Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate/Evidence: Difference between revisions

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Evidence presented by Retartist

Tarc Ignores the WP:CIVIL pillar

1 2 3 4 5

The above links are tarc removing warnings (which he is allowed to do) of people warning him for uncivil behaviour

The following diff is of tarc claiming that WP:CIVIL can be ignored. 6

Evidence presented by Tstormcandy

To preface, I would like to point the Committee to precedent set at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern European mailing list which states that ArbCom can and will consider certain off-Wiki activity as part of final decision principles and findings of fact. Disclaimer: I will be linking to less traditional or trusted external sources, but only because there is no other way to display the evidence.

Involved editors have been targets of deliberate harassment

Some of the users listed as involved parties in this case have been specifically targeted by external forces for additional scrutiny and potential harassment. Though this does not excuse user actions it may help explain some of the stresses and behaviors displayed in other evidence and should be taken into account as state of mind of the editors. One very recent example is seen here[1]. This is a thread on a forum sympathetic to the goals of other parties listed as involved in this case. There are others but I do not wish to waste space.

Found as another extension of an off-Wiki forum is this[2] Pastebin file, detailing how persons should complete an "operation" to "dig through" post histories and summaries of particular users for the sake of gathering obstructionist evidence for collection and reproduction, with User Talk:Jimbo Wales mentioned specifically which was later done. In this one case, users Ryulong, NorthBySouthBraanof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom and TaraInDC are singled out as "The five horsemen of Wikipedia".

Off-wiki collaborating is disrupting the Encyclopedia

This direct quote states some named parties specifically. It discusses a matter that should be occurring within this case. "Best result includes NorthBySouthBaranof desysopped, FuturePerfectAtSunrise desysopped, Ryulong banned from wikipedia [...] and general sanctions against WP:Feminism for brigading articles to promote their viewpoint." Users MarkBernstein and Ryulong are singled out frequently, with screen captures of some of their discussion edits posted.

The task of collaboration and research resulted in many edits at incident boards and even on the talk page of User:Jimbo Wales (as the text file instructs) many times; [3][4][5][6] among others. A short list of AN, ANI and other incident reports can be found in the case examples of previous resolution methods attempted.

By extension of the suggested collaboration and cases of users following through with it we get a large amount of meatpuppetry happening in these matters. Once again, there is an abundance of these external examples. Such bullying must not be permitted on Wikipedia and editors should feel safe in the process of following standard Wikipedia policies and guidelines without being threatened. I implore the committee to not "let the bullies win" in this case via their collaborations off-site disrupting normal activities. ♪ Tstorm(talk) 23:32, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Masem

Ownership and refusal for consensus development

(I will be proving diffs to support this in next few days) There is no question that Gamergate is a troubling situation for WP, due to the fact that the "proGG" side have been trying to significantly influence the article, administration, and this case, though not always in a malicious manner, just clumsy and/or unworkable. It should be clear that the coverage of GG is predominately against proGG (there are few RSes that give a leaderless anonymous online effort any time of day particularly as the proGG efforts include criticizing and attacking those RSes, in addition to the fact that there is the harassment/threats of female figures attached to the situation - no one really is ready to give them any positive coverage). There's little we can do while staying within reliable sourcing policy like WP:UNDUE and WP:FRINGE and WP:BLP, so there is no way that the GG article can be (at the current time) very favorable of the proGG position, and hence the need to enforce some decorum on the behavior of WP:SPAs and unsigned editors who can't contribute towards that.

That said, these same facts have been used by a number of editors who have refused to engage in efforts to build consensus as mitigate the tone of the article and engaged in ownership-type behavior to maintain their version; these include (but not limited to) Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. I believe they have very strong feelings against the proGG side of the story (aka sympathy for those who were harassed), which itself is not a problem until it gets in the way of constructive editing, as their edits and behavior to the article have clearly tainted the approach of the article and has made it difficult or impossible to work with. They early on established a persona non grata approach to the proGG SPAs trying to influence the article, and continue to claim that all that the article needs are methods to deal with SPAs (see associated case statements). This has been their excuse to refuse to participate in other dispute resolution methods, including formal mediation [7].

