WP and the Wikimedia foundation continue to ignore their internal problems and instead focus on gathering data that shows what everybody already knows, then trying to "solve" it with irrelevant projects that don't even begin to nip at the edges of the issue.
We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
The Wikimedia foundation is well aware of the problem and considers it their top priority. However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The "irrelevant projects" are their best attempt at fixing the issues.
Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and force change without community buy in.
This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.
> However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be.
The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged.
Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution.
All I can say is that I offered to do some informal product consulting with the WMF a few years ago and I walked into the building thinking I knew what the issues were and what obvious steps were required to fix them and I walked out being as equally confused and frustrated as the people there.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Curse, a popular games media network which has taken no part in the controversy.
I've remained neutral to Gamergate as much as possible, but kept myself informed. One of its core problems is that it kept the name "gamergate" for a lot of similar-but-unrelated issues which makes it encompass a lot more than is humanly digestable by anyone looking it up for the first time.
People get kind of crazy when they hear that "women are being attacked", and never really want to hear the full story.
The following blog post is one of the most descriptive of the actual issues and comes from someone who was on the side "against" gamergate. I recommend it:
Edit: As an aside... while I'm neutral, as a gamer and someone who has worked on the sides of the games industry for the past decade, I can't help but feel targeted whenever someone blames "gamergate, and by definition gamers" for whatever B.S. they endured from some random twitter troll under a hashtag anyone can use at any time they feel like.
Definition of Gamergate: depends on who you ask, it's a heavily politicized movement. Best to research this yourself from a variety of sources and come to your own conclusion.
Definition of jumping the shark: A late episode of the TV program Happy Days involved a major character jumping over a shark on a pair of water skis. He had done previous stunts involving jumping over things on a motorcycle. Basically the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to things like this to keep viewers interested (not altogether successfully). So now we have the term "jumping the shark" to indicate a decline in quality.
Also, it wasn't just a major character, it was The Fonz.
The Fonz was originally a minor character, but he was so popular with fans that he became a main character, and is the most memorable character on the show.
My favorite "Jump The Shark" actor is Ted McGinley.
A: "Games journalism is being corrupted by woman-centered bias. Here's the damning proof: This guy says his ex-girlfriend repeatedly traded sex for positive reviews of her game."
B: "That is provably untrue."
A: "Yes, okay, that was a lie. Why are you so hung up on that when the real issue is that women are ruining games journalism?"
What really hurts me reading this post is that you either don't know anything about a very controversial situation and still felt qualified to "explain things in a nutshell", or you are very clearly on one side (and consequently know a lot more than you let on) and felt the need to lie.
a) If I chose to exercise my main account here, there's nothing that would prevent me from downvoting. There would be no need to create a new account. Even trying to wouldn't make sense because...
b) New accounts cannot downvote anybody. By operating here with an alt account instead of my main account, I give up my ability to downvote.
Given A and B, your entire premise is totally messed up.
c) It's sad that you've resorted twice to the "it's sad" shtick. The comment was a non-aggressive, good faith one. How about you not take it as an attack? How about you take it as a genuine request? How about you consider following through with the request on that token?
a+b) My apologies. You're right, I didn't mean "downvote".
As for c... "Do better", what? "Do better" is not a valid comment. This is a valid comment, your previous one was not.
Do you want me to explain what I said in further details? I thought it was self-explanatory. PhasmaFelis has decided to take an issue which is clearly controversial to even members not involved and "nutshell" it extremely disrespectuously.
Much as it's petty twitter wars for some, it's also extremely serious issues for others. Jobs can be lost. Jobs have been lost. Some because of ethical concerns, corruption being unveiled etc. Some other jobs have been lost because random idiots decided to false-flag people to their companies until they got fired. Some have been lost because of out-of-context, selective quoting (hey, remember the PyCon forking drama? Yes, like that).
So yes, it's sad that someone who is probably not involved further than the petty twitter wars would choose to either adopt such a dismissive and diminishing attitude, or would choose to lie to further whatever cause he may have had in mind.
Edit: As for actual downvotes, there's some serious downvoting on actual discussion going on in this entire sub-thread. That, too, is sad.
I find it telling that you've given an in-depth argument to something that is basically inconsequential but are afraid to actually address the topic at hand.
Also, please spare us the Tumblr level "do better," unless of course you "can't even."
