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Wikipedia bans editors over GamerGate controversy
- Thread starter FlyinJ
- Start date
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Thanks for posting your side of the story Ryu. Really interesting stuff.
Why did Wikipedia choose to ban a batch of 10 editors at once? What triggered that?
Also, what is your opinion of the other 3 editors who were banned from editing the page. I don't really care about the false flagger, but I am curious as to why they were not permenantly banned at the time it was revealed they were false flagging.
As for the other 5 "fake" editors, why were they chosen to be banned? It seems from your story that there were numerous fake editors editing in false gamergate info.. Why were only those 5 editors banned?
I use the term fake as I don't really know the correct Wiki lingo that is used to describe drive by editing. Were any of those 5 banned accounts actually well known editors?
Why did Wikipedia choose to ban a batch of 10 editors at once? What triggered that?
Also, what is your opinion of the other 3 editors who were banned from editing the page. I don't really care about the false flagger, but I am curious as to why they were not permenantly banned at the time it was revealed they were false flagging.
As for the other 5 "fake" editors, why were they chosen to be banned? It seems from your story that there were numerous fake editors editing in false gamergate info.. Why were only those 5 editors banned?
I use the term fake as I don't really know the correct Wiki lingo that is used to describe drive by editing. Were any of those 5 banned accounts actually well known editors?
I don't think I can answer these questions, sorry.
charlequin
Banned
Gamergate is a misogynist hate movement. At this point if you see someone who actively identifies with Gamergate but presents reasonable, non-sexist opinions about women, it's either someone who jumped in without doing much research, someone who's dissembling, or someone who's showing off a specific area where their opinion isn't particularly sexist in order to provide cover for the movement as a whole.
Permanently A
Junior Member
"The sanction bars the five editors from having anything to do with any articles covering Gamergate, but also from any other article about gender or sexuality, broadly construed.
Am I wrong in thinking that there isn't anything strange about this? I mean a "well-known feminist editor" editing articles about the wage gap or something seems like a clear conflict of interest, no? (Since they might have a more difficult time to be objective.)
And the article says the 5 gamergate accounts were just throwaways, but are there any well-known editors in support of gamergate to ban in the first place? I don't know how their ban system works but I can only guess the fairest way to do it would be by number of edits.
Am I wrong in thinking that there isn't anything strange about this? I mean a "well-known feminist editor" editing articles about the wage gap or something seems like a clear conflict of interest, no? (Since they might have a more difficult time to be objective.)
And the article says the 5 gamergate accounts were just throwaways, but are there any well-known editors in support of gamergate to ban in the first place? I don't know how their ban system works but I can only guess the fairest way to do it would be by number of edits.
Read the thread. Being a biased person is fine as long as you stick to the rules and write a neutral factually based article.
crowphoenix
Banned
GamerGate is really a shit stain of human misery, hatred, and failure. On the plus side, they have made me more driven to see the industry become more inclusive.
Having a perspective on an issue doesn't constitute a "conflict of interest".
Permanently A
Junior Member
Alright having read the thread I see what you mean. Banning them was probably too reactionary a measure.
freethought
Member
You know the Gamergate article seems in pretty good condition atm. I'd say it has a good neutral POV while correctly identifying the whole Gamergate debacle as a clearly anti-feminist attack campaign.
All I'm saying is, wiki is an encyclopedia, it's banned a bunch of people who were not improving the content or information in the article, concerns were raised about the efficacy of these measures, those concerns seem to have been unfounded as the page is very fair. Heck if we're being honest the page is clearly anti gamer gate since there's so much evidence this whole thing is nothing more than an online harrassment campaign with no real fucking grounding in a debate on journalistic ethics and all of this is absolutely reflected in the article, isn't it?
I mean, I read that article and I come away with the inescapable conclusion that gamergate started as a horrific bit of public slut shaming and swiftly progressed into a more general wave of harrassment and intimidation aimed at basically any woman who dared to pop her head up. Specifically and only women.
All I'm saying is, wiki is an encyclopedia, it's banned a bunch of people who were not improving the content or information in the article, concerns were raised about the efficacy of these measures, those concerns seem to have been unfounded as the page is very fair. Heck if we're being honest the page is clearly anti gamer gate since there's so much evidence this whole thing is nothing more than an online harrassment campaign with no real fucking grounding in a debate on journalistic ethics and all of this is absolutely reflected in the article, isn't it?
