The Wikipedia Post — Introduction
GamerGate, the consumer revolt against corrupt games journalism and censorious progressive radicals, has been on a tear through countless Internet communities for five years. On Twitter and reddit supposed harassment from GamerGate has prompted crackdowns on “harassment” in the form of stricter policies on what users are allowed to say even as GamerGate maintains massive social media influence. News sites have also cited GamerGate as the cause for closing comment sections for their articles. It even has led to calls for global censorship at the United Nations with a report lampooned for its poor fact-checking and shoddy citation work (we know all about that on Wikipedia). Unsurprisingly, this Internet civil war has also played out on Wikipedia, the first stop for a confused public and more than a few rushed journalists. Just as it has elsewhere, the GamerGate dispute has sparked unprecedented moves to stifle participation on “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
Amidst the early chaos of Wikipedia’s GamerGate dispute was me, going by the username “The Devil’s Advocate” a.k.a. “The Throwaway Advocate” or simply “the Devil” as my admin friends call me. Frustrated with the resistance I encountered when trying to have even just a small portion of the GamerGate article present the GamerGate perspective in accordance with the site’s policies, I went to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, the most powerful body in the site’s community charged with handling the online encyclopedia’s most contentious conduct problems. The Committee accepted my request to review the ongoing conflict over the article and over time I made detailed evidence submissions. When the decision came down I was banned from the topic of GamerGate, but so too were many of the editors who had been trying to force the articles to be as one-sided as possible. Early on other editors took to referring to these editors and their partners as “The Five” and this was eventually expanded by editor DungeonSeigeAddict to “The Five Horsemen of Wikibias”, which would provide the name of an 8chan digging operation aimed at documenting misconduct by Wikipedia editors. I can tell you that this operation was a complete and total failure.
Next: Part 1: The Lie Heard Around The World
Return to Table of Contents