As I said below, I work in the industry. And yes, it's extremely incestuous (not just games journalism... the entire non-mobile games industry). Corruption is rampant and until gamergate surfaced, nobody cared because "whatever, it's just games".
"They" is a big net to cast. I know a lot of people who were involved and don't even have twitter accounts - would you cast it over those too?
I don't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top" over the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for undisclosed favours".
> I don't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top" over the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for undisclosed favours".
I want to be perfectly clear, though, that neither of those things ever happened. The story that various writers accepted sex from Zoe Quinn in exchange for good reviews was the founding event of the Gamergate movement, and it is 100% false.
Not that you have any sources for that, but either way, does it matter? I don't know about you, but I don't really care about Quinn (her sex life even less so), and IMO everyone involved (on both sides) should stop caring about her - she, and some other nameless people, have been using the controversy as their personal publicity ring.
Fact is, I can tell you first hand that the industry I'm in is massively corrupt. I'm glad some people are casting a light on it. Devs, journalists, indies, companies, it's rotten all over. Full of people abused for working their "dream job", full of undisclosed deals to promote such and such game (makes sense when your livelyhood literally depends on it)... and full of seriously low quality wannabe-journalism to top it all.
I love what I do, but god damn do I hate the environment I do it in.
So, yes, the idea that Quinn traded sex for reviews is provably, definitively a lie, and all of this information has been publicly available for around nine months.
> but either way, does it matter?
Yes, the truth matters, especially when lies are being used to harass someone.
This is exactly what I was talking about in my original snarkpost. You're absolutely right that the gaming press is full of corruption, and has been for as long as there's been a gaming press, but gamers in general have never given two shits. Remember when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for giving Kane & Lynch a 6/10, and the bloggers tutted over it for a week, and then everybody forgot? It wasn't half as controversial as, say, that time the CODBLOPS tutorial level was too hand-holdy. Who cared if some guy lost his job? The games kept coming, and that was all that mattered.
But when a woman is accused (falsely) of using sex to boost sales of her (free) indie game, oh ho ho, now it's time for a fucking movement. THIS INJUSTICE SHALL NOT STAND.
And when you show these guys incontrovertible evidence that the accusation against Quinn was a lie, then they immediately backpedal and say it was never really about Quinn, and go right back to raging about Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu and ignoring guys like Gerstmann.
There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
> There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
If you look in my post history, you'll find that I said exactly this a few months back. I'm convinced that Gamergate's #1 problem is how the name is reused for everything and based on a hashtag (which makes it easy to abuse as a "dialing my personal army" kind of thing). Twitter doesn't allow for intelligent discourse anyway, and encourages this kind of "us vs. them" mentality. (Maybe you're familiar with CGPGrey's video on it, if not, I very highly recommend it: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry)
The tipping point that boosted GG's popularity wasn't specifically the Quinn scandal but the onslaught of "gamers are dead" article, which was followed by more and more revelations (and I'm sure a fair share of them were false). The Quinn scandal was one starting point, but it could have been anything else.
But does it matter what started a movement, really? Because right now, the controversy's is fueled by the people who stand to gain the most from the attention. Quinn is the least guilty of it, but if you look close enough, you'll find that the harrassment claims are really just claims. Just the other day, one of those recurring names was claiming she had to "flee to Europe because of the threats", and then when few-months older tweets surfaced about a "planned vacation to Europe" surfaced, the narrative changed. (Again, I apologise for no sources but I dislike giving those people attention - my email is accessible from my profile if you want to continue in private).
I'm sure they get their fair share of death threats but... don't be on twitter then? It's not just a horrible medium for discussion, it really encourages this behaviour. Anyone mildly popular and controversial gets death threats. Just like anyone mildly rich will find people asking for money.
I try to remain neutral, as I said. But it's hard to feel sympathy for those people. The only thing that can be done about corruption is that people find out and talk about it, and that won't happen without momentum. GG just happens to have the momentum.
I scrolled through a few articles on gamergate. I still don't get it. I got to this article, where someone apparently wrote a book "understand gamergate". So it seems to be a complex case. I've seen the term a few hundred times, but never sparked my interest. I recon'd by this time it would be easily summarized. But I guess not.
Don't bother, it's a classic dishonest flamewar where both sides does their best to smear the other side. Nobody cares about the issue anymore (they can't even agree on what the issue actually is).
