Then, in January 2015, Lightbreather proposed a women-only space on Wikipedia for female editors to support each other and discuss the specific barriers they face online. The proposal was part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Inspire Campaign, launched to fund projects aimed at closing the site’s gender gap—but users took to the “oppose” section of proposal’s discussion page to promise to “fight this to the death.”

“It’s just incredible how much hatred was spewing out of these guys. … When you have a bunch of angry people show up on the doorstep of a new project you’re trying to get off the ground, it drives away a lot of people who might have been interested,” Lightbreather said. Her idea for a Women’s Wiki didn’t get funding from the Foundation, but others have created similar spaces elsewhere on the site.

After stumbling across the fake pornographic pictures this spring, Lightbreather went to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, a panel of 15 elected users who have the final say on all arguments between editors.*** ArbCom declined to take on Lightbreather’s case on the grounds that it may “out” the editor that had posted the pictures, or link his username to his real name. But by that time, someone had already opened a case against her, a female editor who often defended Corbett in disputes. She argued that Lightbreather approached Wikipedia with a “battleground mentality,” and that because Lightbreather had filed complaints against multiple editors in the past, she herself must be the problem.

ArbCom’s final decision: Lightbreather was banned from editing Wikipedia for a minimum of one year.

* * *

As the Internet’s single largest source of free information, Wikipedia has faced skepticism about its credibility since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But according to a 2011 study from the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of Americans use the site, up from only 36 percent in 2007. Interestingly, the more educated someone is, the more likely he or she is to consult Wikipedia. Almost 70 percent of Americans with college degrees read Wikipedia. Google now pulls directly from the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, so even people who never visit the site read it. Today, it’s the seventh most-visited website in the world.

But Wikipedia has changed in other ways since its founding, too. Wales said when he created the site it would be based on a “culture of thoughtful, diplomatic honesty” and a “neutral point of view”—but over time, that point of view came to be dominated by whoever joined Wikipedia first and wrote the most. As a result, Wikipedia has become a kind of Internet oligarchy, where those who have been around the longest have the most control.

“Most people look at Wikipedia, and see the text, and assume that it’s unproblematically produced by volunteers and always on a trajectory to improvement,” said Julia Adams, a sociologist at Yale University who’s studying how academic knowledge is portrayed on Wikipedia. “But that is simply not the case.”