https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-foundat... Another controversy has been simmering over the article “femme,” the French word for woman, Ms. Rault said. At issue is whether the first paragraph should refer to gender in addition to biological sex, and whether transgender women should be included in the definition of woman. This debate devolved into an “edit war,” a heated back-and-forth in which Wikipedians continuously edit an article to overwrite the other side’s changes and reflect the language they want. [...] Wikipedians also began to discuss the “content gender gap,” which includes an imbalance in the gender distribution of biographies on the site. The latest analysis, released this month, said about 18 percent of 1.6 million biographies on the English-language Wikipedia were of women. That is up from about 15 percent in 2014, partially because of activists trying to move the needle. [...] In countries where it is more dangerous for L.G.B.T. individuals to be open about their identities, harassment on Wikipedia can be particularly virulent. Once, an administrator on a Wikipedia page blocked an editor simply because that person’s username suggested that the editor could be gay, said Rachel Wexelbaum, a Wikipedian who works to improve L.G.B.T. content on the website. Eventually, she said, Wikimedia’s Trust and Safety Team got involved, and the administrator was blocked for those actions. [...] If a volunteer administrator finds the allegations of abuse credible, the user can be barred from editing anywhere on the site. Administrators for some Wikipedias, such as the English-language site, can also declare a “topic ban,” a socially enforced tool in which other editors are responsible for making sure the guilty user is not involved in editing articles that mention prohibited subjects. Violating a topic ban can result in a sitewide ban.