Joseph Reagle – Equality, gender, and speech in open communities

In addition to decision-making and legal necessity motivating closed subgroups within open communities, minority groups troubled by perceived bias in the larger community sometimes also seek a separate “safer” space. The creation of such a space, the female only WikiChix mailing list, broke from the model of female friendly, but non-exclusive, spaces in other open content communities and prompted arguments that such moves could become absurd, are unnecessarily divisive, and contrary to the egalitarian ethos of the larger community. This led to WikiChix being detached from any support or formal affiliation with Wikipedia. I conclude by arguing this break from open but focus-friendly subgroups should only be a last resort and we should better understand the circumstances that necessitate it.

One should not be surprised that a source of contention in “open content communities” are situations in which a subset of community members create a closed, exclusive, space. The conditions that prompt such proposals and the rhetoric marshaled to support or attack them give insight into a community’s attempts to understand and implement both openness and equality.

A common feature of online communities operating under an ethos of open and egalitarian values is frustration with the co-existence of group decision-making and seemingly contrary forms of autocratic authority. Evidence of this phenomenon includes the alleged “secret cabal” of USENET in the 1980s, private “sysop” only e-mail lists or IRC channels, and “benevolent dictators” of communities including Python, Linux, and Wikipedia. Indeed, I argue that the open character of such communities fosters the emergence of strong leaders who make autocratic decisions when the community can not easily make the decision itself. Furthermore, such leadership must be exercised with humility and humor or the community may fork or fail.

Another force behind closure is the success of such communities and their consequent need for legal standing. Accommodating the Wikimedia Foundation’s need to quickly and discreetly respond to the threat of legal action (e.g., removing a defamatory statement from an article) with the Wikipedia’s culture of public consensus is not easy.

An even more difficult situation in an open community is a demand for minority only spaces. For while the first catalyst is a seemingly inevitable structural result of group decision making, and the second is an inescapable reality of living in a litigious society, the last is purposely chosen by a subset of the community in seeming contradiction with the values of openness and equality. This was aptly demonstrated in the Wikipedia community by the recent announcement of a “WikiChix” list for female only discussion:

Offlist chat about the recent discussions on systemic gender bias in Wikipedia made it clear that a number of women were not comfortable contributing to the conversation there. This inspired the creation of WikiChix in November 2006. WikiChix is a wiki and mailing list for female wiki editors to discuss issues of gender bias in wikis, to promote wikis to potential female editors, and for general discussion of wikis in a friendly female-only environment.

Formally excluding anyone from the larger community prompts questions of fairness and discrimination. Some members react by arguing of a slippery slope towards absurdity, such as a need for: “… a mailing list for homosexual African-Americans from planets other than earth”. In a similar spirit, another Wikipedian asks about the need for a “British-only or atheist-only” list but also acknowledges the specific motivations for the creation of Wikichix: “the list was organised to avoid a specific problem – women feeling uncomfortable posting to this male-dominated list where explicitly sexist statements (even if they weren’t meant seriously) are left unchallenged by a large number of people”.

Interestingly, the very notion of equality may inhibit constructive action towards mitigating bias. Wilson argues that a presumption of equality alongside the possibility of informal bias can be disarming to the women who would otherwise object because (1) those females who believe there are equal opportunities will see no reason for action; (2) those who believe there is a misperception or that women feel less confident will be tolerant of encouragement for women, but they are also content see the status quo maintained; and (3) the women who believe in their equal abilities do not want to be singled out for special treatment and may therefore “count themselves out and express ambivalence” (p. 138). The model of female “chix” projects (e.g., LinuxChix, Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, KDE Women, WikiChix, etc.) appears to be a positive counterforce to this tendency.