I mean, I read that article and I come away with the inescapable conclusion that gamergate started as a horrific bit of public slut shaming and swiftly progressed into a more general wave of harrassment and intimidation aimed at basically any woman who dared to pop her head up. Specifically and only women.
The issue is that the proposal is banning people who have contributed to the article in good faith to cover Gamergate's downspiral into a hate mob and isn't as harsh on someone who is presently a mod of KotakuInAction who I personally sent in evidence privately to reveal he had been instrumental in several threads harassing me there.
bengraven
Member
I got lost as soon as GG started because of how fast news was moving and because I wasn't able to check very often.
Every time I see it mentioned though it's come to the point where it seems like it's between two extremes:
1) overly aggressive no-girls-allowed gamers
2) angry feminists (femi-"nazis" or whatever) who are quick to condemn someone for being misogynist.
So I kind of backed off and now this news means nothing to me because I don't understand which side is banned.
Every time I see it mentioned though it's come to the point where it seems like it's between two extremes:
1) overly aggressive no-girls-allowed gamers
2) angry feminists (femi-"nazis" or whatever) who are quick to condemn someone for being misogynist.
So I kind of backed off and now this news means nothing to me because I don't understand which side is banned.
freethought
Member
I don't know man, seems to me the only issue of concern to wikipedia is the neutrality of the article. Wikipedia isn't the arbiter of justice on the internet, all they can do is moderate their own site which has strict neutrality guidelines. If you sent them evidence of this guy breaking wikipedia rules that's one thing, but they can't really ban someone from wikipedia for being a dick on another site.
It is against Wikipedia's rules to organize a harassment campaign against someone on Wikipedia while you yourself are participating. And the arbitration committee is not going to say "the article is not neutral". They don't have that power.
tonysidaway
Member
The arbitration case is nearly over. It looks as if four editors who are broadly sympathetic to feminist causes will be topic banned from Gamergate and other topics related to gender and sexuality (NorthBySouthBarananoff, Ryulong, Tarc and TaraInDC). A fifth, TheRedPenOfDoom, is sternly told off (admonished) for treating Wikipedia as a battleground.
Less attention has been paid in this thread to the fate of other problem editors, because much of the newspaper coverage has come from Mark Bernstein, who also seems to regard Wikipedia as a place to do battle with the foe (which it isn't; at best, it's useful as a scoreboard in such battles). Bernstein himself was topic banned for rather outrageous attacks on fellow editors, and is currently blocked from all editing for a month because he keeps skirting the topic ban.
About half a dozen other editors are also being topic banned, and many of those are established Wikipedia editors who happened to treat Wikipedia as a battleground but were more sympathetic to Gamergate. About half of those were already topic banned under community processes which have done much to calm the topic area down. The same processes have also excluded another half dozen disruptive pro-Gamergate editors, some of whom fit the description of "throwaway" accounts.
Collaboration in the topic area is better now than I've ever seen it. This is partly due, I'm sure, to the controversy running its course and no longer being fight-of-the-month on Twitter. Partly it's due to the efforts of a small few administrators (one of whom narrowly escaped a very mild ticking off, for being quasi-involved) who handed out community-approved blocks and bans for egregious conduct. And partly it's due to the remaining editors realising there's no penalty for behaving like civilised human beings and talking through disagreements.
I would probably have been more lenient to people who likely shouldered a lot of the burden of fighting off sock puppets and ended up being sanctioned. Some of them lost a lot of the benefit of the doubt, though, because they've been sanctioned by the arbitration committee before not once but several times. Those circumstances had nothing to do with Gamergate.
It's the gunfighter paradox. If you take up extreme methods to save the village, the village that first welcomes you during a crisis may decide it would rather you didn't turn the place into a battleground every time you judge that a new situation requires your unique gunsmithing skills. But by then you may see yourself as the only thing between the village and anarchy. Some of our best and most decent editors occasionally fall into that bad habit.
We used to call it Defender of the Wiki Syndrome, but ironically the sarcasm in that title has been lost over time.
