Chapter 18
It had begun to spiral out of control a few weeks before then. It started with the creepy, ‘too long, didn’t read’ emails, mentioning her children and suggesting what would happen when the local sex offenders got to find out their personal information. Then came the wacky website, and the cyber-rape pages. Then images of dead people and autopsies. He suggested getting pictures of her family and photoshopping them onto corpses, so she could ponder on mortality, and so on. In the end, his emails started hinting of physical violence. He was doing this because she was a woman, because she was an administrator on Wikipedia, and because she had once blocked him.
Can volunteers work well online with the mentally ill and the criminally insane, many of whom are drawn to Wikipedia like moths to a flame? “It is emotionally and physically draining. While some were mostly annoying time sinks who seemed to be just desperately seeking the attention they must have lacked in their real lives, others have displayed all the signs of full-blown psychosis, particularly in engaging in cyberstalking both on and off Wiki”, says one.
But the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t want you knowing about this. “They are afraid that if it became generally known that women who edit Wikipedia are liable to be stalked, women might be even less likely to participate. So they don’t take any action that might be publicly visible (such as, for example, seeking a protective order forbidding a known sex offender from attending their events, which would be a trivial matter to obtain) because of that risk. The most important thing is increasing participation. There’s nothing wrong with concealing safety risks if it furthers that goal”.
