Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-01-28/Forum


 * Editors' note: As we mentioned in our introduction, one of our goals is to offer a platform to discuss happenings in the Wikipedia community through publication of op-eds, editorials, and other material. This week, we have featured two excellent op-eds penned by Wikipedia administrators that offer differing views on how the arbitration committee handled the GamerGate case. The views expressed are those of the authors alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section, but please let your discussion be a positive representation of two of Wikipedia's core values—consensus-building and civility. Thank you.

Masem: Committee facilitates stability
Gamergate has drawn a lot of people and organizations into the controversy, and Wikipedia has been one of the more visible. The Gamergate supporters have identified that the English language Wikipedia article is one of the first results when one searches for "Gamergate", and desire to see that the article expresses their side of the issue properly. This has resulted in many of these supporters working with the open wiki nature of Wikipedia to try to discuss changes and introduce their side into the article. Some of these have been reasonable, starting civil discussions on the content.

However, the majority of these interested editors have been those that have not taken the time to learn about Wikipedia's policies on content, sourcing, and living persons. Several have tried to introduce some of the tenacious Gamergate theories into the article without proper sourcing, including egregious claims against living persons, particularly women. Some evidence of potential outside coordination to influence the Wikipedia article exists. How to handle the single purpose and sleeper accounts and anonymous edits of this nature has been a struggle. To stem the influence of these types of editors, the community decided on instituting general sanctions on the Gamergate topic space, which has been generally sufficient to quickly quell external pushes to affect the article.

At the same time, there has been a large disconnect between groups of established editors in how they approach the article. The Gamergate topic is clearly emotionally-driven, as the harassment of anyone (women or otherwise) via pseudo-anonymous groups already has a toxic connotation, and it is very difficult to find any sourcing from the media that doesn't paint the Gamergate supporters in a negative light. This has created a divide between these editors on how our sourcing and neutrality policies need to apply. Issues have arisen around how to present the media's highly negative take on the Gamergate situation within the neutrality policy, while the "verifiability, not truth" paradox of reliable sourcing has made the task of presenting objective material about Gamergate supporters from quality sources nearly impossible. There are plenty of pages of heated discussion of these matters, which can be expected from a situation like this.

What is core to the Gamergate Arbitration Committee case is that a subset of these established editors have seen themselves as a type of "white knight". They have expressed an overly strong concern about maintaining the page free of BLP violations and keeping the predominant view of the press as demanded by our neutrality policy to the point of edit warring. They have failed to accept new editors in good faith and have presumed bad faith about existing editors who did not follow their view. They have attempted page ownership, even when a draft version of the page was set up to prevent edit warring on the main space. As more attention was drawn to the Wikipedia article within Gamergate circles, many of these editors themselves became targets from offsite groups due to their opposition towards Gamergate, which appeared to drive them further into their activities of preventing Gamergate supporters from changing the nature of the Wikipedia article, while forgoing what would be expected behaviour of all Wikipedia editors.

The case was presented as a clash of the behaviour and attitudes of these experienced editors against an ongoing tide of single purpose accounts that, intentionally or not, wanted to push the Gamergate supporter side of the controversy onto Wikipedia and correct the lack of coverage the press has given their side.

While this is difficult situation for any editor to deal with, ArbCom's decision correctly focused solely on behaviour, only issuing findings of fact and no decisions or remedies on content policies, supporting the uninvolved admins who have tried to maintain order in this mess, and urging the community to review Gamergate and related articles within the context of policies.

The decision continues to uphold how we should handle new and single purpose accounts that are only here to try to influence the context of one topic, and re-emphasizes the community-based general sanctions within the context of the decision. At the same time, the rulings, particularly towards editors who are being topic-banned or admonished, affirm that decorum and civility is expected of editors even when dealing violations of BLP or neutrality. Actions like edit warring and battleground mentalities, regardless of how "right" that position might be, is not appropriate within the consensus-driven editing process.

The ArbCom decision does not have the bias that some blogs and news sources are reporting, but instead is applying an equivalent standard to every editor, new or experienced, who comes to edit in a given topic area with a mission: editors are still expected to follow civility, standards of decorum, and encyclopedia policy that an open wiki built on consensus requires to maintain stability, no matter how much one might feel their mission is for the right cause. The decision enforces the tenet that Wikipedia is meant to be neutral on any topic it covers and should not be used as a battleground to push agendas from any direction, regardless of the cause.


 * Masem is a Wikipedia administrator and works frequently on the areas of contemporary works, video games, and popular and Internet culture, science, and current events. He is also a major contributor in the areas of Wikipedia's non-free content policy and notability guidelines.

 Arbitration    Committee

Protonk: Actually, it's a circus
The Arbitration Committee just announced their decision in the Gamergate case. The case, from the "infamous blunder" of the proposed decision to the bizarre press release (an ArbCom first, perhaps?), has been an utter, avoidable failure that shakes any confidence I have the Committee will be effective in the future.

