Rui, can you give an idea of how exactly this all went down? Would you say that the gamergate people were purposefully trying to bait you into war editing? Or Was it just the constant vitriol in the talk sections that got out of hand and went against Wiki policy?
Edit: also, are you the editor mentioned in the article who admitted to false-flagging the Bradley discussions? I'm not trying to call you out, but in my opinion that gives whoever that was a huge lack of credibility. As you can tell from the OP, I'm definitely against the GG hate group, but those kind of shenanigans don't fly with me.
Edit: to get it out of the way first, Tarc is the "false-flagger". I went over this in another post in the thread.
This is the earliest version of the Gamergate page I can find. There was apparently a whole block of Internet Aristocrat videos deleted shortly before this version but the edits were expunged from public view. So I urge everyone to take a look at that first. Then look at
the first version of the page that ever got protected after apparently 48 hours of Gators and the first non-gator editors to show up.
My participation in the article was like my participation in any other article. I read stuff online or on the talk page, looked at the news that came out, and then tried to incorporate it. Then any Wikipedia editor who was sincerely not a gator responded to the gators showing up on the talk page who constantly cried foul. I went over the general things I saw go on in a previous post so I'll repost it here:
The thing is that "anti-GG" behavior was just trying to keep the pages in line with Wikipedia's policies. I know that's all I was trying to do (and also add information from new articles when it was still sort of boiling over in the media). The issue was that sea lions ending up at Wikipedia were
constantly crying foul over a perceived "anti-GG" bias. If you go through
any of the two prior Gamergate threads on GAF you'll see the exact same behavior. Brand new accounts appearing out of nowhere parroting the same discussion points as every account that came before it that got banned. Here's the rundown of what I saw before I stepped away from everything in November and only checked in a few times when shit hit the fan (or I read a post on Reddit by someone who documented it in a parodic way):
- The Gamergators who went to Wikipedia intended to change the page so it presented their side of the story in a 50/50 split when such a 50/50 split does not exist in anything Wikipedia considers reliable sources (see Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources for more).
- Arguments were made constantly that the Wikipedia pages on Adolf Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan (as was linked in here earlier in the thread) didn't malign the subjects as much as the Gamergate page does, completely ignoring the fact that the page isn't about their unorganized movement but the controversy it caused, like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the Obama birth certificate deniers which both go "these people think this but they're fucking nuts for doing so".
- They constantly complained that the word "misogyny" appeared in the first sentence.
- They constantly complained that the allegations that Zoe Quinn had sex for good reviews were labeled as "false allegations".
- They would post links blindly without any sort of inkling as to what anyone else was supposed to gather from them. If you've already done the research, then provide the information and use it as a source for your new opinion and tell others instead of forcing them to do the leg work you already did.
- They complained that I had added free photos of all of the major figures, and it just so happens that there are more free photos of the harassment targets (or in their words "anti-GG") than there are of the pro-GG ones.
- They cried foul when someone discovered that the photo of Christina Hoff Sommers wasn't actually free and couldn't be hosted on Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Commons (a central file repository for all Wikimedia projects).
- They cried foul when people independently decided that the section about Christina Hoff Sommers' "Gamer boys will be gamer boys" video was deemed irrelevant and got removed.
- They cried foul when I messaged someone else and said "Hey, I found all these grammatical errors. Could you fix them because if I touch the page after I said I'd not touch the page they'd lose their shit" and they did indeed lose their shit (on Reddit at least).
- They fought tooth and nail when someone (I think it was Tarc) messaged Zoe Quinn on Reddit and asked her if she could provide photographs to the Wikimedia Commons because the one photograph someone did find she disliked as it was constantly being distributed by newspapers who just took the photo off of her Wikipedia page.
- They went apeshit when I tried to suggest that we use one of those photographs over the one that was already on the page.
- They constantly tried to push Breitbart, KnowYourMeme, Gamergate.me, Techraptor, TheRalphRetort, etc. as sources (not sure if it's still going on).
