A decision was made this week by “Wikipedia’s supreme court” to ban five editors who were attempting to prevent the “Gamergate Controversy” article from taking on a pro-Gamergate slant. The editors can not only no longer edit the Gamergate entry, but also any other entry having to do with “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.” It’s a move that’s disappointing for those who would like to see Gamergate’s harassment against women laid bare, as well as for those who’d like to see Wikipedia not tacitly give a harassment campaign exactly what it wants.
According to The Guardian it was Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, “the highest user-run body on the site,” that handed down the decision. The “Gamergate Controvery” article has been a sort of Gamergate battleground since the beginning, receiving the kind of push and pull that the rest of the conversation around Gamergate has — namely, whether it should be presented as being about ethics in journalism or whether that particular cause flew straight out the window the second the campaign became widely associated with its horrific threats against and general harassment of any woman who dare speak up.
Arbcom’s decision has not yet been made final, but where it stands now isn’t exactly great: The only pro-Gamergate editor accounts that have been punished were throwaways, what Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein described as “disposal accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned.” In contrast, five editors who were working to prevent the article from taking a pro-Gamergate stance have been banned — and not just from Gamergate articles, but from any relating to gender or sexuality, “broadly construed.” As Bernstein writes:
By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia.
It should be noted that this decision comes from a panel of fourteen arbitrators, eleven of whom are (you guessed it!) men. Bernstein also called the decision “a blunder that threatens to disgrace the Internet.”
This is why we can’t have nice things.
(via The Guardian) (Image via Wikipedia)
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