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Wikipedia bans editors over GamerGate controversy

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Please provide examples of anti-GG doing this.

For instance. https://twitter.com/trustedtrevor/status/527981156466446336
http://www.reaxxion.com/3720/totalbiscuit-is-sent-death-wish-by-anti-gamergate-for-promoting-charity
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/for...ear-old-Girl-who-wanted-to-Be-a-good-feminist

But of course you'll find some way to ignore this thing completely, or say it's all lies, bullshit, fake and whatnot.

Both sides have nutcases and valid points.
 

PhineBuyM3

Member
I don't think pro or anti should be editing the article. And from what I can tell wikipedia has been having a problem with ideologues running roughshod long before this.
 

devilhawk

Member
So the Mark Bernstein article outlines how he believes GG baited the bans.


So the idea is that you intentionally target and bait people into edit wars and collude off site to have a buddy play impartial and lodge complaints when your target has been successfully baited.
This sounds conspiratorial enough to need its own -Gate name.
 
Come on now. This is reaching into conspiracy theory levels of reaching.

If you read through the arbitration page detailing this whole thing, most of these people were repeat offenders, previously santioned for being involved with edit wars or being unable to remove their own bias while writing. No "baiting" was required here, they were going to self implode on their own.

Edit: Actually re-reading this article more, this person does not seem to understand the point of Wikipedia. It's to present facts. Facts as in "This event happened at this time". Not make judgment calls on the moral or ethical impact of those events. That's for the reader to decide on their own. A slant, even if it's in the direction that society has deemed correct on that given day, is still a slant, and has no place on Wikipedia.

.

I felt the same after reading the article. The arbitration page seemed fine and detailed why the people were having disciplinary actions taken against them.
 
A woman named Anita had sex (gasp). A bunch of virgin gamers were highly upset she didn't give up the box to them. So they harassed and doxxed her, sent death threats to her and her family, told her they wanted to rape her among other things. When other women spoke out they too received the same threats of murder and rape to both the females and their immediate family and friends. And the reason why gamers did this is because of "ethnics in game journalism".

And no I'm not kidding, that's literally gamergate.

No, it's not because a bunch of virgin gamers were angry they didn't get laid. What actually happened was Zoe Quinn's (not Anita) boyfriend complained online about her cheating on him. This led to (false) accusations that she'd cheated on him with guys in the gaming press so they'd give her game good reviews. And that somehow led to assholes being assholes and sending death threats to Zoe. People like Anita stood up for Zoe, so the pro-gamergaters turned their attention to her and brought her feminism and Tropes vs. Women videos into the whole thing and started complaining that feminists were trying to ruin video games. Then the it kinda completely lost any focus and just became an arbitrary reason for assholes to send death threats to any random women who were in any way connected to video games.

See? You don't have to exaggerate pro-gamergaters as just a bunch of angry virgins to make them look bad. They look just as bad even if you actually report the facts.
 

AlexMogil

Member
The Wikipedia article on Gamergate is pretty good. It stays relatively neutral and shows the actions of each side. And boy are there a lot of crummy actions by one side.
 

Jebusman

Banned
No, it's not because a bunch of virgin gamers were angry they didn't get laid. What actually happened was Zoe Quinn's (not Anita) boyfriend complained online about her cheating on him. This led to (false) accusations that she'd cheated on him with guys in the gaming press so they'd give her game good reviews. And that somehow led to assholes being assholes and sending death threats to Zoe. People like Anita stood up for Zoe, so the pro-gamergaters turned their attention to her and brought her feminism and Tropes vs. Women videos into the whole thing and started complaining that feminists were trying to ruin video games. Then the it kinda completely lost any focus and just became an arbitrary reason for assholes to send death threats to any random women who were in any way connected to video games.

See? You don't have to exaggerate pro-gamergaters as just a bunch of angry virgins to make them look bad. They look just as bad even if you actually report the facts.

This is what I don't get.

I understand y'all hate Gamergate. A lot. That's fair. Good reasons to.

But what do you thing hurling further insults and slander their way is really accomplishing? Hell, why do you even need to do that in the first place if you're on the right side of history? Is "eye for an eye" really the way to go about it? No one should be losing an eye in the first place.

The amount of people in this thread who seemingly are just reading this as "Wikipedia condones Gamergate" are acting as blindly as the very people you hate.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

This is a fantastic article. What a bunch of whiners, although I can understand why women would not want to only be described as 'reproductively viable'. Good images as well:

Pachycondyla_berthoudi_sam-hym-c007394a_profile_1.jpg

I seriously didn't know that the gamer-gate people were even loosely organized. I thought it was an umbrella term for overly nerdy sexist gamers who doxxed the women who spoke out against them.
 
