The Wikipedia Post — Part 8: Beginning of the Crackdown
When discussing the Atlantic piece on the notion incivility from people such as Eric Corbett was keeping women away, Robert Fernandez wrote in the Signpost about the need for those opposing tighter standards to “get out of the way.” He argued that they should not resist “new policies and structures” being put in place. Fernandez invoked the phantom threat of GamerGate to warn that failing to address the problem could bring down Wikipedia. Playing on this narrative of harassment and GamerGate that was in the air, admins took many steps the same year to increasingly stifle discussion on the site. A hard-line approach further shifted Wikipedia away from the open environment it was in the past. One of the earliest big changes that year came in response to GamerGate and was all about protecting one of the few remaining horsemen in the topic area: The Red Pen of Doom.
Although he was eventually banned from the GamerGate page for his vitriol towards the movement and other editors, this only came after repeated efforts to protect him. Mid-may of 2015, an unregistered user tried to post a request for sanctions against Red Pen. The discussion was closed rapidly and the unregistered attempted to repost it several times before it was finally allowed to stay up. Repeated objections were raised in the discussion about allowing the report to stay up and administrator Zad68 eventually closed it again citing the perceived impropriety of an unregistered user filing a report, regardless of whether Red Pen’s conduct might warrant sanctions. At this point, Retartist re-filed the request for sanctions upon which it was quickly noted he had been banned from the GamerGate topic for noting the large list of sources contained in the unofficial GamerGate dossier. Due to this ban, Zad68 closed this filing as well. Numerous editors noted Red Pen’s conduct in the filings did warrant sanctions, but it was not until established editor Startship.paint filed another report on Red Pen a few days later that it was seriously examined.
Some editors reiterated that Red Pen’s conduct warranted sanctions, but Bernstein repeatedly weighed in with references to “barking” and “sea lions” to divert attention away from Red Pen’s vitriolic attacks on others and onto pro-GamerGate accounts. These efforts were successful as Zad68 commented that he was taking his focus away from Red Pen’s conduct, despite noting it had merit, and would instead focus on new or low-edit pro-GamerGate accounts being active on the article. He proposed a special sanction that would require any accounts active on the GamerGate article to have made 500 edits and to have been active for, at least, a month. The anti-GamerGate brigades were jubilant about the prospect, with administrator Bishonen also weighing in to cheer the idea. Ira Brad Matetsky, a.k.a. NewYorkBrad, weighed in to merely counsel that Red Pen not make insulting suggestions about editors being poorly-educated or comment about their mental health, but suggested he receive no sanction. Despite the evidence against Red Pen consisting mainly of his treatment of other established editors, rather than new accounts, the result of the request was no sanction for Red Pen and the imposition of the 500/30 restriction.
It was a similar restriction to one that had been imposed regarding the more significant issue of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the former Soviet states of Armenia and Azerbaijan, where pro-Armenian socks proved repeatedly efficient at slanting articles on the conflict towards a pro-Armenian perspective and at evading the technical means of sock detection by administrators. Unlike in that case, the editors the 500/30 restriction was intended to keep out of the GamerGate article were believed to be mostly regular users with new accounts or old low-edit accounts. While technically applicable to all accounts, it was plainly intended to keep out pro-GamerGate accounts. Like the 500/30 restriction, the Arbitration Committee had passed a finding on “single-purpose accounts” to address a misconception rolled into the broader narrative about the dispute on Wikipedia that the problem was pro-GamerGate throwaway accounts. Reinforcing this, they had banned editor Loganmac from GamerGate as a “single-purpose account” despite him having being editing for years. Yet even as the ArbCom case was happening a genuine issue of single-purpose throwaway accounts was developing in the dispute, and it involved anti-GamerGate accounts.
Five different accounts were created in direct response to GamerGate, all focused heavily on advancing an anti-GamerGate narrative. These accounts were Strongjam, Parabolist, PeterTheFourth, ForbiddenRocky, and Dumuzid (See Appendix C). While all used different approaches to conceal their purpose and some were more obvious than others, all of them showed the same basic tendency of having a laser-focus on GamerGate and all things it touched on Wikipedia. Not a single one of them has been blocked or sanctioned for being single-purpose accounts. Of these accounts, only two were excluded by the 500/30 restriction: Parabolist and Dumuzid. While Parabolist showed no sign of attempting to return to the article, Dumuzid made a prodigious amount of edits over the course of about two weeks in July, at which point he promptly jumped back into the fray. A large portion of the edits made to the article in the month following the ArbCom case were made by the SPAs and three of them made their way into the top ten contributors to the GamerGate article and its associated discussion page.
