User:Monicak47/sandbox

Monicak47 (talk) 00:40, 22 September 2016 (UTC) Writing About the Gamergate Controversy: The Wrongs and Rights

In writing about debatable topics, it is often hard to take a neutral stance. In writing about debatable topics that garner intense media scrutiny, it is even harder. This is especially true for Gamergate, a controversy that involved the video game community and the issues of sexism and journalism in video games. Wikipedia stresses its “three core content policies" in regards to any written article on its website; these tenets—neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research—determine whether or not the Wikipedia article is a right fit for the website. The Gamergate controversy is a topic that is controversial for several reasons and at times hard to grasp entirely; with this in mind, this Wikipedia article does a fairly good job in adhering to Wikipedia’s policies. However, it could do more work to include important events and ideas crucial to the debate that would help readers fully understand the Gamergate controversy.

“Gamergate Controversy” takes a very divisive topic and does its best to keep in line with Wikipedia’s policy of neutrality. Certain parts of the article seem more subjective than others, but the article includes reasoning for both sides of the argument. Although many of the reliable sources the article cites come from reliable sources, they mostly support the victims of the Gamergate controversy. While this is certainly not a bad thing, it does make the article seem more subjective, as many members of Wikipedia discuss on the article’s Talk page. Besides some of the bias the article may contain, it is overall effective in following the accuracy principle. It does its best to take a convoluted subject and state the major events that happened in as chronological of an order that it can.

The article is overall effective in obeying with Wikipedia’s core pillars, but there are still some gaping holes that it needs to cover. This debatable topic does not cover just one issue; it covers multiple. One point of contention that deters the consensus aspect of this article is the issue with Biographies of Living People. This is a prominent issue in the article’s Talk page. While the attitudes towards the persons of interest in the article are accurate, it may help the article to include the thoughts of the affected female victims in the later stages of the controversy, which focus largely on sexism in the tech and entertainment industries. These women, such as Brianna Wu, who wrote for The Guardian on the one-year anniversary of the Gamergate controversy, are still dealing with its consequences. One aspect of accuracy that the article lacks in is the response of other entertainment industries to Gamergate, such as the book community. In 2014, the same year #GamerGate trended on Twitter, #ReaderGate also trended in criticism of the controversy. The inclusion of this detail would help the article adhere to Wikipedia’s accuracy policy. Despite its few flaws, “Gamergate Controversy” adheres to Wikipedia’s core policies enough that it is still a thorough source of information for readers.