Good lord, I had no idea how bad the situation was. Check it out, they are still locked in angry debate, with new comments going up on the talk page as of yesterday:
@Gamaliel: What new accounts? What does your closing and hiding of this thread have to do with new accounts editing the article? The thread had nothing to do with new accounts editing the article or not editing it. We were talking about how people respond to reader feedback on the talk page, not editing the article. What kind of grounds for closing and hiding a thread is this? As the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense whatsoever, I will open it again after waiting an appropriate amount of time. Chrisrus (talk) 20:40, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
——————
Chrisrus again unilaterally declares that “the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense.” They make sense to the rest of us. This is simply disruptive editing. Will someone please take the appropriate steps already? Thanks! MarkBernstein (talk) 21:23, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
It's not wikipedia's first controversy and it won't be the last. Whenever you have anything involving two "sides" ending up in wikipedia, wikipedia is faced with the challenge of remaining neutral and impartial to it. That conflicts with the very idea that "anybody can edit it".
It's kind of like when you have a jury trial, but anyone and everyone can get on the jury at any point, disguising themselves as anyone they are or are not, and there's no limit on how many jurors there should be.
Wikipedia does a lot of things very well. But polarizing topics are very clearly not one of those things. I suspect that they're an example of something that--more or less inherently--is more of less incompatible with Wikipedia's fundamental model.
> The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, [EDIT to prevent tedious distracting subthreads] operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
> When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says.
> Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”
They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.
There isn't any good reason why an online encyclopedia would have such a massive gender imbalance. The fact that this is the case points at deep problems in the community.
Posting something on HN about Apple without knowing the history of the conversation here won't do much to you except maybe a downvote.
Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.
But my search is specifically about Wikipedia process. Those half million words are not about dashes as an encyclopedic article, those words are people bickering over, for example, "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" (at least 20,000 words just on the hyphen / dash in the title).
Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use.
That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out.
But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.
No need to edit it out, this is the most important point here. Wikipedia is being controlled by an army of neckbeards. If women were in charge you wouldn't see the kind of toxic pedantry and bickering the is prevalent on Wikipedia today.
The most important step we could take to improve Wikipedia would be to make the community more friendly to would-be female editors. And the only way that is ever going to happen is by first getting the misogynist neckbeards out.
It's a realistic statement. Or would you deny the obvious, that Wikipedia would be better off (less bureaucracy, more openness, less bickering, less toxicity) if the community was more gender-balanced and included less misogynist neckbeards?
I think we can easily agree that any community is better off without misogyny, but in order for Wikipedia specifically to be better off without it, it has to have a problem with it in the first place. [citation needed] on that, I guess? Is there a track record of incidents you can point to?
> “One hostile-to-women thing about Wikipedia I have noticed is that if a movie has a rape scene in it, the wiki article will often say it was a sex scene. When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike “sex”, the word “rape” is not neutral, so it should be left out according to NPOV. Example (this one actually ended up changing “sex” to “make love”, which, oh wow.), example. There are probably more but it’s pretty depressing to seek them out. (It’s not true in cases where the movie is explicitly about rape, like the rape revenge genre that’s got its own page, but please don’t tell me that should assuage my concerns.) There are a few other things I’ve found frustrating about Wikipedia, but discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.” [19]
Clueless. The word implies an act without consent and when sufficient evidence of that absence of consent exists, it becomes rape. This is neutral, unpleasant but neutral, rape is a definable binary fact based thing. Discussion of if it is or is not a rape scene belongs to movie aficionados and critics not a Wikipedia page.
They don't argue the term rape when it's a matter of a criminal conviction so they can't argue neutrality here. If the debate of if it is rape or not is sufficiently divisive and exists out in the wider written world, then it perhaps warrants a new article section such as "Uncertainty of consent in sexual content" where normal Wikipedia standards such as citations and no original research should be applied. However this is a pretty unlikely outcome so the basic facts stand, rape is a neutral term for an event or behaviour, emotionally charged, but factually clear and neutral.
Some women are perfectly capable of toxic pedantry and bickering. So are some men. Whether you attract these types and offer them a haven in your community is a matter of how you organize and regulate your community. From a decade of experience in organized free software: Dealing with identifying and handling toxicity is one of the toughest scaling problems volunteer organizations face, in general.
