- I joined Wikipedia a month or two before I turned 13.
I had it under a pseudonym for the first few years
and I can't remember whether it came out
that I was 13
or whether I was a woman first.
I was 13 when I got my first death threat.
I suck dick for money,
I am Hitler,
I'm a Jew,
I'm a Jew and Hitler,
I suck Hitler's dick.
I can't tell if I was really brave or really naive.
I was like well they'll never find me,
they'll never do anything to me.
I'm a middle schooler, whatever.
(mysterious music)
- I founded Wiki Project Women in Red
which is a global community of editors
who write articles regarding women,
women's biographies, women's works (mumbles),
such as the paintings they painted,
the sculptures they sculpted,
the schools they founded
and also women's issues,
things like women's suffrage and women's health.
- As hard as historians are trying,
there's still a lot of women
who are lost to history
because of systemic structures.
Wikipedia's a tertiary source, right?
We can't do original research.
So I can go into an archives
and find all this information
about a really cool woman in science
and if it's not already written about by a historian,
that can't go on Wikipedia.
We're reliant on the feminist historians
and the queer historians
who've been at this for decades.
They have to do the leg work first.
(mysterious music)
- There was something that I had written
or maybe something that I hadn't written
in defense of something that an editor
had thought needed to be changed.
I disagreed.
As a consequence, someone,
an editor that I'd never interacted before with,
pasted an image of a painting
on my top page
and that image was the painting called
The Rape of the Sapine Women.
They didn't come out to say I want to rape you
but it felt like a veiled threat to read that.
- Retaliation is a huge issue
and I think anyone who's adding content to Wikipedia
that's outside of that white man norm
can expect to get some form of that.
Suddenly, you're in the middle of an argument
and your competency is questioned,
you're being called a bitch,
it's implied that maybe you're a prostitute.
A lot of these things have happened
to people that I know.
And so it very quickly devolves into the personal.
Folks who are experienced use
bureaucracy and intimidation.
This article was created by somebody new,
it's clearly someone who's not notable
because in my three second glance through the internet
I haven't found the right sources.
So I recommend we delete it.
Three other male editors show up
and go yep, seems right to me,
just get rid of it.
And off it goes.
- Wikipedia's what happens
when anarchy begets bureaucracy.
Wikipedia originally started out with five rules, right?
And now there's thousands of pages of policy.
It's all of these systemic structures
of racism and sexism and classism intertwining
to make it more difficult to keep an article, right?
- There's an upstream problem with Wikipedia
which is that women have been left out of history
and not written about in sources for centuries.
Every single episode of The Simpsons on Wikipedia
has its own article,
literally every single episode
of the American TV show, The Simpsons,
has its own article
and yet, women scientists, women activists,
important contributors to history,
we're still arguing
about whether or not they belong.
- I get accused a lot
of having a feminist agenda with Wikipedia
and I absolutely do.
Not only does knowledge deserve to be free,
but knowledge needs to be representative
and it needs to be just.
We can use platforms like Wikipedia
to help shape history
and be on the right side of history.
(mysterious music)