User:Patient Zero/OWH

I have redacted the usernames of the two editors they claimed to be, as they are editors in good standing, who are, to the very best of my knowledge, not the same person, and also, quite simply, I do not want to bring them into this, as that would be wholly unfair.

As an autistic person, I was left feeling deeply uncomfortable by this unsolicited message, as well as (at the time) the thought that someone had just so casually admitted to being a sockmaster behind two accounts I thought of as editors in good standing. Whilst I am reassured that the latter is untrue (I believe the person who messaged me was actually in a content dispute with these two editors), I cannot help but realise the link between my disclosure of being an autistic Wikipedia editor, and the nature of this disturbing message. It is my personal belief that this person attempted to target a vulnerability of mine in order to cause distress and alarm to me as an individual.

Whilst I was able to get support and reassurance from the Arbitration Committee, as well as from a few admins who use the Wikipedia Discord, I was still feeling very much alarmed by the nature of the off-wiki communication. I blocked the individual in question, and never received any further communications elsewhere. It has now been exactly one month since the incident, and I now feel comfortable disclosing exactly what happened, so that other editors do not have to go through the same thing, or will know what to do if it does happen.

One thing it certainly made me realise is that off-wiki harassment can happen to absolutely anyone. That one-off incident made me uncomfortable - I cannot imagine for one second what it must be like to be the subject of harassment as a female or feminine-aligned Wikipedian. Indeed, one of the main reasons why we do not have many editors who openly disclose being of a female gender is due to the high levels of harassment against them, which makes them fear for their own safety and drives them away from the project... and people still wonder why we need projects like Women in Red. It's certainly opened my eyes to the extent of the problem, and it's made me want to speak up in the hopes that others will be more compassionate and understanding going forward, but I also want to make very clear that it shouldn't take hearing me, a man, talk about his experience of harassment for people to realise the extent of just how much this affects our users.

If anyone reading this has a LinkedIn profile where they declare that they are a Wikipedia editor, please keep an eye out for messages of this type; if you are unfortunate enough to receive one, take screenshots before blocking the individual (otherwise this may delete the record of the messages), and then report them to the Arbitration Committee immediately after. Whilst I have identified the numerous sock accounts of this individual (happy to discuss this with administrators/arbitrators) on Wikipedia, that of course does not stop them from messaging Wikipedians off-wiki in an abusive manner. I reported the account to LinkedIn themselves, but I have since learned that it was never taken down, and there remains a risk that other Wikipedians could also be harassed by them, in a way that targets their own vulnerabilities, hence me deciding to speak publicly on the matter.

Finally, one thing I am not going to let this experience do is affect my ability to make "difficult edits". I am now doing fine, am more than happy to speak about the matter publicly (as you can probably tell from the large block of text above!), and will continue to assist the community in tackling long-term abuse. However, we are all human here (apart from the many helpful bots we have scattered around the project!), and so I'm also more than comfortable talking about my feelings around the matter, and saying that it was an alarming experience. When distressing content appears on Wikipedia, we may see a subsequent string of semi-automated edits, RevDels and suppressions, but behind all of those are real people (or their bots, and even then, there are real people behind those). We could all do well to remember the person.

TLDR: I was harassed off-wiki. Whilst it was an uncomfortable and alarming experience, I learned a lot, and I won't let it get to me.