One example close to me (I guess everyone has their own) is how the Spanish Wikipedia systematically misspells the name of dozens of Spanish cities and towns, changing the official toponyms for largely invented ones that "sound more Spanish".
This has been the source of endless debates that haven't done anything to change the position of the senior contributors in control. So we have an absurd situation where a non-trivial amount of Spanish toponyms are more accurate in the English Wikipedia than in the Spanish one.
In the global context, this is probably a small issue. And yet I wonder how many people are put off contributing when they perceive that a small in-group is able to push their opinion like this.
Wikipedia gets a worse rap than it really deserves.
If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.
But Wikipedia as an encyclopedic repository is never going to be a good venue for controversial topics. That's not the purpose of an encyclopedia. It's a terrible forum for a debate, and that's the way it will always be. This isn't something wrong with Wikipedia in particular, other than the fact that it is one of the largest and most visited sites on the Internet.
A normal encyclopedia is curated by a relatively small amount of people who are able to reach a consensus on a controversial topic, as opposed to random strangers on the Internet with an opinion being able to edit things.
Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions.
It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin.
It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing it.)
"Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions."
Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy (abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium.
Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard. This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand.
There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of their history, mergers, finances, and problems.
Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR Newswire.
Sigh... I guess I should have known better but I tried to upvote both parent posts but due to HN not changing the vote buttons for mobile for years now it might have been downvotes.
Wow, that's troubling - I'd like to help out. Is there a requirement of years/posts/edits to be made before you can help on the 'conflict of interest' noticeboard?
I found that the best way to contribute to wikipedia is from multiple IPs without logging in. Otherwise some troll could delete the entire history of your edits with some wacky explanation.
69 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadWe're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and force change without community buy in.
This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.
The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged.
Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution.
Here's me almost 1500 days ago (4 YEARS!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491
Here's the recent thing that was going on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168
Here's an article on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466
And another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638
This discussion goes back to 2011 at least, and WP just can't seem to admit that there's a problem.
It's absolutely the right place to look if you want to know how to 'jump the shark'.
I've remained neutral to Gamergate as much as possible, but kept myself informed. One of its core problems is that it kept the name "gamergate" for a lot of similar-but-unrelated issues which makes it encompass a lot more than is humanly digestable by anyone looking it up for the first time.
People get kind of crazy when they hear that "women are being attacked", and never really want to hear the full story.
The following blog post is one of the most descriptive of the actual issues and comes from someone who was on the side "against" gamergate. I recommend it:
http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-si...
Edit: As an aside... while I'm neutral, as a gamer and someone who has worked on the sides of the games industry for the past decade, I can't help but feel targeted whenever someone blames "gamergate, and by definition gamers" for whatever B.S. they endured from some random twitter troll under a hashtag anyone can use at any time they feel like.
Definition of jumping the shark: A late episode of the TV program Happy Days involved a major character jumping over a shark on a pair of water skis. He had done previous stunts involving jumping over things on a motorcycle. Basically the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to things like this to keep viewers interested (not altogether successfully). So now we have the term "jumping the shark" to indicate a decline in quality.
edited to change jet ski to water skis
Also, it wasn't just a major character, it was The Fonz.
The Fonz was originally a minor character, but he was so popular with fans that he became a main character, and is the most memorable character on the show.
My favorite "Jump The Shark" actor is Ted McGinley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_McGinley
He's joined the cast of several once-popular shows as they were on the decline.
A: "Games journalism is being corrupted by woman-centered bias. Here's the damning proof: This guy says his ex-girlfriend repeatedly traded sex for positive reviews of her game."
B: "That is provably untrue."
A: "Yes, okay, that was a lie. Why are you so hung up on that when the real issue is that women are ruining games journalism?"
Try http://deepfreeze.it - complete with citations for pretty mcuh everything.
So.. why?
b) New accounts cannot downvote anybody. By operating here with an alt account instead of my main account, I give up my ability to downvote.
Given A and B, your entire premise is totally messed up.
c) It's sad that you've resorted twice to the "it's sad" shtick. The comment was a non-aggressive, good faith one. How about you not take it as an attack? How about you take it as a genuine request? How about you consider following through with the request on that token?
Do better than that response, too.