Less attention has been paid in this thread to the fate of other problem editors, because much of the newspaper coverage has come from Mark Bernstein, who also seems to regard Wikipedia as a place to do battle with the foe (which it isn't; at best, it's useful as a scoreboard in such battles). Bernstein himself was topic banned for rather outrageous attacks on fellow editors, and is currently blocked from all editing for a month because he keeps skirting the topic ban.
About half a dozen other editors are also being topic banned, and many of those are established Wikipedia editors who happened to treat Wikipedia as a battleground but were more sympathetic to Gamergate. About half of those were already topic banned under community processes which have done much to calm the topic area down. The same processes have also excluded another half dozen disruptive pro-Gamergate editors, some of whom fit the description of "throwaway" accounts.
Collaboration in the topic area is better now than I've ever seen it. This is partly due, I'm sure, to the controversy running its course and no longer being fight-of-the-month on Twitter. Partly it's due to the efforts of a small few administrators (one of whom narrowly escaped a very mild ticking off, for being quasi-involved) who handed out community-approved blocks and bans for egregious conduct. And partly it's due to the remaining editors realising there's no penalty for behaving like civilised human beings and talking through disagreements.
I would probably have been more lenient to people who likely shouldered a lot of the burden of fighting off sock puppets and ended up being sanctioned. Some of them lost a lot of the benefit of the doubt, though, because they've been sanctioned by the arbitration committee before not once but several times. Those circumstances had nothing to do with Gamergate.
It's the gunfighter paradox. If you take up extreme methods to save the village, the village that first welcomes you during a crisis may decide it would rather you didn't turn the place into a battleground every time you judge that a new situation requires your unique gunsmithing skills. But by then you may see yourself as the only thing between the village and anarchy. Some of our best and most decent editors occasionally fall into that bad habit.
We used to call it Defender of the Wiki Syndrome, but ironically the sarcasm in that title has been lost over time.
tonysidaway
Member
The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee has published a statement in response to press articles about the Gamergate case. It's intended to clarify the role of arbitration in Wikipedia.
Statement on the GamerGate case.
Statement on the GamerGate case.
charlequin
Banned
Man, even when writing something that's supposed to be clarifying and informative they can't help but produce something long-winded, obfuscatory, and tone-deaf. Would it have killed one actual real human to try to clarify the situation in normal English?
That's how I see it. That and "leftist" ideology.
D
Deleted member 10571
Unconfirmed Member
Yeah, it's basically a lot of "we did something", I don't see any actual clarification at all in there. Maybe I'm missing it between all the legal speak though.
theusedversion
Member
tonysidaway
Member
Take-away points:
It's not a court.
Ideology isn't a criterion.
Those sanctioned had a mix of views.
The Arbitration Committee is forbidden to evaluate article quality. This is not a reflection on the state of the article itself.
Wikipedia isn't a battlefield.
The media have been extrapolating the outcome of the case from a highly preliminary proposal; the actual outcome develops over time and it's still in progress at the time the notice was written.
squarerootofpie
Neo Member
Thanks for posting the original pages etc. It's so hard to decide what to think regarding the wiki thing when there's not really any clear information out there.. Good to have some basic facts about the situation
It's so difficult to trudge through these long threads because sometimes it can be so demoralising to just sit there and take in the huge amount of hate people seem to have for your gender.
freethought
Member
You know, the whole 'Gamergate' thing makes no sense to me. I know Adam Baldwin coined it, but it was in reference to a person I'd never heard of sleeping with another person I'd never heard of to promote a game I'd never heard of on a website I'd never heard of. Now that is barely a scandal, it's certainly not worthy of the -gate suffix.
No, there should have been a concerted effort to appropriate the term to refer to the actual scandal that shocked and disgusted pretty much anyone you cared to tell, that of a bunch of gamers harassing and bullying women online for daring to own working mouths and vaginas. That should be gamergate. That is gamergate.
No, there should have been a concerted effort to appropriate the term to refer to the actual scandal that shocked and disgusted pretty much anyone you cared to tell, that of a bunch of gamers harassing and bullying women online for daring to own working mouths and vaginas. That should be gamergate. That is gamergate.
cripterion
Member
That's me right there.
tonysidaway
Member
When a group has to write its own publicity and hire ads to disseminate what it considers "the real story", things aren't looking good. That's a clear sign of desperation. They have realised that badgering people on Twitter isn't working for them.
