The Wikipedia Post — Part 3: White Knights of the Five Horsemen

The reason these five editors could only be held accountable by the Arbitration Committee is because a select group of admins had taken it upon themselves to cover for them at every step along the way and ruthlessly take down their opponents. Many of them conveniently gave themselves away in the discussion about Wikipediocracy’s doxing of Tutelary where they, devoid of sympathy, suggested sanctioning her in response. One admin, Black Kite, was in fact the one who first proposed banning her from any articles about living people and this was backed by admins HJ Mitchell (who suggested a site ban), Cuchullain, and Robert Fernandez a.k.a. Gamaliel, who proposed two additional editors be banned from the GamerGate dispute. It would be these admins and several others that later joined the fray who would define the suppressive environment that preserved the GamerGate article’s biased slant and paved the way for Mark Bernstein’s smear of ArbCom.

Black Kite was an early presence in the GamerGate dispute, having been the admin to delete Titanium Dragon’s proposed additions to Quinn’s page. Not longer after that he went to Wikipedia’s “Gender Gap Task Force”, a user group predominantly feminist in leanings aimed at addressing perceived gender biases in content and process, and requested their intervention to deal with “misogynistic editing” at Quinn’s page. He would get involved in multiple edit conflicts, including one where he removed mention of the DDoS attack on The Escapist’s GamerGate thread as “irrelevant” to GamerGate and even reiterated Tarc’s suggestion that it may not have happened. Wikipedia’s policies on admin conduct state admins involved in a dispute should not be acting as admins in that dispute save for exceptional circumstances such as vandalism. Editing in the manner Black Kite did would seem to be consistent with being involved in the dispute rather than being an impartial admin, but Black Kite didn’t think so at all and continuously insisted he was free to act as an “uninvolved” admin in the dispute.

Harry “HJ” Mitchell, an organizer for the notoriously corrupt Wikimedia UK chapter organization, is the closest to even-handed as the admins involved can manage. That means essentially that he is willing to offer very mild time-limited sanctions to opponents of GamerGate, harsher if they are in some way criticizing Wikipedia’s powers that be, but typically hands out sanctions of indefinite length to anyone perceived as supporting GamerGate. Early on, right after supporting banning Tutelary from Wikipedia, he blocked an account using the name Doxelary and commented in the discussion about Tutelary to insinuate it could be her sock. He later stated he didn’t believe it was likely, but he did make sure the person operating the account could not contradict his insinuation. An investigation would later suggest “Doxelary” was using another sock-puppet to vote for banning Tutelary. One thing separating him from his colleagues is that even as he was a bit fussy about it, Mitchell did acknowledge the allegations of admins behaving poorly were credible in some cases and suggested one be admonished while submitting a proposal to strip another of his admin position.

Cuchullain, unlike most of his colleagues acting as impartial admins, did acknowledge being too involved in the dispute to act as an impartial admin and stepped away at the end of September. The problem is that Cuchullain was already far more involved in the dispute than any of his fellow admins. He is the most active editor on articles about Anita Sarkeesian contributing hundreds of edits to her article, its discussion page, and the article and discussion page of her video series to exclude sources seen as reliable on Wikipedia(See Appendix A). Cuchullain is currently listed as the top contributor to three of these four pages and has the second-most contributions on the fourth. Cuchullain’s past discussions included arguments with Tutelary, who was going by the name Ging287, where another frequent contributor, horsemen NorthBySouthBarnof, was also arguing with her. Days after commenting on Sarkeesian’s article talk page about sources referencing Zoe Quinn, Cuchullain went over to Quinn’s page to protect it from edits by non-admins.

Before deciding he was too involved to be an impartial admin Cuchullain protected Baranof from a block for making over twice as many reverts within 24 hours on the GamerGate page as the three traditionally allowed, by locking the page instead, despite the dispute directly concerning Sarkeesian. He also later used his admin access to the page while it was locked to restore the preferred version of another Anita article regular, TheRedPenOfDoom, who had been fighting with others over the issue. On the Sarkeesian article discussion page Cuchullain could be found around the same time questioning the reliability of a major Indian newspaper’s article providing even-handed coverage of Sarkeesian’s critics, because the article was written by an unnamed correspondent. His most slippery move on the article was when he and another editor steadfastly resisting including any criticism of Sarkeesian, finally agreed to mention a video by Christina Hoff Sommers criticizing Sarkeesian’s work after a long drawn-out discussion. As with many bright spots, it was dashed when they went right back to their old positions a month later to support removing the material once participation shifted in their favor. Not surprising that someone who would behave so dishonestly as an editor would also behave so dishonestly as an admin.

