The Wikipedia Post — Part 6: Horsemen After the Fall
Masem voluntarily removing himself from the GamerGate dispute didn’t completely protect him from attack. On Twitter, Jay “Tarc” Herlihy posted Masem’s real name and made sexually denigrating remarks about him being a furry, for which ArbCom banned Herlihy from Wikipedia. Despite his “Black Republican” impersonation antics and trolling of the Bradley/Chelsea Manning naming discussion having led to his ban from Wikipediocracy, his actions of doxing and shaming Masem apparently convinced the staff that he was okay to allow back on to the site. When some members questioned why he would kick Masem while he was down, Herlihy stated that “Being an enabler of Gamergate vermin doesn’t have an expiry date” and compared his doxing of Masem to shanking a pedophile in prison.
Tarc was not the only horsemen whose removal from the GamerGate topic didn’t prevent him from still creating problems in the area. When editor Retartist was banned from the GamerGate topic area for linking to the GamerGate.me site and a list of its sources, Travis “NorthBySouthBaranof” Mason-Bushmann was the one who reported him. A report stating he was violating his topic ban was rejected on the grounds that he was claiming a legitimate exemption for dealing with potential defamation of living people. He was still advised by admin HJ Mitchell to avoid further involvement and noted he had violated his topic ban in comments on the talk page of Jimmy Wales, prompting angry attacks from Bushmann who cast himself as an innocent victim perpetuating the white-washed narrative being promoted regarding the GamerGate dispute on Wikipedia. Following a user bringing this to ArbCom’s direct attention, Bushmann persisted in his victim-playing and directly attacked an arbitrator who suggested his approach to the issue was a problem.
However, his editing would extend beyond any claims of exemption to direct flouting of his topic ban. In a request for clarification filed a month later by Mark Bernstein regarding whether campus rape was covered under the “gender-related controversy” portion of the standard GamerGate ban, Bushmann directly commented to mostly complain about his “overly broad” topic ban and attack an editor who had removed the ThinkProgress piece regurgitating the false narrative crafted by him and his cohorts. Despite having reasonable cause to believe campus rape would be construed as covered under his topic ban as several arbitrators had already weighed in to agree campus rape was covered, Bushmann proceeded to make edits to the page about the controversial creator of HBO’s Girls Lena Dunham regarding an allegation of campus rape she wrote about that was subject to defamation proceedings. While this might seem in context to be openly defying a topic ban he believed to be too restrictive, a report filed by another user against Bushmann led to no action as admin Mitchell declared it a “misunderstanding” about his topic ban. Bushmann still had time to rail about it to Jimbo and demand he modify the topic ban. Bushmann would also later breach his topic ban to complain at a conduct noticeboard over alleged harassment at an unrelated ArbCom case page, in a discussion that had nothing to do with him or the ArbCom case page.
Bushmann’s greatest and most persistent breaching of his ban from GamerGate-related articles would be his editing of the article on BlackLivesMatter activist Shaun King. After Milo Yiannopoulos revealed in Breitbart that the self-proclaimed biracial protest leader might be white, a bio was created about King and Bushmann soon descended on it to attribute the story entirely to the unnamed “Breitbart writer” who simply noted what was on public records subsequently confirmed as authentic by The New York Times. Under the terms of the standard GamerGate topic ban, Bushmann would be prohibited from making any edits about people associated with GamerGate. This didn’t stop him. After Shaun King broke his silence about his birth certificate showing two white parents to say that man was not his real dad because his momma told him so and no you can’t ask her, Bushmann immediately swept under the rug the secondary corroboration about King’s race from CNN’s Don Lemon and documented inconsistencies in King’s account regarding an alleged hate crime committed against him in school. Follow-up edits by Bushmann attacked Yiannopoulos by name citing a Salon smear piece and described the report by Yiannopoulos as “false” based solely off King’s solemn vow that he is not a crook.
It wouldn’t stop there as Bushmann’s breaching of his topic would turn much more egregious after someone who tipped off Yiannopoulos about the King allegations would be arrested by police. Joshua Goldberg a.k.a MoonMetropolis, the world’s greatest victim of being 2 edgy 4 u and possible originator of the Ben Garrison smear campaign. Goldberg is known for having epic Internet slap fights with himself, including on Wikipedia where several of his accounts have been blocked for (shockingly) impersonation, harassment, and sockpuppetry. Since he had told Yiannopoulos about the blog by Vicki Pate alleging King is white, though Yiannopoulos states he had already been in touch with Pate at the time, it immediately was raised as an issue at King’s bio by Bushmann. This dispute made its way to the article’s discussion page where anti-GamerGate editor Artw suggested including the details about Goldberg in the article on Yiannopoulos or perhaps the GamerGate article due to one of Goldberg’s many conflicting personas being that of a GamerGate supporter. Despite GamerGate being directly tied to the matter, Bushmann would leave voluminous angry comments demanding Goldberg’s flimsy connection to the piece be used to discredit Yiannopoulos in the article.
Having noticed his egregious violations of his topic ban I pointed them out on the Wikipediocracy forum. The apparent effect, aside from arousing the consternation of one of Wikipediocracy’s trustees who would likely later be the deciding vote in my ban from the site, was that Bushmann seemed to vanish from the page for nearly three weeks. It was over a month and a half before he would fight over the claims about King’s race again, though now without even alluding to Yiannopoulos. ArbCom was informed of Bushmann’s topic ban violations a few days after his rant on King’s discussion page, but no action was taken. While avoiding further blatant breaches of his topic ban for the rest of the year, Bushmann’s thin veneer of concern about defamation underlying his partisan agenda-pushing would continue unabated all the same at articles on political correctness cause du jour Ahmed Mohamad and Clinton apparatchik Huma Abedin.
