Wikipedia, for those not familiar, is the largest online encyclopedia. Think Cracked but with slightly fewer fart jokes. Some people want that. Go figure. Despite being such an influential site, Wikipedia has fewer than 10 percent female editors. That leads to some strange problems. For example: The entries on porn stars and Pokemon are both more extensively detailed than the entries on prominent women. This page on American novelists is divided into "Female American Novelists" (for the women-folk) and "American Novelists" (for the men). They once removed all the female movie directors from their list of horror directors.

Basically, it seems like Wikipedia has some weird problems with regard to gender -- so what's up? Well, I was an editor from shortly after it was founded until just a couple of years ago. I am also a trans woman, and I can tell you exactly what's up.

#4. It Started As Something Beautiful

Lane Hartwell

I first joined Wikipedia in 2003, back when the Internet still had stuff like blogs, instead of 23-page slideshows reminiscing about the days when we had blogs. The site had some really embarrassing priorities: While there were dozens of articles about different characters and locations in Atlas Shrugged, there was nothing about Manila. And the article about Nigeria consisted of unmodified copy-and-pastes from The CIA World Factbook 2000. As far as "policy" went, their guiding light was what they called a "neutral point of view" -- the idea is that they would never take a stance on any controversy, ever, and that all the write-ups would be both satisfying and inoffensive to everyone who could ever read them. Sounds kind of ideal, right?

Signet Classics

Or at least as evenhanded as you could be while still hosting a shitload of Ayn Rand.

I got into it because I had been researching Cold War Berlin for an online game I was writing, and since Wikipedia was quite sparse on that front, I thought I'd put what I'd found up there. Then, because I also knew a lot about British politics and geography, I created a bunch of articles on that topic. Then I started editing others, because I was having a ton of fun and am clearly a huge dork (see: "was writing an online game about Cold War Berlin.")

I was part of a wave of new editors and an explosion of informative content: Wikipedia went from 19,700 articles at the end of 2001 to 188,800 by the start of 2004, and we just continued growing from there. It became clear that the Wikipedia project was going to produce something incredible. Even if that "something" was just a million-page treatise on Babylon 5.

Warner Bros. Television

Which sounds funny until you see the actual length.

#3. Then It Got Ugly

Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images

As the stakes got bigger, so did the fighting: The first big dispute I got into was the highly contentious subject of British geography. See, some people wanted Wikipedia to use "historic" counties in Britain for everything, leading to such comic absurdities as describing Brixton as being in Surrey (a decade before gentrification, too!). You ... probably don't care about that. But that's why you're not editing for Wikipedia. Still, someday you might have to write a paper on it, and you'll care then.

The point is, we had a small dispute over something that couldn't be less consequential, but the "neutral point of view" doctrine meant that we had to find a compromise that would leave every possible perspective happy. And while the debate seemed courteous enough, this is the point where my user page started to get vandalized. I still don't know who exactly I pissed off or why. Maybe Sir Archibald Pheasantbottom takes his historical British counties seriously. Sometimes it was just silly stuff and charmingly absurd meta-vandalism. Then it got a bit personal.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia

{{Citation needed, you unbelievable assclowns}}

I'm not sure what my gender or sexuality has to do with Brixton, but if you're at all familiar with how the Internet works, you're probably recognizing the pattern: A woman has expressed an opinion and therefore must be destroyed. It wasn't like that before. So what changed? Well, remember how I said we had 188,800 articles at the start of 2004? By 2006, we were at 895,000. The harassment came on the heels of one of the weirdest realizations a group of writers can have: People were starting to care about what we were saying.

We weren't working on the rough draft of an experimental encyclopedia anymore; we were a real source of information. After I created the Wikipedia article for the 7/7 London bombings, I was interviewed by NPR, like a real journalist. But there were downsides, too, like the "Seigenthaler incident," wherein the biography of a living journalist was vandalized to say that he had been involved in assassinating John F. Kennedy. Then the Essjay controversy exposed one of our most prominent editors, supposedly a professor of theology, as a fraud. These weren't weird mistakes or jokes anymore -- the words we wrote were actually impacting people's lives, and the whole world.

Pixsooz/iStock/Getty Images

Especially the blood pressure of teachers reading their students' "original" papers.

Which was great news -- but as more and more people started listening to us, some men in our ranks started doing everything they could to make sure that the women weren't heard.