Fernandez took few actions prior to the arbitration case, but the actions he did take were some of the most impactful. Less than two weeks after calling for Titanium Dragon to be banned from the GamerGate dispute, Fernandez pulled the trigger himself, but this was ultimately overturned because procedure required him to only take action if an editor had been formally warned and continued to violate policy, which had not happened and that topic ban’s reversal itself led to threats of an ArbCom case. Yet this procedural irregularity was not the only issue as he was one of several admins who had become directly involved in the GamerGate article dispute. His most damning involvement was a conversation where he claimed as fact that GamerGate was not interested in journalistic ethics and suggested this should inform any edits made to the article. Fernandez argued with other editors about it, even removing a comment criticizing the sources he cited. Another example included an argument he had with editor PseudoSomething, the third user he suggested banning and wrongly called “Puedo”, over the usage of possibly opinionated or biased sources and the exclusion of Breitbart as a source.

Right before entering his argument with PseudoSomething, Fernandez left an encouraging message cheering on NorthBySouthBaranof who was already arguing with PseudoSomething. Incidentally, after he banned Titanium Dragon, Fernandez received praise from Baranof and several other anti-GamerGate editors. He disputed this by saying he was being attacked by both sides, citing his talk page. As it turns out, the only dispute Fernandez appears to have had with editors opposed to GamerGate concerned his removals of “Five Guys Burgers and Fries” references in the discussion, despite them simply noting it as the original term for the Quinn controversy before the move to the more general GamerGate hashtag. I took the time to extensively lay out this evidence of favoritism only for administrator Michel “Drmies” Aaij to close the discussion an hour and a half later claiming it was “inappropriate” and not relevant to the thread where several editors pushed for the very action Fernandez took against Titanium Dragon, including Fernandez himself, and demanding I “put up or shut up” by starting an entirely new discussion. I attempted to re-open the discussion, explained my reasoning, was twice shut down, and then blocked by Aaij.

One user showed up after the closing of that thread to agree with the concerns I raised about Fernandez. In the ensuing dispute another editor, using the name Tabascoman77, announced that he worked for a media outlet and was planning a piece on GamerGate covering the Wikipedia controversy, with Fernandez being mentioned. Simply for talking about writing an article criticizing Wikipedia’s handling of the situation, a user proposed banning Tabascoman from the site indefinitely. Fernandez heartily endorsed this proposal with similar talk of admin action and characterized Tabascoman as a bully and troll. By the end of the day Fernandez had blocked Tabascoman for 24 hours citing the site’s policy on claims about living people. It is this same editor who would later be blocked indefinitely for posting a link to J.W. Caine’s piece refuting allegations about the origins and motivations behind the GamerGate and NotYourShield hashtags. Officially, the reason he was banned was for “not being here to contribute to an encyclopedia” despite having several hundred productive article edits in his history. The evidence was essentially him arguing against those pushing to ban him over his planned article.

Fernandez continued as ArbCom began considering a case on the GamerGate dispute with one of his ridiculous actions being to ban an editor from the topic of GamerGate for having a profile page mimicking Ryulong’s and tied it to harassment, though the two never interacted with each other. Said ban was later extended to indefinite by an admin named MastCell despite numerous editors questioning the sanction, because he didn’t like the user’s explanation. Around the same time Fernandez would shut down a discussion seeking sanctions against Tarc, after the editor repeatedly restored a claim that the hoodie worn by Vivian James, the unofficial GamerGate mascot, has a color scheme referencing a rape joke. The reason Fernandez gave for not taking action against Tarc was his own agreement with the edit Tarc made, claiming it wouldn’t even matter if it went against a consensus of other editors.

Undoubtedly, the weirdest incident around this time concerned the same Mark Bernstein whose spammed blog posts would bamboozle major media outlets. It began with a one-sided fight between Bernstein and admin Masem after the latter argued that the “rape” image allegedly referenced by the hoodie worn by Vivian James may not depict rape at all. For this Bernstein branded him a “full-throated rape apologist” on Twitter and posted to his blog about it. He followed this by attempting to get the “gamergate admin” sanctioned. In his statements right before pushing to get rid of Masem we see the beginning of Bernstein’s absurd conspiracy claims that would later be spread throughout the left-wing press as he accused Masem and other long-time users of being part of a “coordinated POV attack” on the article. After one of these users asked him to stop these extreme accusations Bernstein suggested that perhaps the user simply supported plans to “rape and beat women in computing” and was not part of a conspiracy. Fernandez swooped in with an incredibly meek reprimand that all the same upset Bernstein to the point that he literally issued a “call to arms” on his blog and posted a manifesto on his profile page.