- They made new pages on pro-Gamergate subjects to content fork away from all the negative shit they can't possibly fix because their PR is awful. That's why 8chan and 8chan's owner Fredrick Brennan have their own pages.
- In the last 24 hours, they were maligning people peripheral to Gamergate that happen to have articles. Brianna Wu's husband Frank Wu has his own page because he's notable in his own right and Wikipedia had to expunge contributions to it because of how vile it was.
- An established editor proposed that some long rambling pro-Gamergate website whose authorship was attributed to "Gurney Halleck" (Patrick Stewart's character in the 80s Dune movie) to be added to the page and was so insensed when he got shot down that he added the refusal to add the link as evidence of a "house POV" to the arbitration case. It wasn't until weeks later that the evidence was removed because everyone with a working sense of morality knew it violated a central policy of Wikipedia not to post anything that could remotely malign someone unless it's from a impeccably reputable source considering it pushed the "Five Guys" narrative.
- Someone tried to add a disclaimer to the top of the page saying "This is not what Gamergate supporters believe, go to Know Your Meme".
This is the shit that all of the editors on Wikipedia have had to deal with since August. And because it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" it takes so much red tape to get rid of anyone who isn't being an obvious tool.
Also to add to this list I just remembered that Gators went apeshit when their "Based Mom" complained that her Wiki page had been edited to say she wasn't a feminist and that the lengthy review of her book was cut down. And they went crazy when Brianna Wu complained on Facebook that gators were brigading the new Wikipedia page that was recently created on her video game and that Ian Miles Cheong suggested she get in touch with me, and that I only found out about this fact because their screenshot of this discussion was circulating online for hours until I got tagged into some Twitter thread about it.
So because we are not emotionless machines and had been harassed by external forces throughout, it did make our comments a little less sugar coated as time went on. Wikipedia user "The Devil's Advocate" (hereon TDA) used this, and the fact that administrators showing up to clean up after the gator garbage by banning and blocking the worst Gator accounts that there was an imbalance in treatment in the pages which led to the arbitration case. TDA spent most of the evidentiary phase presenting as many diffs as he could that presented actions on the article itself and the talk page as completely out of context to paint everyone in a bad light. He constantly linked to content I had added to the page that was from reputable sources that depicted Gamergate negatively and comments I made that explained how anything from Gamergate's figureheads (e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos) could not be used on the page because of the reputations for never fact checking. They also used the one time I tried to list every "zombie account" I had found over a month long observation period and the request that they be banned from the site for obvious advocacy because I had accidentally included two admins who to me were spouting pro-GG statements. TDA has
apparently been involved in a lot of other right-wing conspiracy theory pages. Someone on KotakuInAction
even posted that he had been banned from 9/11 articles for pushing the conspiracy theories there before he became involved in the Gamergate shit.
Most of the people who have been brought forward for bans in this mess are not strangers to the arbitration committee. I was previously de-adminned by them in 2009 after I reacted poorly to one person's incessant actions in my favored topic area and also a couple of years of harsh blocks on users and IPs. I also have been blocked multiple times for edit warring, although in some of these cases it was later revealed to be editors who would later be banned for the shit I was reverting them for or I had unknowningly uncovered a banned user who had been sockpuppeting for years already. I should have done more work into getting administrative help, but often people wanted nothing to do with me, regardless of which method I went about to contact an administrator for help, nor did I want to be the type to constantly go to the incident board where people were already rolling their eyes when I was mentioned. I went into the IRC channel a couple weeks ago to get some help with something, and one of the chat members who is an admin on the site told me off and hoped that I would be banned from the site because he allegedly gets complaints about my behavior so often that he'd rather I be gone already.
I'm finding it rare to enjoy doing anything on Wikipedia lately. I'm absolutely hated by a fandom I am a part of because they don't like how I spell things according to the official trademarks rather than the "corrected" fansubs and I've gotten into petty arguments over including something in a section header because of a TV show.
