zero it becomes very difficult, and we’ve seen that in the number of communities on the web in general, is that if you have no rules and you have no expectations about how to participate, it becomes very difficult to then later set them. ”

“ People have dug into her relatives’ Facebook pages with fewer privacy settings than hers. They’ve shared photos of Molly to various websites, photoshopping her face onto lewd images, and they’ve taken a photo of her with her baby niece, and captioned it with racial slurs. They’ve added data to these images, to make sure that they’re some of the first results you see when you search for her name or user name. A slew of Twitter accounts have been created to harass her, commenting on her physical appearance, her weight, her family, her sexual preferences. ”

“ Wikimedians have spent millions of hours building one of humanity’s most remarkable resources, forty million articles, three hundred languages, used by half a billion people every month, from every corner of the planet, from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to here in London. ”

“ She’s also the target of repeated harassment because of her involvement with Wikipedia. She’s been targeted by people who disagree with the calls she’s made as an administrator. She’s been targeted for her physical appearance. ”

“ I think that, I mean, that was a bit of a leading question, but I actually think that this is an issue, right, that people who don’t have any direct experience of what it means to be vulnerable or to be marginalized have a very difficult time understanding what it means to be vulnerable or be marginalized and then actually investing in those issues. ”

“ Woman’s voice: Hi, thank you for speaking, In which ways are you supporting the people who are contributing and administrators and editors for coming with you with concerns about being harassed in life? ”

“ So now, we actually have dedicated budget, resources, and staff, who actually work with our emerging communities, to help these groups participate, and grow, and understand what their needs and barriers are. ”