Another response employed by those concerned with such spaces is not to object to the exclusion, but to the division of the larger community. Shouldn’t the community ensure the common space is accessible rather than spinning off groups? For example, “A better solution would be to kick any of the men that behave like that, not to assume that ‘all men are chauvinist pigs’”. Of course, given the value accorded to free speech, the community would have a difficult time restricting the speech of “men who behave like that.” How would such a determination be made? One of the few standards available for the discrimination of speech in such communities is that of trolling: contentious speech, probably not even genuinely held, expressed for the sole purpose of inflaming discussion. But how would one distinguish between misogyny and trolling? (Or, how does one distinguish between genuine racism and provocation? Consider Michael Richards’, Seinfeld’s Kramer, recent claim that he is not a racist despite his racial tirade against hecklers: one need not actually believe the offensive statements one uses to antagonize others in a heated moment.) An irony is that falsely held misogynistic statements espoused for the purposes of trolling might be censured or censored, but a genuine misogynist could claim that any formal censure is a form of “thought crime” which is generally anathema under free speech principles.

This type of discussion, these difficult questions of freedom and equality, often prompt extensive debate. While discussion about these values sometimes creates a shared “productive ethical orientation” within the community, they can also be alienating and seemingly endless. This is why such topics are so suitable to trolling in the first place, and for which benevolent dictators often step in, as Wikipedia’s cofounder is willing to do on questions of Nazis:

The point is, if the broad philosophical question is “Do we ban people for merely holding unpleasant or unpopular beliefs?” then the answer is “no, we never have, and there seems to be very little support for doing so”. If the point is “Does asserting unpleasant or unpopular beliefs automatically get you a free pass to be any sort of jerk you like, because we are planning to bend over backwards to make sure we don’t ever ever ever discriminate against Nazis?” then the answer is, “no, being a disruptive troll is still being a disruptive troll.”

Not surprisingly, it did not take long for the WikiChix proposal to be challenged; a longtime male contributor and self-described “overly combative” “anarchist” tried to subscribe to the list and was rejected. (I suppose this action was a violation of the norm “Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point“, which brings some measure of sanity to difficult issues.) In my informal observation of similar communities I haven’t perceived a decrease in female presence after the provisioning of a female friendly space. A counter to the hypothesis that women are abandoning the common space is that having a more supportive space to fall back upon will encourage comfort in speaking in common spaces.

The final, parliamentary, objection to the WikiChix proposal was that this exclusive list was being hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The other free software related women fora, while focused on being “women-friendly,” are more or less open and affiliated with the larger community. LinuxChix “is intended to be an inclusive group where everyone is and feels welcome…. LinuxChix is intended to be primarily for women. The name is an accurate reflection of that fact. Men are welcome because we do not want this group to be exclusive”. Debian Women states: “We’re not segregated. Debian Women is a subgroup of Debian that allows anyone to join and help”. On UbuntuWomen, “Membership is open to all”. The KDE Women website is run by women so “you have to be a woman”, but in addition to the six listed female members, there are also five male “supporters” and men are present on the IRC channel and mailing list. The gender exclusivity of WikiChix is atypical and it is not clear to what extent this decision was considered, purposeful, and what the consequences might be relative to the other female friendly fora.

In the end, the WikiChix list was moved from being hosted by Wikimedia, which might carry the presumption of endorsing exclusive discrimination, to a non-Wikipedia host: “Excellent. I still think it’s a bad idea, but if it’s not being supported in any way by Wikimedia Foundation there’s no need to complain about it here any more”. As is often the case on difficult issues, the conclusion to this argument was facilitated as much by exhaustion as by reason. Endless argument about whether bias exists, rather than partaking in constructive dialogue on how to counter it, is a reason such spaces are often created! By severing any support and official affiliation with the Wikimedia Foundation the topic became moot to the larger community.

I believe an implication of Wilson’s argument about the inhibiting effect of the presumption of equality and the difficult and troll-prone character of discussions about bias merits female friendly spaces. However, I also believe formally affiliated, inclusive yet focus-specific spaces are preferred. Could this have been tried in the Wikipedia case? Or, unlike the other, more technical communities mentioned, is the Wikipedia simply too large and unruly? These questions and the consequences of this type of closed space within an open community merit further consideration.

Akcnowledgement: I thank Biella Coleman for discussion and comments.

Further links

Joseph Reagle’s blog

Wikipedia vs. women

Special issue: recent articles, wiki politics
Tags: gender, joseph reagle, wikipedia