This is what I don't get.

I understand y'all hate Gamergate. A lot. That's fair. Good reasons to.

But what do you thing hurling further insults and slander their way is really accomplishing? Hell, why do you even need to do that in the first place if you're on the right side of history? Is "eye for an eye" really the way to go about it? No one should be losing an eye in the first place.

The amount of people in this thread who seemingly are just reading this as "Wikipedia condones Gamergate" are acting as blindly as the very people you hate.

Because people are still being attacked by them and leaving the victims to their fate kinda seems cold.

Like, gamergate has started resorting to swatting people they don't like. Or sometimes random bystanders who happened to rent the wrong apartment or have a similar name. People could get killed by that shit. Over video games.
 

Daemul

Member
Can Wikipedia find out who was behind those pro-gamergate throwaway accounts? If so, they need to find them and ban them. They need to do a full purge on that site.

This is a really pointless mindset, and a lot of people are saying similar things. There may be an immense heap of vapid bullshit involved but at its core the issue is misogyny in gaming subculture, which is something any decent person interested enough in games to be on a forum like neogaf should at least be sympathetic to. That doesn't mean you have to spend hours reading up on GG nonsense but don't just throw up your hands and say OH THIS SHIT AGAIN? WELL FUCK IT, THEY'RE BOTH STUPID. I completely agree that this has gone on far too long, in fact it should have never been an issue, but it is one and it's something some people have perfectly good reasons to care about.

I understand that people care about this, but like you said, this thing should never have become an issue, it should have been nipped on the bud before it became this giant mess, which any reasonable person will now want to stay the hell out of, regardless of ideology. It's gotten to the stage where it would be simpler just to restrict conversation on it, rather than constantly having moderators wade through pages of bullshit, in a futile attempt to keep some form of sane discussion going.

It's up to Evilore and the admins anyway, they can do what they want.
 
It seems Wikipedia did the right thing. There shouldn't be any angle in the article. It's not presenting both sides as equal, there's no sides to consider, just the things that happened. Neutrality cuts both ways I guess.
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
I understand that people care about this, but like you said, this thing should never have become an issue, it should have been nipped on the bud before it became this giant mess, which any reasonable person will now want to stay the hell out of, regardless of ideology. It's gotten to the stage where it would be simpler just to restrict conversation on it, rather than constantly having moderators wade through pages of bullshit, in a futile attempt to keep some form of sane discussion going.

It's up to Evilore and the admins anyway, they can do what they want.

There is a hate group actively calling swat teams to people's houses. It's not something that is just going to magically go away if we stop talking about it.
 

ibyea

Banned
Can Wikipedia find out who was behind those pro-gamergate throwaway accounts? If so, they need to find them and ban them. They need to do a full purge on that site.



I understand that people care about this, but like you said, this thing should never have become an issue, it should have been nipped on the bud before it became this giant mess, which any reasonable person will now want to stay the hell out of, regardless of ideology. It's gotten to the stage where it would be simpler just to restrict conversation on it, rather than constantly having moderators wade through pages of bullshit, in a futile attempt to keep some form of sane discussion going.

It's up to Evilore and the admins anyway, they can do what they want.

It's not so much that people want to engage with gamergate. It's that people engage them out of necessity because lives have been mercilessly ruined by these people, constantly being targeted with threats and harassment.
 

Jebusman

Banned
Because people are still being attacked by them and leaving the victims to their fate kinda seems cold.

Like, gamergate has started resorting to swatting people they don't like. Or sometimes random bystanders who happened to rent the wrong apartment or have a similar name. People could get killed by that shit. Over video games.

How does this defend what I stated? There is no doubt at all that those who represent the gamergate movement are doing horrible things, but should that immediately justify you doing less horrible, but still not pleasant, things in response?

You can condemn a group and their actions without resorting to the typical "virgin, basement dwelling, neckbeard" stereotype people want to keep bringing out.
 

Pie and Beans

Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
Seems fine. Don't bring your gender-war to Wikipedia, just stick to the facts without slant. If you're using it as your battleground, then yeah, buh-bye. Goes for both 'sides', but its funny that people have a problem accepting there are also plenty of bad loony bins on the anti-GG side as thats rarely something the mainstream media likes to dwell on. Got to have one side be the clear "goodies".
 
nothing on the scale off death threats or actually carrying out bullying

The question wasn't "which side has bigger assholes" or "which side has more assholes?"