Anyone thinking to criticize the anti-GamerGate bias on the article or criticize it generally would have to deal with inevitably being swarmed by these SPAs alongside the handful of anti-GamerGate regulars such as Bernstein. When prominent editor Sitush weighed in on various issues he saw with the quality of the article, he had to contend with four different SPAs joined by Bernstein and others. Due to their involvement discussions that might otherwise be a near even split with established editors on both sides of a position, slant heavily in favor of the anti-GamerGate stance. The absurdity of this situation is best exemplified in a discussion where moderately anti-GamerGate admin Masem spent nearly half a day fending off three of the anti-GamerGate SPAs over whether to cite Spiked Magazine in the article to note the liberal outlet’s sympathetic view of GamerGate. Sitush suggested paving the way for more outside participation by removing Bernstein and SPAs who he argued were hampering discussion, but his proposal was rejected by various editors, including Fernandez, and Future Perfect consequently shut down the discussion.
The mystery behind who could be operating any of these five accounts has eluded editors critical of Wikipedia’s handling of the GamerGate topic. Horsemen Tarc a.k.a. Jay Herlihy has suggested several times that he has continued editing about GamerGate in spite of his ban, though no definitive proof has emerged. Some have baselessly suggested Bushmann was using one of the accounts given his questionable history with using multiple accounts. One GamerGate supporter who was banned from Wikipedia even claimed there were efforts to use accounts pretending to be opposed to GamerGate in order to slant the article in a more negative direction and discredit the site. It is possible such talk from banned editors is merely a troll to incite witch hunts against editors and sow paranoia about infiltrators, but it would not be a first for people to edit Wikipedia as part of a long-term subversion effort to undermine its credibility. Whatever the identity or intentions of these editors, their impact on the article would define the post-ArbCom situation on GamerGate-related articles.
Even articles not directly related to GamerGate would be impacted by these accounts. PeterTheFourth regularly showed up at the articles of his opponents from the GamerGate dispute to fight with them there as well. His very first article edit was to follow me to an article to fight. Peter would also follow Masem to articles about My Little Pony to oppose his position. At times this behavior would chain where Peter would follow a GamerGate opponent to an article and then follow an opponent there to yet another article as he did with Cla68, who Peter reported over a fight about Disney World outsourcing jobs. Peter sometimes did this in defense of one of the horsemen such as Red Pen who taunted GamerGate opponent DHeyward. When DHeyward told him to “STFU” Peter emerged out of nowhere to tell him to be civil. DHeyward’s friend MONGO was also hounded by Peter. In one case Peter hounded him to defend Bushman from accusations of hounding DHeyward. Audaciously, when DHeyward reported PeterTheFourth for some of his conduct, Peter rushed to Fernandez demanding sanctions. Fernandez, to his credit, had previously recognized Peter’s conduct was a problem.
This was not limited to Peter. Other anti-GamerGate SPA’s showed up to fight with Masem or back up Bushmann. Like little ducklings following mother duck, they would also routinely follow Bernstein and help him out in any struggles he had. Outside Wikipedia, these anti-GamerGate SPAs also found homes on various fora critical of Wikipedia to pick at their GamerGate opponents. Most prominent was a blog called “Sea Lions of Wikipedia” (SLOWP) originating with regular threads at the GamerGhazi reddit community. The blog used a mocking and derisive tone to attack anyone showing the mildest sympathy to GamerGate. At one point the blog oddly described Andreas Kolbe as a “sealion” i.e. GamerGate sympathizer, despite his wife having written and him having spammed on Twitter the Wikipediocracy piece doxing two editors deemed sympathetic to GamerGate. Kolbe dared suggest ethics in games journalism could be included in a description of GamerGate. SLOWP’s comment section often hosted Bernstein, PeterTheFourth, and Dumuzid. It also defended SPA’s, attacking DHeyward as a “stalker” for reporting Peter, who was in fact the one doing the stalking. Parabolist, together with Peter, found a home on Wikipediocracy, first showing up to defend the honor of milady arbitrator Molly “GorillaWarfare” White and take pot shots at me, of course.
While this 500/30 restriction would “stabilize” the GamerGate topic area, it obviously did so mainly by taking out one side more than the other in the same way a dictator crushing a violent rebellion will “stabilize” a country. However, this came to be seen as a very “effective” means of dealing with a contentious topic area and inevitably the idea spread. Its first major opportunity came in a case concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then-administrator Malik Shabbaz, who takes his username from the 60’s era African-American activist Malcolm X, got into a fight with pro-Israeli user Brad Dyer after identifying an edit by Dyer about restrictions on Jewish emigration from Iran that was very closely paraphrased from the cited New York Times piece. Responding to Dyer’s denial of copyright infringement, Shabbaz called him “sick in the head.” Dyer responded by undoing an edit to the article on Israeli human rights group B’Tselem where Shabbaz removed material that identified a favorable description of the group’s nature and funding as the group’s own description, leaving an exact copy of B’Tselem’s self-description.