I'm genuinely confused. The site seems to maintain that it's about ethics in game journalism but the third article is a takedown of Anita Sarkesian because she's a feminist.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Talking about feminism is unethical(tm)
tonysidaway
Member
Feminists are teh eeeeeebil. And they got girl cooties.
freethought
Member
Hey guys, I've been pretty much on one side of this issue since the beginning. The whole #GamerGate thing just seemed to be a fairly obvious attempt to bully some women online, and that's being charitable.
But now they have Jack Thompson on their side my head is spinning. So now I think they must just be anti-censorship guys, I mean that is what Thompson is known for after all.
But now they have Jack Thompson on their side my head is spinning. So now I think they must just be anti-censorship guys, I mean that is what Thompson is known for after all.
"What the media and Wikipedia didn't tell you..."
"READ THE FACTS"
Looks just like a photocopied pamphlet an unshaven college anarchist/conspiracy theorist would be handing out at a rally.
crimsonheadGCN
Banned
There's now a Wikipedia entry about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArbitrationGate_controversy
ArbitrationGate controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArbitrationGate_controversy
ArbitrationGate controversy
I foresee an ArbitrationGateGate(gategategategate.... ad nauseam) coming in a week or two.
also that page will probably be deleted very swiftly
Oppo
Member
I'm getting that banner quite a lot as well. and I've never, ever visited any gamergate sites.
it's a little disconcerting.
terrisus
Member
Yeah, I'm getting that ad on mobile too, and aside from this thread, I've basically never even read anything about the whole "GamerGate" issue, and don't really go to any non-NeoGAF gaming sites either.
So I'm guessing it may just be a general NeoGAF ad.
aspiegamer
Member
Unfortunately I cannot pin this "article" specifically to any of Wikipedia's guidelines for instant deletion but someone opened a deletion discussion very quickly which an external admin can close if sentiment seems overwhelming (and it does).
Ironically, despite the fact that my cookies from any of countless privacy-ignoring services will have seen me seeking out more GG content than I'd care to admit to, I have not seen any of these ads on NeoGAF or elsewhere.
Are these people for real?
SliceSabre
Banned
All this does is make the side that is supporting the feminist editors look like asshats. Like holy crap let it go.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Why is it disconcerting? It's something linked to the thread. The ads are always like that.
What? Moderators are still users on a discussion board...
Freshmaker
I am Korean.
Most were probably treated like shit in middle school and high school. Paying their years of harassment forward.
Well, if you look at their "what is gamergate" link, here's the first sentence of their private wiki:
"Overt politicization" of course refers to feminist and/or social justice critique of video games. Ditto "censorship." So they're not exactly doing a great job of hiding that they're an anti-feminist movement, if you read this stuff in the context of the actual actions they've taken and the people they've chosen as enemies.
The biggest irony of this is that Jack Thompson himself received death threats from gamers back in the day. You'd think he'd be on the other side.
freethought
Member
Cognitive Dissonance: The Movie
Nah, I could have guessed Jack Thompson wouldn't have no truck with them damn feminists. It's different see, because of reasons.
I don't even know any more man.
edit: Remember Doritogate, and how everybody said Doritogate was all about journalistic ethics in videogames, and then everyone believed it was about journalistic ethics in videogames.And everyone acted like it was about journalistic ethics in videogames. And then it just sort of went away because nobody really cares that strongly about journalistic ethics in videogames. This is just like that, except that it's not at all.
squarerootofpie
Neo Member
So they're fighting censorship by... censoring feminists? This is some inception stuff right here.
squarerootofpie
Neo Member
The funniest part of this is that pro-GGers (who want games to stay the way they are or something along those lines) are using Jack Thompson as an example, despite the fact that he doesn't think that video games should be available to anyone under 18. Which would mean complete reform?
Also is it just me or does that soundtrack just scream conspiracy theorist?
You could literally apply that logic to the Dragon Age Inquisition banners that flooded my browser December 2014; DAI aka - game of the year.
Side note: I really like Dragon Age Inquisition.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
Yes, people who hate Anita for supposedly trying to "ruin" video games are praising a guy that has factually attempted to restrict the distribution and content of games through the process of law. The irony here is so strong it's headsplitting.
GungHo
Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
They waged war with the power of editing and used Wikipedia as their battlefield.
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