There's probably many other problems with the article from other contributions, but this group of editors have been the largest contributors to the article (outside myself), and while they are adding material w/ sources and the like that meets the base WP polices for V, NOR, and NPOV, they have used a structure and language that I and other editors believe is far from the impartial nature that WP:NPOV demands for an encyclopedia article. While this starts getting into content-related issues which I know ArbCom generally does not comment on, understanding what issues that I and others have seen is part of the behavior problems:

• Part of the issue is the nature of the press's role in Gamergate, in that they are involved parties, moreso at the video game and tech sources since proGG are trying to directly impact their ad funding. As such, the press has every reason to be negative of the movement, and many have flat out called the movement as a whole "misogynistic" due to the nature of the harassment. I want to stress this doesn't invalid these as sources, but we have to understand the difference between facts and opinions expressed in these These editors want to have WP's article call the movement out as misogynistic in WP's voice instead of stating it as the widestream press's opinion. This has been argued through many times, pointing that other articles for strongly-disliked groups by the public, like Westboro Baptist Church and Scientology put all such criticism in the approach non-WP statement instead of in WP's voice, but they shut down and refuse to accept this distinction, claiming that what the RSes state is absolute.
• There are some neutral statements about the proGG's stance on their desire to change ethics from good reliable sources, as well as the nature of this being a "movement". But these editors focus too much on the press's stance that because of the harassment issues, that there can be no "movement" or their "ethics" cries are false fronts; as such they reject attempts to write sections of the article in a different structure or a more impartial manner to present these points without ridicule.

A key part is, 90% of the article, in my opinion, is fine in light of what the sources give - there's good proper sourcing, and telling the story per WP:WEIGHT; it does need trimming, some smoothing of what are now minor points (it does suffer from WP:RECENTISM), some WP:QUOTEFARM edits, which most agree to, and could use a re-organization in light of these. But the impartialness, also a requirement of WP:NPOV can be fixed, in my opinion, simply by reworking some language order, word choices, and general article structure without loosing any of the key points or verving away from the net impression that the GG side has been broadly condemned by the VG industry and public at large, but I and other editors cannot convince this small group to go in this direction, because they seem unable to separate their strong feelings against proGG from editing the article, and reject these changes or refuse to accept that the article is written as an attack article towards the proGG side in WP's voice. This has led to long-standard conflict over the article that needs arbitration, as to assure that we actually have processes to get better consensus, and if possible (as that is more content related) on what WP's stance should be on writing impartial articles in light of the issues Gamergate presents. --MASEM (t) 01:53, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Evidence presented by NorthBySouthBaranof

Gamergate supporters have attempted to use Wikipedia as a platform to attack living people

There has been a long-term campaign by GamerGate supporters to use Wikipedia's articles related to the controversy as a platform to further their movement's harassment and smear campaign against, among others, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu — in defiance of reliable sources, the Biographies of living persons policy and human decency. This has involved the insertion of unfounded, illegitimate and false allegations about those people, vulgar and vile slurs, insensitive treatment, etc. and has resulted in dozens, if not hundreds, of revision deletions and Oversight requests from both articles and talkspace. (As a result, many of these edits are now inaccessible to non-administrators.) This has required a major response from previously-uninvolved editors to prevent unsourced and poorly-sourced claims about living people from appearing in the encyclopedia.

• [8] This history page for Zoe Quinn and this history page for Talk:Zoe Quinn are instructive — both Titanium Dragon and TheNewMinistry inserted a wide array of allegations, claims and attacks which have since been revision-deleted, including an entire section entitled "Accusations of Personal and Professional Misconduct" and using edit summaries such as "removed biased wording painting Quinn as a victim and masking what she did."
• [9] —Titanium Dragon refers to Zoe Quinn, the subject of the biography, as "a scandal attached to a person."
• [10] — Titanium Dragon makes an array of poorly-sourced or unsourced gossipy, salacious, negative and irrelevant statements about Zoe Quinn on the talk page. The user proceeds to revert the material back in after another editor removes them on BLP grounds.

Argument to come

Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.

Evidence presented by The Devil's Advocate

Ryulong has repeatedly made egregiously POV and inflammatory edits

• Adds numerous unnecessary quotes of insults made by a single person towards GamerGate to reinforce narrative about a gender bias in harassment.
• Uses "noting" when referring to several inflammatory opinions about GamerGate, thus presenting them as fact.
• Adds massive paragraph accusing GamerGate supporters of copyright violations based off a single source.
• Adds nearly a paragraph worth of material based off one in-depth source suggesting the unofficial mascot of GamerGate references what the source suggests is a depiction of rape.

