Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate
Gosh. This is hard to believe.
:::le sigh:::
No, it’s not.
DAMMIT JIMMY!
FFS.
It’s about ethics in crowd-sourced encyclopediae.
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It will be interesting to see if this ends up being an overreach.
The fact that wikipedia is way more operationally dysfunctional and socially screwed up than its basic technical architecture (well, you just, like, create an account and edit stuff, right?) would suggest is something that has come up repeatedly, sometimes from the outside sometimes from insiders worried about brain-drain or frustrated by an edit war with somebody who knows nothing but has 100+ hours/week to rules-lawyer about it.
However, as long as the result stubbornly continues to be surprisingly accurate and useful, nobody takes that all that seriously.
Will this purge(if history is anything to go by, ideological purity will always demand at least a few follow-up purges and maybe a bit of internecine bloodletting) damage the casual-user-visible results enough to make the place look noticeably shabbier, or will they get their relatively surgical silencing of a few specific people on this specific topic?
I suspect some sort of complicated drinking game is involved, with points earned per howl of outrage generated.
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Meanwhile, Anita got some [critics in her article][1]
Still, I’m shocked considering that Jimmy Wales already chastise them for not being a proper organized movement (its lack of leadership and structure contributes to it’s downfall). Then again, as my tweet stated, Jimmy was trying to be neutral on this one.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropes_vs._Women_in_Video_Games#Critical_reception
As some git pointed out in another topic today:
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I think this might just highlight some of the problems with wikipedia in the first place - that it’s not entirely open to edited, but is still subject to forms of control. What’s really problematic, is that those forms aren’t transparent. It seems that there is still a narrative being shaped behind the scenes of knowledge production, but one that isn’t subject to scrutiny outside of a very small circle, in other words. It’s the privatization of public knowledge, and all that goes along with that.
This is why you can’t cite wikipedia as a source, kids - at least as a serious one.
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Eh, it wasn’t just some kind of purging of feminist editors, and it even moreso wasn’t because they were feminist. The standard topic ban that included all topics related to gender and sexuality in addition to all topics related to GamerGate or anyone involved in it was applied to everyone that engaged in any bad behavior sufficient to even be mentioned in the ArbCom discussoin, with only one exception…
11 people in total were topic banned for warring over this article, but per the standard media narrative, persons on one side are ignored to encourage the narrative. The only person discussed that wasn’t punished was NorthBySouthBaranoff, who is anti-GG.
Out of those punished, I’m actually disappointed that Ryulong wasn’t outright banned, but only topic banned.
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Wikipedia has a host of problems.
I gave up due to the triggering bullying even from moderators [or whatever the term was]. I was already frustrated by the attempts to force me to out myself. I think the bullying tends to drive survivors from casual editing, and tends to strengthen dominant groups and weaken marginalized groups in higher-level editing, dispute intensification, policy interpretation, and policy determination.
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To be fair, basically all 11 topic banned were engaging in behavior specifically against WP policy, such as edit warring, being uncivil, BLP violations, and the like. No one was being punished for being feminist.
Here’s the actual discussion on it by ArbCom, the votes, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate/Proposed_decision#Motion_to_close
This is exactly the point of bullying, all bullying. It’s to bring people into line with social norms and to warn others against deviation. This is why victims of bullying during school are often ignored and assumed to have “caused” the bullying themselves “well don’t be weird, don’t act gay, don’t dress like a boy/girl”…
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Well finally, a little common sense from the bastion of ‘social justice’ wicked-pedo-ia.
It’s a good start but does anybody really think this will make any difference to a bunch of hateful femi-nazis? I’m not condoning death threats or anything (nobody really does, they don’t really exist) but perhaps a stronger message needs to be sent than merely banning women with a vested interest in skewing a rational dialogue about not-sexual poltics from informing about sexual politics.
The twisted reality those fascists were pushing down our throats was the epitome of violence. Injurious and menacing, they sought to bully a free spirited and informative collective of game enthusiasts by spreading hateful lies about their ‘supposed’ persecution! Where was the evidence? The true evidence, preferably presented by a Scotsman. All we ever heard was the demands for attention from a group of professional victims. How dare they victimise the victimising warriors of such an important movement!? It really hurt my feelings.
To summarise: women bad, gamers good. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! You lose, we win. die in a fire, (jk!) but really, diaf.
FUCK YOU JIMMY!!!
And oh FFS /s
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FWIW, here is how the gamergate controversy page currently reads - it does mention the ethics stuff, but it also does still discuss harassment of women:
The Guardian article puts a bit more of a nuanced take on the issue and how the pro-feminist editors were more harshly sanctioned, as some see it:
It’s easy to sanction the competent, they admit their mistakes. Abuse-by-proxy as I see it.
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Are there policies applied clearly, and consistently, without selective interpretation, and selective enforcement? No.
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Now I get animated pain-gifs in my mail, too…
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Wait? From who?
Automated from BoingBoing.
Huh… are these threatening? I think I’m confused (or maybe just dumb! 
)
