I became involved in this because I was worried that the article was going to be defaced by angry gamers; instead, it was being defaced by angry culture warriors. I sought to make the article more neutral, and include sourced information. Subsequently, I was doxxed by Wikipediocracy in September, along with another user, Tutelary, in an attempt to intimidate us. user:Tarc, a former associate of Wikipediocracy, made approving noises, while user:Gamaliel noted that he wanted to ban users such as ourselves, and subsequently did so, in a ban which was later reversed by another admin.
- Ryulong has a long history of abusive behavior on Wikipedia, and has not significantly improved his behavior in the time since he lost sysop status many years ago. He continues to attack others and seek to get people who are in content disagreements with him banned by asking sympathetic admins to do so, while the users in question are involved in administrative action against them. He insults others and behaves uncivilly and tries to close down conversations. He simultaneously claims that there is consensus for his point of view and that there is a horde of people set against him. Users like this discourage others from using Wikipedia and compromise the integrity, real and perceived, of the encyclopedia.
- NorthBySouthBaranof has a history of poor behavior as relates to other users; he assumes bad faith in everyone else on a constant basis and tries to get editors who point out that he is violating rules (such as WP:BLP) banned. He was warned about casting aspersions on other users and deliberately distorts what they say on a constant basis. He was warned about this behavior in an ANI and continues to engage in it. He engaged in other warned-in behavior as well, such as inserting a quote from Cracked (a humor website) into the Zoe Quinn article after having been warned that it was unacceptable to use in a BLP. He has engaged in behavior that he has demanded revdels for from other users, and has attacked other users for doing exactly what he has done - and done what he has attacked other users for doing after attacking them for doing it. He either lacks understanding of or doesn't care about WP:IMPARTIAL and WP:NPOV, and has noted that Adolf Hitler should say that he is evil in the lead. He does not recognize himself as having a point of view, nor that he is pushing it. After being informed that I was working on assembling an ANI against him and other abusive users on the article, and later while in the midst of 3RR dispute over Ryulong's behavior, he sought to get me banned from editing the article, thereby preventing me from lodging a complaint without having to appeal the ban first.
- Tarc has a history of extremely uncivil behavior, referring to people he disagrees with as "misogynists" and otherwise insulting them; when warned about his behavior, including on the ANI about the Wikipediocracy doxxing incident, he spat on the notion that WP:CIVIL is important. He has a long history of negative, aggressive interactions with other Wikipedia users and he does not appear to be likely to change. This sort of hostility drives other users off, and results in a very negative and hostile editing environment.
All three of the users noted above believe themselves to be wholly justified in their actions. All three have refused mediation, and two of them refused to engage in any sort of outside work at all in reaching a compromise. Ryulong has insulted the mediation process and people who were trying to engage in it, and turned up his nose at the idea of engaging in any sort of dispute resolution on the issue, or indeed that there was a dispute at all over the content of the article, while assembling a list of people he wanted banned because they disagreed with him.
The article repeats unreliable claims of people involved, and cites sources who are involved directly in the controversy and whose actions have resulted in advertisers pulling out from websites due to their writings being percieved as "bullying". One of the people involved - Zoe Quinn - previously claimed to be harassed in late 2013, and a bunch of news sources repeated her allegations without verification. As a result, the people who she claimed had harassed her were themselves harassed, and it appears that they never were involved in any sort of harassment. No police report was ever filed on the incident, no one was held criminally responsible, and The Escapist, who repeated her initial claims, was later forced to write an apology and change their rules about verifying claims of harassment and other issues, as well as add a disclaimer to the article.
This is an endemic problem; to the best of my knowledge, no one has been charged criminally in any of this. We don't know who is making these threats or hacking websites; all we have is supposition. As far as I know, neither Milo (a reporter for Breitbart) nor Zoe Quinn have filed any sort of criminal complaint in relation to alleged death threats, while speaking about them to reporters and on Twitter; the only source we have on the threats being made against them is themselves, as far as I have been able to determine. In sharp contrast, the threats against Sarkeesian are well attested to - we have the full text of the threats, and we have evidence that the threats were made because she went to the FBI and police, who have investigated the death threats. According to the police, FBI, and Utah State University, the death threat she received at USU was not a credible threat, in that there was no danger to her or the public, and it was noted as being similar to other threats she had received in the past - basically, someone is sending them to terrorize people, but do not appear to have any intent to actually kill anyone (at least according to the FBI).
Per WP:HOAX, it is important for us to report on hoaxes as hoaxes, not be sucked into them and repeat them. When someone calls in a fake school shooting threat or a fake bomb scare, we can report on the hoax (i.e. that someone did that), but we should not perpetuate the hoax (i.e. state that the threat is real, that someone really was going to go to USU and shoot a bunch of people).
