User:Nadiatalent/Lesson Learned

This is an archive of a brief explanation of why I left wikipedia in 2012 after finding it intolerable that other editors would make comments about the probable character and/or motives of any person of my gender. I now use a pseudonym, except in a few instances where it seems useful to signal which real-world person is making a particular contribution. Thank you to all my fellow editors (and there were quite a number!) who expressed sympathy; I hope your personal efforts to float beyond the maelstrom are always completely successful.

As has been discussed in essays over many years, for example here, here, and here, anyone academically inclined, and particularly a female scientist, probably shouldn't bother trying to contribute to Wikipedia.

Sadly, the voluminous and eloquent discussions listed above seem to have had little positive effect on the group social behaviour, so that the knowledgeable, rational, or diplomatic editors probably inevitably become demoralized by the overwhelming task of prevailing on even tiny points of fact or decency against the nincompoop faction and the raving-looney faction, but worst of all the out-for-blood (i.e., troll) faction.

The particular circumstances that led me to see the futility of my participation centred around an individual with enormous energy for copying text from many sources, much of it copyright violations, and almost entirely automatically translated from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or French (according to this person's own statements in the Spanish Wikipedia). Some of the results were hilarious, the fauna of one locality included nerds and charcoal, the fruit of a plant was said to be a Bay (link included), but much of the material made very little sense. Several editors tried to combat the efforts of this enormously energetic individual. When the "contributions" were copyedited or deleted or tagged with, this person became abusive, and eventually their accounts (three that I know of) were blocked, but anonymous IP addresses with the distinctive editing style were active for quite some time (and at least one with a similar style was active as recently as August 2012). This all might have been manageable eventually (hope they get blocked, hope they lose interest, eventually find all their or similar material and clean it up ...) but to have my efforts dismissed by a "good-faith" editor because "women are impatient" was the final straw. Sorry, I am not made of stronger stuff.