The Gamergate controversy erupted when game developer Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping around and metastasized into harassment and death threats against anyone (usually female) who criticized either the pretext of the controversy - "actually...it's about ethics in game journalism" - or gaming culture itself. Normally, these situations die out as forum trolls get bored. Gamergaters did not get bored.

Threads on KotakuInAction (KiA), a popular Gamergate forum, or subreddit, on the website Reddit, brought a heavily active community interested in seeing their version of events displayed here. Rather than just coordinating to tag-team articles, they also focused on editors. Five Wikipedia editors, dubbed the "Five Horsemen", were identified as "biased" against Gamergate:, , , ,  and.

As a result of the attention (and, admittedly, the intransigence of some long term editors), in the span of three months the article has been protected nine times and the talk page has accumulated millions of bytes of discussion. Three arbitration requests were made in 30 days, all lodged by editors pushing a pro-Gamergate POV  and all aimed at editors defending the article against the same.

Arbitrators recognized early on that off-wiki "co-ordination" and "controversy" were central to the case. Editors with experience in similar enforcement areas warned against potential problems. left an prescient note, reminding the Committee that "[c]learing the decks of all the editors who have already contributed to the Gamergate colleciton [sic] of articles is only going to provide more incentive for...[single purpose accounts]." with, as put it, "all the makings for another procedural disaster like the infamous "Macedonia 2", where hordes of people motivated by external political agendas were given free rein to drown the procedure in their drivel for weeks, until clerks and arbs started randomly and erraticly [sic] hitting out with blocks against established participants who had cracked under the constant provocation and lost their temper."

Recognizing these exigencies, recommended "an expedited case, and firmly holding to deadlines and word limits." , with hoping to "[handle the case] in a highly expedited manner to avoid its becoming a complete circus". suggested temporary injunctions may be needed to ensure an orderly case.

On the 25th of November, the Committee accepted the case.

The Committee let two deadlines slip after 11th hour pleas for more space and time from parties to the case, some of whom had been warned about misuse of the evidence page or accusations made with irrelevant or insufficient evidence. No temporary injunctions were proposed or enacted. No sanctions were made during the case, although enforcing the third deadline required fully protecting the evidence page.

The initial proposed decision was released, after two delays, on the 19th of January. Every member of Gamergate's "five horsemen" faced sanctions. Only one editor supporting Gamergate who was not already banned or topic banned faced sanctions. Proposed decisions change over time, of course; new remedies were added by other arbitrators and some of the original remedies did not gain consensus, but remarkably little has changed in the overall scope. Ryulong, Tarc, and NorthBySouthBaranof were topic banned; TaraInDC and TheRedPenofDoom will just be "admonished". Despite finding unanimously that "off-wiki feuds" and accusations of "off-wiki canvassing" were central to the dispute, none of the proposed remedies addressed off-wiki actions.

summed up the problem directly: "by sanctioning long-time editors who have had to deal with deplorable, egregious off-site (and many times on-site) harassment, while letting one of the main coordinators of that harassment go unmentioned, tells regular editors(volunteers themselves) and admins that protecting the project from BLP violations coordinated from off-site will not only get you sanctioned, but the perpetrators will be rewarded with no sanction." added, "in trying to appear fair, you've really only given the outside harassers exactly what they want. I sincerely hope your "robust protections" are as advertised, because from where I sit, I see no incentive at all to try and enforce Wikipedia's policies on this set of articles.  Looks like all you will get for your trouble is harassed, attacked, doxxed and threatened from the outside, and then topic or site banned from the inside."

Lest we imagine this uncertainty is only hypothetical,, a former arbitrator, wrote that she "took action [in the topic area] using advanced tools the other night only after I had the personal commitment of two of your colleagues to 'have my back' if I did so, because this decision is so broad that even acting entirely within policy I see a realistic risk of being sanctioned for taking entirely policy-accepted actions." Remember the case was kicked off by a complaint about administrative malfeasance, precisely the kind of situation an administrator wading into Gamergate six months from now might face.

That an arbitration decision divides the community and foments uncertainty is not news, nor is it a sign by itself that the Committee cannot tackle vexed problems. What truly staggers here is the extent to which active arbitrators saw the major issues in the case coming and then did literally nothing about them. They recognized that behavior during the dispute would be a problem, then took no action as the evidence page ballooned. They recognized the importance of off-wiki coordination and then refused to take action on that very subject. They were repeatedly warned about misinterpreting this dispute as garden-variety Wikipedia factionalism and went on to "[clear]the decks of all the editors" anyway.

Gamergate is not special. It is not a 100 year flood. It is the future of online resentment and so long as Wikipedia is both editable and authoritative we will face the same sort of problems. I had a hope, when this case was first taken, that Wikipedia would do the right thing in the end. That this community, which I am so passionate about and have been lucky enough to be a (very marginal) part of would land on the right solution after having tried all the bad ones. We're still looking, and the Arbitration Committee appears to be badly lost.


 * Protonk is a Wikipedia administrator who has had an account for over six years, totaling over 23,000 edits in that time (many of which have yet to be reverted!)