Ryulong, the only editor to get banned from Wikipedia entirely due to the GamerGate ArbCom case, even found a way to continue messing with the site. Once it became clear Ryulong was getting booted off of the site, a user called Hipocrite offered to edit any pages at his request. Within an hour of his ban Hipocrite went into action, undoing an edit by a long-dormant user correcting Ryulong’s inaccurate romanizations (the infamous “CondolLegs” case). The user who dared correct the error was given an indefinite block by HJ Mitchell, who argued a vandalism block from eight years prior indicated the user correcting an error was not there to contribute to an encyclopedia.
Mitchell then locked the page to new accounts citing “vandalism”, but a longtime editor stepped in to make the same correction of “CondolLegs” to Condor Legs. This time arbitrator Brad “Courcelles” Brown leapt to action and blocked the editor indefinitely and when the editor requested an unblock on the basis that the edit was only correcting an error, arbitrator Thomas “Guerillero” Fish shot down the appeal then revoked the user’s access to the user talk page and e-mail, a measure usually reserved for cases of repeated frivolous appeals or abuse. Somehow, this was not the end to the fight over correcting this obviously inaccurate romanization. One user commented on the talk page of the relevant article to affirm that Condor Legs was clearly the correct version of the name and two hours later was indefinitely blocked by Brad Brown. Even questioning these actions got one user in trouble as soon after an editor successfully requested a review for one of these blocks and criticized another an admin rushed to block the user indefinitely. All but one of these blocks were eventually overturned and the “CondolLegs” error was finally fixed.
Yet this tragic comedy of errors did not end as Ryulong continued to exert his influence from beyond the wikigrave. A friend of Ryulong’s called OuendanL burst onto the scene to make various edits to subjects of utmost importance: anime shows and Power Rangers. Ryulong’s pal soon wound up fighting his old fights at Japanese superhero articles, particularly replacing the accurate romanization Buddyroid (think droids) with Buddyloid (think something that makes no sense). OuendanL was then joined by another wikinoob friend of Ryulong, Kitsunelaine, who tag-teamed out the Buddyroid correction and got admins to protect the page from corrections and block all the accounts correcting it as sockpuppets. A user noticed the odd pair of newbies tag-teaming to keep the Buddyloid romanization and reported them as socks, but an admin argued they were different people and they had not violated Wikipedia’s policy on proxy-editing or meat-puppetry.
Not content to merely manipulate Wikipedia from afar, Ryulong took his GamerGate obsession on the road to RationalWiki. Created as a counter to the right-wing Wikipedia fork Conservapedia, RationalWiki has a habit of collecting wayward Wikipedians disenchanted with or disinvited from the online encyclopedia. Having a more free-wheeling environment, Ryulong gained administrative privileges on the site in his first weeks as a member. Days later he was already the center of controversy for using his newfound privileges to remove privileges from a banned Wikipedian and getting his own privileges temporarily removed in response. Just a month after his ban from Wikipedia was final, Ryulong’s obsession with GamerGate was already wearing down the members of RationalWiki, who insisted he find something more productive. Bizarrely, Ryulong claimed his activities on RationalWiki writing about GamerGate might potentially get him work and that his social life was dead anyway.
Ryulong became a perennial source of controversy on RationalWiki. He fought with other admins to try and impose a months-long block on tens of thousands of IP addresses leading to yet another instance of him losing then regaining his administrative privileges. The fight resumed a month later as part of a wider ruckus where Ryulong was blocked for throwing around insults on RationalWiki’s GamerGate article talk page. As many of RationalWiki’s member began calling for removal of his admin privileges, Ryulong threw in the towel and gave them up himself. He then a day later brought a fight over the indentation of replies to the same conduct noticeboard prompting more than a few bewildered responses at the absurdity of such a trivial dispute being so intense and protracted, attributing a lot of it to Ryulong being extremely thin-skinned. Other members began to wonder why RationalWiki seemed so obsessed with GamerGate and many chimed in to say it was mostly Ryulong, to his considerable consternation.
Despite it being a site lacking in any real importance or influence, Ryulong began to spread his misconduct beyond GamerGate to topics such as prostitution and My Little Pony, where he was joined by his puppet friend Kitsunelaine. His unusual tirades against My Little Pony proved particularly damaging. First arriving to angrily remove the article’s “brony propaganda” that didn’t portray adult male fans as perverted bigots from 4chan and accusing anyone objecting of “whitewashing” the very important page of very important criticism. Somehow this turned into a big long fight over several weeks before calming down. Weeks later Ryulong once more relinquished his admin privileges due to a complaint made by their main opponent from the MLP dispute: community-elected moderator Paravant. Ryulong and his puppet friend Kitsunelaine’s fight over MLP resumed when the two began tag-teaming to keep a line attacking a brony documentary as “propaganda” that was sourced to some random blogger. They then ganged up to try and take down Paravant for actions over the course of the rekindled MLP feud until the moderator relented and agreed to leave them alone, perhaps even giving up serving as a moderator.
Neither had long to enjoy this victory as one week later a large sprawling discussion on removing Ryulong from RationalWiki was initiated. Frustrated, Ryulong declared he was making his last edit in a comment insulting his many perceived enemies on the site only to make his claimed final last edit be removing people mocking him by saying it would not be his last edit. Not surprisingly, he returned a week later to rage at some more people over GamerGate before finally seeming to stop editing entirely after a few more days. Thus Ryulong’s spree on RationalWiki ended after an impressive amount of blocking wars where he repeatedly unblocked himself and wars between admins over giving and taking away his admin privileges, though he did successfully get his moderator opponent from the MLP dispute to self-identify as an “evil gator”, retire and impose a decade-long self-ban.
Next: Part 7: Knights with no Horses
Previous: Part 5: Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat
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