Shabbaz labeled this action “harassment” for which Dyer accused him of not being able to “take the heat” and called Shabbaz “Sonny boy” in the process. Being of Black African descent, Shabbaz later claimed he took this as a racial insult, to which he responded by repeatedly calling Dyer “stupid” and an “asshole” albeit not yet claiming any racial offense. About an hour after this during discussion of the fight he began hinting at some perceived racial element in between attacks. When Dyer removed the remark in response to his apparent offense, Shabbaz accused him of hiding it. Subsequently deleted comments from Shabbaz saying ��you can suck my dick” and calling Dyer “Jewboy” together with his other comments prompted another administrator to block Shabazz. His block was lifted following some escalations in response to repeated abusive comments and undoing administrator deletions of his comments. All of this was taken to the Arbitration Committee who used emergency procedures to strip Shabbaz of his administrator privileges. While some had speculated his behavior was a sign of his account potentially being hacked, the Committee ruled this out as a possibility.
Although the case initially focused on Shabazz and his conduct being unbecoming of an administrator, pro-Palestinian editors pushed hard on the idea of there being a problem with pro-Israeli editors being able to edit the relevant articles so quickly and began floating the idea of a 500 edit limit before editors could contribute to articles covering the Arab-Israeli conflict. As evidence for the supposed need of such a restriction, these editors cited past efforts by pro-Israeli organizations to edit Wikipedia. They also claimed a severe pro-Israeli bias or over-representation of pro-Israeli editors and content on the site. Just like the reasons used to justify imposing a 500/30 restriction on the GamerGate article, their reasoning had no real relevance to the case at hand. Dyer, who they alleged was either a sock or recruited as part of a pro-Israel campaign, had already made more than enough edits unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict to bypass any such restriction. Despite this and despite the obvious partisan intent of pro-Palestinian editors looking to stifle potential opposition, the Arbitration Committee expanded the 500/30 restriction to cover all articles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such a restriction was also independently imposed on Indian caste articles and suggested for articles on Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Other than the 500/30 restriction, another proposal was made pursuant to Fernandez’s Signpost article discussing the various controversies surrounding Eric Corbett in which Fernandez also made certain to play up the GamerGate boogeyman. Kolbe after participating in the lengthy debate about the piece for days, put forward the idea of having an “edit filter” that would detect and potentially block “talk page abuse” towards other editors. The proposal was divisive and faced significant opposition, but Kolbe continued pushing forward the idea by suggesting the Wikimedia Foundation that owns Wikipedia make use of “machine learning” to develop such a process. Again, members of the community were bitterly divided, with many opposed. Initially no sign of any action on this point was coming forward, but a few months later in early 2016 the Foundation launched its “Detox” project. It specifically cited two of the discussions Kolbe initiated as resources and worked towards developing tools that could detect “toxicity” in comments in the hopes of later developing means to combat “harassment” on Wikipedia. The tool the Foundation would develop together with Google became a subject of controversy this year after members of Wikipedia and Wikipediocracy found its rating of toxicity rated comments towards women as more hostile than the same towards men. It was shut down by the Foundation when it was also found to rate people identifying as gay as toxic and failed to recognize anti-Semitism as toxic.
Fernandez’s Signpost piece also was the beginning of a surge among the anti-GamerGate and feminist cliques on Wikipedia pushing for a revolutionary shift to bring an “end to harassment” on the site. The now-late Kevin Gorman suggested on the mailing list focused on alleged gender gap issues that fixing Wikipedia’s problem could be done through elections to the Arbitration Committee. He believed massively boosting participation was necessary and put forth a proposal for mass-messaging all eligible voters to encourage their participation, which was approved. Editor Smallbones, who was the opposing party to Herlihy in removing the same messages dozens of times from the talk page for Jimmy Wales, put out a clarion call at the Signpost a week after Fernandez to suggest stacking ArbCom with candidates who would “stop the bullying” on Wikipedia. He cited cases concerning the “gender gap” battle related to Corbett and the GamerGate case to claim they show “heavier sanctions are given to women and men who stand up to the harasser than to the actual harasser.” Smallbones argued the election would be easy to sway in favor of candidates dedicated to “ending harassment” and particularly encouraged women to join, typical of such campaigns.
