GG Wikipedia article is horrible. Not a single source is provided in that abomination of an intro. I do not support nor condemn Wikipedia for banning those editors as I am not aware of the full extent of the facts. However, judging from the laughable quality of the GG article, it seems that action was needed, and Wikipedia decided to take it. Whether this is positive or negative is subject to reader's personal opinion, or perhaps personal political and social agenda.
This is something that has been gone over before in the old GG threads. It is a stylistic choice not to have references in the introduction, because the references for those statements are found in the text itself. There were previously references in the intro, but because of gators' insistence that every single statement that maligned them be meticulously sourced, it was decided to follow the manual of style and just leave them out.
As far as I can tell (read through a few things) ... there was a lot of angry behavior behind the scenes by both "sides" and a general lack of interest in objectivity and more about pushing one agenda or another. Just general behavior that is looked down upon on Wikipedia.
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.