Ryulong has engaged in POINTy behavior to push a POV

• Anil Dash material
  • Argues for excluding mention of alleged harassment of GamerGate supporters using a mocking heading.
  • Claims "poor sourcing" for above allegations warrants mention of allegations against named person. Asks about including several serious criminal accusations against named individual based off much weaker sourcing, including tweets from a critic.
  • Removes certain mentions of harassment, including reliably-sourced details about female and minority GamerGate supporters receiving rape and death threats or being fired for supporting GamerGate.
  • After the material was restored, Ryulong adds the allegations against a BLP subject to the article. Initially mild, he later expands the material to include allegations of a potentially criminal nature (bribery).
  • When I remove the paragraph, he restores it and moves it to a section on "support for charitable efforts" apparently on the basis that the "bribe" claim concerned a charity donation.
  • After I remove it, noting the BLP concern, and it is restored again, Ryulong adds an image to the section with a caption containing the potentially criminal accusation.
• GamerGate diversity material
  • Removes reliably-sourced material about women and minorities supporting GamerGate with the rest attributed as opinion, claiming it is to hold "pro-GG" content to the same standard as "anti-GG" content.
  • Subsequently edit-wars to remove from an image caption mention of Christina Sommers stating the gaming generation is much less prejudiced than previous generations.
  • Acknowledges in two comments his attributing mention of the existence of female and minority supporters as though it were opinion, despite acknowledging it as fact, was due to the alleged misogyny of GamerGate not being treated as fact based off similar sourcing.

Ryulong has inserted BLP violations

• Adds material listing several prominent supporters, including Adam Baldwin, who the material states "have had nothing to do with video games", despite the source not stating this about him. Even after Halfhat removes Baldwin noting he has been heavily involved in video games previously (numerous voice-acting roles), Ryulong restores Baldwin's name. Subsequently, he amends it to say article author "pointed out" statements "by the various people . . . derisive of gamers" prior to GamerGate implying Baldwin had made such statements despite this not being said in the source.

Ryulong has repeatedly and flagrantly breached 3RR

• 9RR (seven listed are significant) - [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
• 9RR - Case notes five reverts within a 24-hour period. Additional instances not mentioned in report: [18] [19] [20] [21]. Attempts to close a discussion over lede wording. Eight of these reverts occurred after this suggested compromise by Titanium Dragon. Ryulong rejects discussing it, stating this is because TD "should still be banned from editing the page."
• 12RR - AN3 report. At least seven were significant POV reverts: [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]

Evidence presented by {your user name}

before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person All these articles I've submitted are factual and correct to my knowledge as I've been deep in the story for months I'll add any more I find relevant accordingly as time passes

{Write your assertion here}

Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.

References for gamergate relevance

http://wiki.gamergate.me/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://gamergate.me/

http://gamergate.me/2014/11/data-study-on-harassment/

http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/336432/The-GamerGate-Chronicles/

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/18/The-emails-that-prove-video-games-journalism-must-be-reformed

http://twitchy.com/2014/11/19/gamers-calling-bullsht-on-interview-with-feminist-social-justice-warrior/

PASTEBIN WITH INFOGRAPHICS AND SMOKING GUNS: http://pastebin.com/uVb63Rd7

http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/11/cbc-breaches-multiple-journalistic-ethics-standards-to-smear-gamergate/

http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/11/cbc-breaches-multiple-journalistic-ethics-standards-to-smear-gamergate/

http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/11/gamergate-ben-kuchera-and-the-life-and-nepotism-of-game-journo-pros/

Evidence presented by Mr. Random

Ryulong has been edit-warring in a controversial article despite an acknowledged COI

(This has already been presented at WP:ANI, but it was closed as a "frivolous, baseless and misplaced/forum-shopped request" - by an involved administrator, no less - despite the evidence I am about to provide. I will leave commentary on that, if any, to other users.)

A user on Reddit named "ryulong67" ran an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") titled "I'm Ryulong" on r/GamerGhazi, a subreddit for those opposed to the GamerGate revolt. To do this, the user had to confirm that he was User:Ryulong, which he did by adding a "code" from the Reddit thread to an edit summary on his user page. The subreddit later "shamelessly bumped" a GoFundMe donation drive under the name "Ryulong" - connecting it to ryulong67 - prompting User:Ryulong to stop editing the page due to a COI. (I can provide more substantial proof that the donation drive is his, but I fear it may violate WP:OUTING, as it involves a connection between off-wiki accounts; however, I will post it if requested to do so by an arbitrator.) He has since engaged in an edit war on the draft page, despite having received money from a group with a known anti-Gamergate agenda.