The question was "are there assholes on both sides of the issue?"

And, because this is the internet, and more importantly the contemporary world, the answer is, of course, yes.
 
Because people are still being attacked by them and leaving the victims to their fate kinda seems cold.

Like, gamergate has started resorting to swatting people they don't like. Or sometimes random bystanders who happened to rent the wrong apartment or have a similar name. People could get killed by that shit. Over video games.

That's not the point.

To invoke Godwin's law, it's like saying the Holocaust happened because a Jewish guy stole Hitler's girl. It's incorrect and a blatant lie. Reporting the actual facts of why the Holocaust happened doesn't make Hitler look like any less of an evil piece of shit, so why bother lying?

Pro-gamergaters who are sending death threats and swatting people are assholes. You don't need to make stuff up to prove that they're assholes.
 
The wiki article is a surprisingly accurate synopsis from what I've read thus far, and covers most of the allegations, harassment, and legacy of the 'movement', . The website is not the place for editorializing.
 
How does this defend what I stated? There is no doubt at all that those who represent the gamergate movement are doing horrible things, but should that immediately justify you doing less horrible, but still not pleasant, things in response?

You can condemn a group and their actions without resorting to the typical "virgin, basement dwelling, neckbeard" stereotype people want to keep bringing out.

I'm saying that they're not going to stop this stuff without external intervention. They've kept it up for six months, they'll keep it going for more. And given their recent tactics, there are lives on the line.

Also, I never said that we should call them "virgin, basement dwelling neckbeards". I think that simply restating what they've said themselves in "safe" forums when they thought no one was looking does the most damage to their image. Because they say some really crazy things.

EDIT: Oh, sorry... totally missed the "slander" part of that post somehow. Yeah, I don't think slander is necessary. I do think that calling them out on bullshit and making fun of them is.

That's not the point.

To invoke Godwin's law, it's like saying the Holocaust happened because a Jewish guy stole Hitler's girl. It's incorrect and a blatant lie. Reporting the actual facts of why the Holocaust happened doesn't make Hitler look like any less of an evil piece of shit, so why bother lying?

Pro-gamergaters who are sending death threats and swatting people are assholes. You don't need to make stuff up to prove that they're assholes.

Huh? I never said you needed to make stuff up. There's plenty of ways of being insulting just using the facts at hand.
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
The wiki article is a surprisingly accurate synopsis from what I've read thus far, and covers most of the allegations, harassment, and legacy of the 'movement', . The website is not the place for editorializing.

I think the issue here was that these "throwaway" accounts were going in and removing and changing facts in the article, and other editors kept going in and correcting them.

The current state of the article is not reflective of the history that lead to the event posted in the OP.
 
I do want to point out, while I'm not inclined to do the deep research needed to know if this is some of what happened here, that the way Wikipedia rules tend to work it is possible to be found in violation of them entirely with good faith and honest edits. For example, if people keep trying to insert incorrect or biased information into an article and you repeatedly remove it then you can end up considered guilty of edit warring or similar things. So if an organized group of people wanted to force bad information into an article and largely outnumbered the people trying to maintain it then they could potentially get "bad" actions out of the maintainers trying to stop them.
 
I think the issue here was that these "throwaway" accounts were going in and removing and changing facts in the article, and other editors kept going in and correcting them.

The current state of the article is not reflective of the history that lead to the event posted in the OP.

So, in other words, there were "troll" edits, followed by legitimate corrections to the status quo, and wiki banned the correctors for touching the article too often? That's...bizarre.

I do want to point out, while I'm not inclined to do the deep research needed to know if this is some of what happened here, that the way Wikipedia rules tend to work it is possible to be found in violation of them entirely with good faith and honest edits. For example, if people keep trying to insert incorrect or biased information into an article and you repeatedly remove it then you can end up considered guilty of edit warring or similar things. So if an organized group of people wanted to force bad information into an article and largely outnumbered the people trying to maintain it then they could potentially get "bad" actions out of the maintainers trying to stop them.

Or what she said.
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Pretty much. The whole thing Feels very alienating.
Do you think that its a bad thing that some women were harassed so badly with such personal information leaked that they left their homes out of fear? If yes, congratulations! You are anti-GG
 

Jebusman

Banned
Huh? I never said you needed to make stuff up. There's plenty of ways of being insulting just using the facts at hand.