Users on 8chan began to take notice of Bernstein’s pontificating and mocked his bizarre allegations. Seeing that channers were making fun of him Bernstein began saying his life was in danger and talked of calling the police, while accusing other editors of plotting against him. When a user noted they can’t prove those editors are the ones posting in the completely innocuous discussion thread, Bernstein responded, “Will my corpse be enough to satisfy you? My wife’s? At long fucking last, have you no shred of decency?” Though recognizing the horrendous nature of this behavior, Fernandez inexplicably likened Bernstein’s obscene attacks to the discourse exhibited by half the users involved, implying they would all have to be sanctioned while acknowledging that it might be seen as nothing more than a shrewd effort on his part to ostensibly prove he was unbiased.

During this discussion, Tutelary, one of the three editors Fernandez wanted banned over two months earlier, was being lined up for a topic ban after she sought sanctions against Ryulong over his continued editing of GamerGate topics despite receiving hundreds of dollars from GamerGhazi users and being repeatedly asked to step away by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Though her topic ban proposal saw opinions evenly divided both among outsiders to the dispute and among participants in it, Fernandez invoked administrative discretion to decree the “valid” votes were in favor of banning Tutelary from the topic area, just as ArbCom opened the case on the GamerGate dispute. Almost like magic, Fernadez jettisoned his prior reluctance to sanction Bernstein and made the impassioned declaration: “It is time to take a harder line against disruptive behavior.” Both sanctions were imposed simultaneously, a fact Fernandez would later insist was completely coincidental and not in any way him simply trying to make his shoddily argued ban of one editor he long detested easier to swallow by making a more obvious call for another editor with whom he openly sympathized.

I myself would come under the gun of Fernandez in late December. Travis “NorthBySouthBaranof” Bushman had taken to redacting links to Breitbart on the discussion page for GamerGate, asserting that even linking to an article on the site making claims about living people was not allowed. When I contested his deletion of the link, he sought to have me sanctioned for it. Bushman had justified his actions by twice citing Wikipedia’s own article on Breitbart on why it was unacceptable as a source, a fairly common response on the discussion page. Coincidentally, Bushman happened to be editing Breitbart’s article at the time to slant it towards making the outlet look less reliable. In fact, Bushman and several other left-leaning partisan editors had been the primary contributors to the article on Breitbart at the time(See Appendix B), often making slanted additions without providing key contextual details that in one case were only included a year after the addition. When an editor added Breitbart’s exposure of the GameJournoPros mailing list, however, it was removed within hours as being of “tangential relevance” to the article.

Fernandez, in reviewing Bushman’s report against me effectively decreed that any link to Breitbart articles about living people, even on discussion pages, is cause for sanctions. Not surprisingly, the self-declared Democrat had in the same month been actively hostile in a discussion about Breitbart being included as a source on other political topics, referring to then editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro as a “known fabulist” (a fancy way of accusing him of deliberate libel). Such a vicious characterization of Shapiro just happens to run afoul of the same policies on claims about living people that Fernandez was citing to argue against using any links to Breitbart anywhere on Wikipedia. No one sanctioned him for it and he failed to respond when these comments were brought up to question his ability to be impartial on my case. As it so happens a discussion on Breitbart’s reliability at the time was evenly split largely along partisan lines between those considering it an acceptable source and those considering it unacceptable.

Though GamerGate is the area where Fernandez has been most persistent about abusing his position as an admin to further his own side in a content dispute, evidence of this kind of behavior goes back as far as 2012. In February of that year federal judge Richard Cebull faced a firestorm over an e-mail joking about then-President Obama. The joke was essentially that Obama’s mother didn’t know his dad because he was conceived at some crazy orgy where she engaged in at least one act of sexual intercourse with an animal of the canine persuasion. Since Obama is half black the perpetually-offended PC brigade branded the joke racist. Fernandez wanted this stated on the judge’s biography as the universally-agreed understanding of the Yo’ Momma joke, while an editor called Youreallycan favored the term “racially-charged” instead and they fought over it. During discussion about the material, Youreallycan called Fernandez a partisan and suggested “a slap on the face with a big fish”, referencing a popular Wikipedia in-joke. Fernandez repeatedly redacted these remarks as “personal attacks” despite Youreallycan’s objections and blocked Youreallycan, but rescinded the block after significant criticism. Even in the midst of criticism over his administrative conduct in the GamerGate dispute, Fernandez almost faced his own personal arbitration case for blocking an opponent in the dispute over mentioning scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tall tales about George W. Bush.