On the other hand, when something isn't even being investigated by the police as far as we know, that's a bit of a problem as far as WP:CRIME goes. We are supposed to be very cautious when we are talking about alleged criminal activities, especially as relates to living persons, and ultimately the only source we have on some of this stuff is the people themselves. And that's bad! Per WP:RS, we need independent sources, and need to be wary of assuming that we have multiple attestations to something when it all ultimately comes from a single source.
I am presently topic banned from the article as a result of user:NorthBySouthBaranof asking user:Future_Perfect_at_Sunrise to ban me while North and Ryulong were on the 3RR boards due to their involvement in an editing dispute on the article's talk page; both of the users who raised the issue against them were subsequently topic banned in a very short period of time, both by Future Perfect at Sunrise, and without giving an opportunity to respond or point out that North had a history of misrepresenting the viewpoints of others in such matters. He has refused to reconsider the ban, so it was perhaps inevitable that it would end up in ArbCom. I stepped away after this as I was tired of the harassment being leveled at me constantly by these users and other off-Wikipedia folks and did not want to have to deal with it again, but was asked to get involved here.
I've never been involved in something like this before, so I'm not sure when/how you are supposed to properly present evidence, but as noted previously I had been collecting information about a possible ANI against these users, so I have a fair bit of material. Titanium Dragon (talk) 05:18, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
- Re: off-wiki harassment: it should be noted that several people involved in the "anti-GamerGate" movement have been cited as being "bullies" by major companies which have pulled their advertisement from their websites. I personally have been doxxed by the "anti-GamerGate" folks for editing Wikipedia, and have been called a misogynist by them repeatedly here on Wikipedia. Leigh Alexander has been noted as implying she would "sink the career" of anyone who reports on GamerGate according to TechCrunch (who provided evidence of such by linking to one of her posts on Twitter), and indeed there has been a great deal of harassment of the "GamerGate" supporters and even random third parties such as Wikipedia editors John Bain, who have been called misogynists for reporting on censorship of the issue early on despite his criticism of harassment. The idea that the harassment is one sided here is silly - both sides (or really, all sides, I'm not even sure that there are just two) are attacking anyone and everyone who they see as being on "the other side", regardless of reality. The Fine Young Capitalists were hacked, apparently in conjunction to their revelations about their dispute with Zoe Quinn, and they're a radical feminist group whose goal was to run a game jam creating a game designed by a woman. Some people have been attacked by both sides for not agreeing with them enough. This is a big, very ugly fight on the internet, and both sides have engaged in very ugly language, and in some cases, possible criminal activity (death threats, website hacks, ect.). The idea that this is all done by "one side" is simply false.
- The fact of the matter is that people are not only engaging in this sort of misbehavior on message-boards and social media sites, but actual, ostensibly professional journalists are writing articles like "Gamers Are Over" and "FEMINIST BULLIES TEARING THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY APART". Journalists have gotten in arguments on private mailing lists over this issue, with some of them stating that people should not even be given the opportunity to discuss it in the first place. People are, as noted previously, losing ad revenue as a result of it. Digitimes, a newspaper in Taiwan of all places, noted that it was concerned that a failure to end the controversy might negatively impact sales of consoles, thereby causing damage to the Taiwanese economy; a subsequent article noted that the gamers were still enraged and that it was having economic impacts on parts of the video game industry, noting Google and the YouTube-based journalists have been benefiting while the webpage-based journalists have lost money due to withdrawl of ads.
- This started out as a stupid fight on the internet, but has escalated into having real-world impacts on some companies, with attacks being thrown around on various websites and even in print. A lot of random people and groups have gotten involved; it goes well beyond any specific message-board thread. I had a journalist ask to interview me about the Wikipedia article dispute a while back, and a friend of mine who is a journalist keeps poking me about this stuff periodically despite my trying to step away from it. Titanium Dragon (talk) 06:29, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
- @Ryulong:: Given that people are disputing/discussing action taken against me here, specifically in the form of the topic ban, it is my understanding that it is permissible for me to be involved (would have been nice if you had pinged me, though; merely entering someone's name without a link doesn't notify them) per the rules re: appealing bans - you are allowed to talk about them specifically in the process of disputing said ban. I feel that the issues surrounding the issue are pertinent, here, given the history of systematically aggressive and abusive behavior directed against me by a group of users who frequently use the same degrading terms (misogynist, virgin, ect.) that the folks over at Wikipediocracy who doxxed me used. Wikipedia has no control over off-Wiki harassment, unfortunately, but they can deal with it when it spills over onto Wikipedia. You have claimed to have been the victim of a directed, organized campaign of harassment, but show no signs of sympathy towards me when folks actually do to me what you're worried about them doing to you. Titanium Dragon (talk) 07:09, 10 November 2014 (UTC)