Except (some) people on the anti-GG side seem to feel the need to. It's like they take some weird pride in hurling insults at these guys, and give overly fictitious accounts of the history to make it sound "even worse" than it already is. There's no need for it, and it only hurts the message rather than helps.


No, will you stop quoting that article. This is someone waxing the poetic about how Wikipedia won't allow them to write a biased article, and that merely "presenting the facts" is wrong. On top of believing that 8chan is trying to "remove all the feminists" from Wikipedia (and were successful), when the only people that were banned all had prior bans/restrictions for being involved with previous, and unrelated, edit wars.

Seriously, how else am I supposed to interpret the line:

The key issue here has always been clear: Wikipedia systematically is being used to publicize the sexual history of women in computing in order to drive them out of the field. This is central: whether or not someone said something intemperate on December 13 is not.

The central point of wikipedia IS the "someone said something on some day". That's it. You present the fact as it literally happened. Any moral or ethical fallout of those actions can be raised, but it can't be written like that is the predominant, and only, view.

Or:

Instead, Wikipedia’s ArbCom took a superficial look at the evidence, found a few largely-technical rule infractions, and carelessly tried to give GamerGate the keys by banning all their targeted critics

This is hyperbole at the very least, and a warped sense of reality at it's worst.
 
A cursory glance doesn't show anything wrong with the Gamergate wikipedia page, yet the chatter makes it sound like the whole thing has been converted to Orwellian doublespeak. Kinda hard for an observer to get worked up.
 

Brakke

Banned
A cursory glance doesn't show anything wrong with the Gamergate wikipedia page, yet the chatter makes it sound like the whole thing has been converted to Orwellian doublespeak. Kinda hard for an observer to get worked up.

This is true of every claim GamerGate have ever made.
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
This. I don't know which side is 'good'.
GamerGate thinks women are destroying games, harasses said women and then says "you can't prooove it" and as of recently defended the fact that the board where they based their operations also hosts child erotica

Draw your own conclusions
 
Anyone identifying pro/anti-anything shouldn't be allowed to influence what are supposed to be informative articles about whatever that subject is. My guess is that if Wikipedia felt the need to ban them, they weren't trying to fix a slant as much as they were trying to change the direction of it.

I don't know about banning them from editing feminist articles all together, I guess that would depend on how much "fixing" was being done on the articles they were banned for.
 

kirblar

Member
Except (some) people on the anti-GG side seem to feel the need to. It's like they take some weird pride in hurling insults at these guys, and give overly fictitious accounts of the history to make it sound "even worse" than it already is. There's no need for it, and it only hurts the message rather than helps.
Narcissistic a-holes convinced that their side is righteous and that the ends justify the means exist on all parts of the political spectrum, unfortunately.
 

PhineBuyM3

Member
Seems fine. Don't bring your gender-war to Wikipedia, just stick to the facts without slant. If you're using it as your battleground, then yeah, buh-bye. Goes for both 'sides', but its funny that people have a problem accepting there are also plenty of bad loony bins on the anti-GG side as thats rarely something the mainstream media likes to dwell on. Got to have one side be the clear "goodies".

That's because a lot of anti-GG people like to call themselves progressives(since no one who is a progressive can possibly be an asshole), so they think because they have the "right" opinions they can be assholes to those who don't agree with them.
 

Cybit

FGC Waterboy
that's not how wikipedia is suppose to work. it's just suppose to be facts.

take a look at the KKK page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

it doesn't flat out say they're racist assholes anywhere, just what they did, objectively.

Yep. Which, to be fair, is probably the best way to damn GG. Reading what they objectively did will do more for showing people their hatred than anything else. (read the discussion page on that article, yikes)

ITT: People don't understand how Wikipedia editing works, and are upset that it does not overly coincide with their viewpoint in an editorial manner. (Despite Wales coming out rather strongly against GG)
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Seems fine. Don't bring your gender-war to Wikipedia, just stick to the facts without slant. If you're using it as your battleground, then yeah, buh-bye. Goes for both 'sides', but its funny that people have a problem accepting there are also plenty of bad loony bins on the anti-GG side as thats rarely something the mainstream media likes to dwell on. Got to have one side be the clear "goodies".
What possible lunacy could anti-GG try to exaggerate that would eclipse the actual cartoonishly evil of actual GG

On the day that one of their targets dogs died a prominent pro-GG figure (and " journalist") harassed her about her dog dying

What do you make up that tops that?
 
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