As the admin whose actions compelled me to pursue arbitration, the now late Dreadstar was admittedly the one whose conduct most upset me and was the first admin whose conduct caught my attention. It was oddly enough because he sought to remove comments about Zoe Quinn being targeted by a campaign of “misogynist online harassment” by citing a policy saying Wikipedia is not a discussion forum. Tutelary came to the defense of the editor making these comments by restoring them and Dreadstar proceeded to misuse anti-vandalism tools to revert anyone restoring the comment. He then suddenly claimed he was removing it because it violated Wikipedia’s policy on comments about living people, a policy that typically applies to individuals rather than unnamed collectives, and blocked Tutelary. He reversed both actions, but not without taking a few insulting jibes at his critics. Within a day of criticizing this inappropriate behavior from an admin he threatened to block me for calling other editors biased two days earlier.

I would have another run-in with Dreadstar after I created an article for The Fine Young Capitalists, the radical feminist organization who were black-balled in most gaming media after Zoe Quinn smeared their female game designer contest (BTW, you can buy the game created as a result of the contest, Afterlife Empire, for $4.99 over on Steam). Vivian James, the unofficial GamerGate mascot, was originally created for the contest-winning game by 4chan users as a perk for helping crowd-fund its development and so I included an image of the character in the article next to a paragraph discussing the character’s creation. Due to channers not being as keen on copyright law and licensing issues as Wikipedia, I made sure to claim it as “fair use” to allow it to be included in the article since anons claiming the character is public domain doesn’t cut it. The image was deleted three days later by Dreadstar claiming it was an “unambiguous copyright violation”, a deletion rationale applicable under policy only when the image is not claimed to be fair use.

Dreadstar did restore the Vivian James image hours later, albeit after repeatedly coming up with new invalid reasons to keep it deleted and only to start a formal discussion about deleting it. There he would throw up increasingly odd new reasons such as Wikipedia’s notability guidelines on article creation and the policy on claims about living people, saying the character existed to attack Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, but he insisted the latter reason was not his main reason for supporting deletion. During the arbitration case, Dreadstar shifted gears again suggesting the policy on claims about living people was his sole reason and made his explanation even more ridiculous by mentioning the alleged rape joke reference behind Vivian’s hoodie and tying it to rape threats made against Zoe Quinn. Such comments from a Wikipedia admin were understandably mocked on the KotakuInAction GamerGate subreddit.

Same as several other admins, Dreadstar acted as an enabler for the “five horsemen”, Ryulong especially, and showed an evident double standard in the process. An editor who had been in a dispute with Ryulong, Torga, was blocked for 48 hours after a technical breach of Wikipedia’s three-reverts-within-24-hours limit . Less than half a day before the two-day block was set to expire, Dreadstar moved in and banned Torga from the topic for 90 days. By contrast, just two weeks earlier Dreadstar refused to take action against Ryulong after he made three times as many reverts as Torga did within a 24-hour period. Dreadstar was also the one who first deleted from public view Tabascoman’s edit, redacted by NorthBySouthBaranof, linking to the blog post by J.W. Caine proving GamerGate had always cared about ethics in games journalism and refuting claims NotYourShield was just white men pretending to be people from marginalized groups. Behavior such as this was not unprecedented from Dreadstar as he had indefinitely blocked an editor active on men’s rights articles for supposedly making defamatory claims against living people and Dreadstar then deleted the edit. Only problem is the person died 17 years earlier, so Dreadstar changed his rationale to personal attacks.

One egregious case of admin abuse would pop up hot on the heels of ArbCom opening a case on the GamerGate dispute. After an article was published in Guardian Liberty Voice regarding Anita Sarkeesian’s ties to several characters with questionable business practices i.e. individuals the author suspected were con-artists, editor Xander756 brought up these claims only by linking to archives of Sarkeesian’s old site that confirmed her involvement with one of them. His initial remarks labeling the person a “fraudster” were removed by NorthBySouthBaranof and Xander sought to restore them, repeatedly abusing his anti-vandalism tools in the process. After he cited GLV as the source, the site’s reliability would be questioned, ironically, with unsupported claims that the site was a scam. The revisions containing his claims were then deleted by Black Kite. Xander reported NorthBySouthBaranof for his removals of Xander’s claim, and it naturally moved against him as others took issue with his conduct in the dispute.