As for c... "Do better", what? "Do better" is not a valid comment. This is a valid comment, your previous one was not.
Do you want me to explain what I said in further details? I thought it was self-explanatory. PhasmaFelis has decided to take an issue which is clearly controversial to even members not involved and "nutshell" it extremely disrespectuously.
Much as it's petty twitter wars for some, it's also extremely serious issues for others. Jobs can be lost. Jobs have been lost. Some because of ethical concerns, corruption being unveiled etc. Some other jobs have been lost because random idiots decided to false-flag people to their companies until they got fired. Some have been lost because of out-of-context, selective quoting (hey, remember the PyCon forking drama? Yes, like that).
So yes, it's sad that someone who is probably not involved further than the petty twitter wars would choose to either adopt such a dismissive and diminishing attitude, or would choose to lie to further whatever cause he may have had in mind.
Edit: As for actual downvotes, there's some serious downvoting on actual discussion going on in this entire sub-thread. That, too, is sad.
Also, please spare us the Tumblr level "do better," unless of course you "can't even."
Which I found sexist, because those people got pampered by the game publishers all the time and no one cared...
> Which I found sexist
Huh?
I don't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top" over the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for undisclosed favours".
I want to be perfectly clear, though, that neither of those things ever happened. The story that various writers accepted sex from Zoe Quinn in exchange for good reviews was the founding event of the Gamergate movement, and it is 100% false.
Fact is, I can tell you first hand that the industry I'm in is massively corrupt. I'm glad some people are casting a light on it. Devs, journalists, indies, companies, it's rotten all over. Full of people abused for working their "dream job", full of undisclosed deals to promote such and such game (makes sense when your livelyhood literally depends on it)... and full of seriously low quality wannabe-journalism to top it all.
I love what I do, but god damn do I hate the environment I do it in.
As a matter of fact!
Eron Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with 5 guys, whom he named. (http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/5_guys) Four of these guys were game designers, not journalists. Nathan Grayson was the only journalist among them, and he mentioned Quinn and her game exactly twice, in passing in larger articles--one for Rock Paper Shotgun in January, one for Kotaku in March. (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-v..., http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-time...) Gjoni himself says that Grayson and Quinn didn't sleep together until April at least. (http://geekparty.com/eron-gjoni-clarifies-the-zoe-quinn-nath...)
So, yes, the idea that Quinn traded sex for reviews is provably, definitively a lie, and all of this information has been publicly available for around nine months.
> but either way, does it matter?
Yes, the truth matters, especially when lies are being used to harass someone.
This is exactly what I was talking about in my original snarkpost. You're absolutely right that the gaming press is full of corruption, and has been for as long as there's been a gaming press, but gamers in general have never given two shits. Remember when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for giving Kane & Lynch a 6/10, and the bloggers tutted over it for a week, and then everybody forgot? It wasn't half as controversial as, say, that time the CODBLOPS tutorial level was too hand-holdy. Who cared if some guy lost his job? The games kept coming, and that was all that mattered.
But when a woman is accused (falsely) of using sex to boost sales of her (free) indie game, oh ho ho, now it's time for a fucking movement. THIS INJUSTICE SHALL NOT STAND.
And when you show these guys incontrovertible evidence that the accusation against Quinn was a lie, then they immediately backpedal and say it was never really about Quinn, and go right back to raging about Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu and ignoring guys like Gerstmann.
There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
> There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
If you look in my post history, you'll find that I said exactly this a few months back. I'm convinced that Gamergate's #1 problem is how the name is reused for everything and based on a hashtag (which makes it easy to abuse as a "dialing my personal army" kind of thing). Twitter doesn't allow for intelligent discourse anyway, and encourages this kind of "us vs. them" mentality. (Maybe you're familiar with CGPGrey's video on it, if not, I very highly recommend it: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry)
The tipping point that boosted GG's popularity wasn't specifically the Quinn scandal but the onslaught of "gamers are dead" article, which was followed by more and more revelations (and I'm sure a fair share of them were false). The Quinn scandal was one starting point, but it could have been anything else.
But does it matter what started a movement, really? Because right now, the controversy's is fueled by the people who stand to gain the most from the attention. Quinn is the least guilty of it, but if you look close enough, you'll find that the harrassment claims are really just claims. Just the other day, one of those recurring names was claiming she had to "flee to Europe because of the threats", and then when few-months older tweets surfaced about a "planned vacation to Europe" surfaced, the narrative changed. (Again, I apologise for no sources but I dislike giving those people attention - my email is accessible from my profile if you want to continue in private).
