Becoming Wikipedian women: a sociotechnical history of the Gender Gap Task Force (2013–2023)

The summer of 2014 was a flashpoint of conflict between popular<br/>misogyny and popular feminism. While #GamerGate harassment<br/>campaigns raged across Reddit and Twitter, the experience of dis-<br/>crimination took on a different character within Wikipedia. One year prior to #GamerGate, Wikipedian women came together to address systemic gender bias on the encyclopedia and created the Gender Gap Task Force (GGTF). Following July 2014, the GGTF WikiProject saw intense contestation between editors who wrestled with the question of how to navigate the incommensurability between misogyny and feminism while creating encyclopedic knowledge.<br/>This article demonstrates the complexity of the GGTF’s response by theorizing it through a sociotechnical history of its formation as a counterpublic. Drawing on 443 discussion threads from the GGTFs talk pages, and numerous WikiProject pages, news reports, arbitration cases reports, and user pages, I argue that the GGTF played a significant role in making the identity of Wikipedian women legible and legitimate to the broader community. At the same time, the task forces’ activism as a counterpublic was significantly curtailed by trolling and harassment. In detailing this account, this article demonstrates how the design of an online community was exploited to support geek hypermasculinity and mobilized to exclude women from shaping the identity of “the Wikipedian.”