This is when an admin known as Kevin Gorman, since deceased, would step onto the scene and immediately strip Xander of his access to anti-vandalism tools. At this point Xander had been warned about his restoration of the claims and ceased restoring them, but Gorman would proceed to block Xander and ban him from the GamerGate dispute. While within his discretion to strip Xander of his anti-vandalism tools and block him, especially for a reasonably short length of two weeks, his action of banning Xander from anything related to GamerGate cited the community-authorized sanctions that explicitly are only to be used after a user has been notified and Xander had not only ceased restoring the claims after being warned, but was only notified of the community sanctions mere minutes earlier. Wikipedia sanctions have these limitations on admins to allow editors a chance at improving their behavior after a warning before any action is taken, but in this case Gorman overstepped those limitations.

What made this even less appropriate was Gorman’s cited rationale. Gorman noted an old version of Xander’s page mentioned he wrote for the Examiner and claimed that it also linked to his profile on the site. In reality Xander’s old user page only linked to Wikipedia’s article about Examiner.com. Gorman further claimed that, in addition to a link to his Twitter account showing Xander’s full name, his Examiner profile also linked to an account where Xander “uses slurs against Sarkeesian that I shall not repeat here.” There is no evidence any other account was ever linked on his Examiner profile nor that he engaged in any “slurs” on any account. Wikipedia categorizes this type of digging into another user as “opposition research” under its harassment policies. Describing how to locate a user’s Twitter account when it contains that user’s full name, as it did in Xander’s case, is also considered doxing and Wikipedia’s policies regarding claims about living people are also taken to apply to the site’s own editors, especially when they are identified by name. After another user cited these policies and redacted Gorman’s claims, he restored them and said it was valid under those policies as it concerned a “conflict of interest” on Xander’s part.

Gorman’s claims of a “conflict of interest” proved to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He could be found months earlier fuming at the idea of categorizing the Isla Vista Killings as violence against men, framing it as part of a campaign by men’s rights activists. Kevin Gorman’s activity on men’s rights articles was so extensive it was even once the subject of an article in Jezebel. Gorman insisted his extensive involvement with feminist topics did not bar him from taking action as an “uninvolved” admin regarding edits about a prominent feminist critic or GamerGate, but a week before blocking Xander, Gorman would also smear pro-GamerGate Sarkeesian critic Christina Hoff Sommers as an “MRA author” after she complained about misrepresentation and inaccuracies in her Wikipedia article. When I asked Gorman for a source claiming Sommers was an MRA, Gorman effectively said “I’ll get back to you later.” He never did get back to me. This misconduct by Gorman was, as with other admins, not unusual as he had been admonished by the Arbitration Committee earlier the same year for attacking another editor and repeatedly threatening to block him. ArbCom at the time stated, “The committee notes and accepts Kevin Gorman’s assurances that he has learned by his mistakes and will not repeat them.”

No admin active in the GamerGate dispute has quite the track record as Future Perfect at Sunrise. He was put at risk of sanctions at several points in 2012 for his aggressive battling over various geopolitical articles. This kind of conduct as well as abuse of his admin tools back in 2009 over what is probably one of the lamest geopolitical disputes in history, the Macedonia naming dispute, earned him a whole host of sanctions and briefly cost him his admin privileges. Future’s history of admin abuse would not end there as he would end up before ArbCom towards the end of 2012 for blocking an editor over the objections of multiple admins. Mere months later he would be before ArbCom again for editing an article in favor of one side in a dispute after locking it. His habit of using or threatening to use his admin tools to further his own position in a dispute would once more be raised in two separate administrative noticeboard discussions that year. At the beginning of 2014 Future would once more find himself in front of ArbCom for his habit of using or threatening use of his tools in support of allies or to further his own side, including to protect an ally evading a ban.

