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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.