I'm sure they get their fair share of death threats but... don't be on twitter then? It's not just a horrible medium for discussion, it really encourages this behaviour. Anyone mildly popular and controversial gets death threats. Just like anyone mildly rich will find people asking for money.
I try to remain neutral, as I said. But it's hard to feel sympathy for those people. The only thing that can be done about corruption is that people find out and talk about it, and that won't happen without momentum. GG just happens to have the momentum.
Thanks for trying though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_controversy
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@Gamaliel: What new accounts? What does your closing and hiding of this thread have to do with new accounts editing the article? The thread had nothing to do with new accounts editing the article or not editing it. We were talking about how people respond to reader feedback on the talk page, not editing the article. What kind of grounds for closing and hiding a thread is this? As the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense whatsoever, I will open it again after waiting an appropriate amount of time. Chrisrus (talk) 20:40, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
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Chrisrus again unilaterally declares that “the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense.” They make sense to the rest of us. This is simply disruptive editing. Will someone please take the appropriate steps already? Thanks! MarkBernstein (talk) 21:23, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
It's kind of like when you have a jury trial, but anyone and everyone can get on the jury at any point, disguising themselves as anyone they are or are not, and there's no limit on how many jurors there should be.
> When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says.
I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...
> Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”
They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.
Management wisdom of the crowds.
Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?
I edited the quote.
HN has easily several million words on Apple. Here's a search https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
that doesn't mean that it is impossible for anyone to know anything about the culture and the policies on HN.
Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.
Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use.
That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out.
But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.
No need to edit it out, this is the most important point here. Wikipedia is being controlled by an army of neckbeards. If women were in charge you wouldn't see the kind of toxic pedantry and bickering the is prevalent on Wikipedia today.
The most important step we could take to improve Wikipedia would be to make the community more friendly to would-be female editors. And the only way that is ever going to happen is by first getting the misogynist neckbeards out.
That's a sexist statement.
It's a realistic statement. Or would you deny the obvious, that Wikipedia would be better off (less bureaucracy, more openness, less bickering, less toxicity) if the community was more gender-balanced and included less misogynist neckbeards?
It's not exactly news that organizations were women and more progressive types are in charge fare better: https://www.fastcompany.com/3033950/the-future-of-work/why-t...
Here's a calm discussion: http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont...
> “One hostile-to-women thing about Wikipedia I have noticed is that if a movie has a rape scene in it, the wiki article will often say it was a sex scene. When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike “sex”, the word “rape” is not neutral, so it should be left out according to NPOV. Example (this one actually ended up changing “sex” to “make love”, which, oh wow.), example. There are probably more but it’s pretty depressing to seek them out. (It’s not true in cases where the movie is explicitly about rape, like the rape revenge genre that’s got its own page, but please don’t tell me that should assuage my concerns.) There are a few other things I’ve found frustrating about Wikipedia, but discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.” [19]
Misogynistic or clueless?
They don't argue the term rape when it's a matter of a criminal conviction so they can't argue neutrality here. If the debate of if it is rape or not is sufficiently divisive and exists out in the wider written world, then it perhaps warrants a new article section such as "Uncertainty of consent in sexual content" where normal Wikipedia standards such as citations and no original research should be applied. However this is a pretty unlikely outcome so the basic facts stand, rape is a neutral term for an event or behaviour, emotionally charged, but factually clear and neutral.
This has been the source of endless debates that haven't done anything to change the position of the senior contributors in control. So we have an absurd situation where a non-trivial amount of Spanish toponyms are more accurate in the English Wikipedia than in the Spanish one.
In the global context, this is probably a small issue. And yet I wonder how many people are put off contributing when they perceive that a small in-group is able to push their opinion like this.
If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.
I understand why Malvinas / Falklands is going to be tricky.
I don't expect to have to go to arbcom because I disagree with someone about - versus – versus —.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitrat...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
Voting requires 300 edits on a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project ever and 20 in last six months.
It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin.
It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing it.)
Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy (abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium.
Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard. This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand.
There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of their history, mergers, finances, and problems.
Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR Newswire.