Future’s actions on the topic of GamerGate prior to the arbitration case were brief, but arguably the most impactful out of all other administrative actions in the dispute. When Ryulong had been reported for his latest bout of reverting, Future within 20 minutes indefinitely blocked the other party fighting with him and left Ryulong alone despite him having greatly exceeded the three reverts typically allowed an editor. Titanium Dragon had been the one to report Ryulong and hours later Future would ban him from the GamerGate dispute within 20 minutes of a report by NorthBySouthBaranof and before Titanium Dragon had a chance to defend himself. As editors began to question Future’s decision Black Kite rushed in to close the discussion four hours after it had opened and Future rapidly closed down any criticism of the action on his own page. It was in direct response to me requesting a review of Titanium Dragon’s ban from the GamerGate dispute that Ryulong made his proposal to ban dozens of editors. It instead turned into a proposal to ban Ryulong from the topic area, but Future closed it down seven hours later claiming there was no chance of it being approved despite significant support being given and even opponents of a ban saying he should step away.

His only other major intervention was in response to ArmyLine launching an appeal of the one-year topic ban imposed by Acroterion for merely stating as fact the widely reported allegations of Quinn cheating on Eron Gjoni with Nathan Grayson. Future declined the appeal and blocked ArmyLine for a week citing ArmyLine’s reiteration of the widely reported allegations of Quinn cheating, while dismissing the editor’s criticism of Acroterion being biased as a valid basis for an appeal. When I and several other editors questioned Future’s block, Fernandez shut down the discussion and both he and Future fought against efforts by Tutelary to re-open the discussion. Two days after this incident occurred Fernandez made his executive decision to ban Tutelary from the GamerGate dispute, conveniently just as he became resolved to deal with the abusive attacks coming from Mark Bernstein.

Probably the most ridiculous sanctions to have come out of the GamerGate dispute were those imposed by admin 5 albert square. After the GamerGate article was protected the small lock icon used to note this was changed to a larger banner by admin HJ Mitchell. Just over two weeks later NorthBySouthBaranof returned the lock to its smaller size. Editor Dwavenhobble restored the lock’s size two times, before being blocked for a week by Future Perfect at Sunrise. Albert square, apparently, felt him twice restoring an admin’s change to the size of a lock icon warranted much harsher action and minutes later changed Dwavenhobble’s block to an indefinite one. When his unblock request was declined due in part to him characterizing the edits of his opponents as “vandalism”, he retracted the claim only to have it cited as cause for revoking his discussion privileges by admin PhilKnight, the same admin who suppressed an edit linking to this blog post by J.W. Caine refuting arguments denying GamerGate’s diversity and proving supporters always cared about ethics in games journalism.

It would not be her final act of absurdity as I myself would be subjected to her penchant for trigger-happy adminning. When Xander appealed the topic ban imposed on him by Kevin Gorman, HJ Mitchell cited an alleged violation of Wikipedia’s policy on claims about living people in the appeal and blocked Xander indefinitely. As the statement had been hidden from public view I requested Xander e-mail me what he said and was blocked indefinitely by albert square. Though it was reversed hours later following considerable criticism, it did highlight one odd correlation. HJ Mitchell, the admin whose block I was questioning, had been her co-nominator when she successfully ran for adminship. Eventually, an admin would send me a copy of what Xander had said, which was apparently the claim Anita Sarkeesian was “working for a pick-up artist” in her past. The same statement, however, can still be found unredacted in a live archive as of this writing from the same administrative discussion leading to Xander’s ban in a statement directly responding to the admin who sanctioned him. Mitchell justified his indefinite block by wrongly, as it would seem, claiming Xander had repeated “exactly the same content” while effectively restating exactly the same content Xander had not repeated.

Other incidents would pop up such as an editor who was barely active in the GamerGate dispute at the time being banned from the topic for a month, following a request from a user who would be blocked as a suspected sock-puppet, because of a post linking to a student newspaper article that contained false claims about living people. What defined admin conduct in the GamerGate dispute is a compounding of bias upon bias, with biased admin actions potential enabling other biased admin actions. An admin who was heavily involved in the GamerGate dispute would also be deleting article revisions, including those used as a cause for sanctions against users who could not see these revisions. When admins such as Acroterion describe Zoe Quinn as being “extensively harassed, primarily for being female in a male-dominated culture”, yet are also the same admins deleting revisions and handing out lengthy sanctions it creates a confidence issue. Editors were expected to simply trust that admins were not overstepping, without being able to prove it to themselves as the evidence is erased by the same admins being accused. Given the clear bias of admins and cases such as the suppression of the blog post by J.W. Caine debunking claims about NotYourShield’s authenticity and GamerGate’ concerns about journalistic ethics, such trust did not seem warranted.

Next: Part 4: White Knights of the White Knights

Previous: Part 2: The Five Horsemen of Wikibias

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