The call was answered resoundingly. Fernandez himself threw his hat in the ring, his Signpost article looking more like a campaign message in retrospect, and was soon joined by a whole crew of candidates looking to tackle the “harassment” boogeyman. Bernstein also joined the fight, boasting of his success in spreading his lie-filled hit pieces into the mainstream media as a credit to his efforts against “harassment” with the usual tinge of conspiracy-theorizing, though the non-admin acknowledged he was unlikely to win. Gorman also set out to be the change he wanted to see in the world, joined by his fellow moderator of the gender gap mailing list Keilana. His block of Corbett subsequently looking much like a campaign statement, Kirill Lokshin also jumped in on the “anti-harassment” ticket. Another non-admin volunteered and White also ran for re-election. In her statement on running again, White only acknowledged one “flaw” and that “flaw” was not speaking her opinion enough. Most curious of the “anti-harassment” slate was Opabinia regalis, an administrator who spent years away from Wikipedia only to return shortly after the conclusion of the GamerGate case. Though claiming to not know much about the case when asked, she claimed in re-applying for adminship earlier that year to have returned precisely because of the case.
A survey of these prospective ArbCom members showed them largely in step with key planks of the anti-harassment narrative: being dissatisfied with the GamerGate case and believing women are sanctioned too harshly. Due to this they and others pledging to tackle harassment received the endorsement of Smallbones in his campaign on a “voter guide” editors create during elections, which received thousands of views over the election period. However, their candidacies proved much more polarizing for others concerned about them being agenda-driven or too deep into on-site drama. Some voted against nearly all “anti-harassment” candidates, one calling them the “Friendly Space” caucus, in reference to “friendly space” policies applied to some Wikimedia movement spaces. This included two of the women who created voter guides, one of whom was the one who sacrificed her position in defense of Corbett in one of the “gender gap” disputes, and another being Bishonen under her alternate account Bishzilla, the queen bee (or queen kaiju as she may prefer) of Wikipedia. Member of Wikipediocracy Tim Davenport a.k.a. Carrite, predicted a massive win for “Friendly Spacers” who he identified with a “PC Delta” tag in reference to the fictional “PC” fraternity in South Park.
With feminist campaigning in the mix and thousands of votes cast, it gave way to paranoia and suspicion of a politically-correct bloc of voters forcing in members who would ruthlessly enforce harassment policies against those deviating from their feminism-infused dogma. On WikiInAction, a subreddit dedicated to criticism of Wikipedia, a user posted what were purported to be early voting results. Though one of the Wikipedia users overseeing the election rejected the claims, the numbers seemed all too plausible for others to dismiss. In a GamerGate-related chat group, the pro-GamerGate user who claimed there was a secret campaign to push Wikipedia towards an extremely biased viewpoint to discredit it claimed one of those involved was reflected in those results. Although he did not identify the user, most outside Opabinia regalis were well-known quantities. Naturally, this did not mean this was anything more than trolling and when the final results were announced the outcome was distinctly different with several in the “leak” not making the cut (the total valid votes did oddly sync up exactly with the alleged leak). However, Carrite’s prediction of a massive victory for the “Friendly Spacers” proved prescient as two-thirds of those voted in had campaigned on an “anti-harassment” stance.
My own situation would take a turn for the worse on Wikipedia as well. During the case where Masem reported Mark Bernstein for harassment over his repeated “M_____” remarks castigating Masem with various vicious insinuations, Bernstein stated some of the comments took place in the context of attempting to argue Eron Gjoni’s blog post about his relationship with Zoe Quinn constituted “domestic violence” as claimed by Anita Sarkeesian in a Guardian article. Bernstein suggested Sarkeesian was interviewed as “an expert in the area” on domestic violence to lend false credence to her allegations against Gjoni, which were made solely as an alleged victim of alleged harassment from GamerGate. Taking exception to this dishonest promotion of the feminist vlogger from alleged harassment victim to domestic violence expert so as to make defamatory characterizations of Gjoni, I removed the claims. As I had in previous cases with admin approval, and as anti-GamerGate figures had done with impunity, I invoked exemptions to my ban concerning defamation of living people. When another challenged this, I noted Sarkeesian was never described as an “expert” of any kind in the article, let alone on domestic violence, making it an explicit violation of policy on top of its malicious use against Gjoni, and removed the claims again.
However, I would soon be descended on by the anti-GamerGate SPAs, who were quick to undo it claiming there was nothing wrong with giving false credence to Sarkeesian’s self-serving inflammatory attacks. I was reported and despite an admin not supporting action and one of the SPAs even being persuaded that the material was a violation of policy, Future Perfect seized the opportunity to get revenge on me as a long-time critic of his conduct as an administrator, including in the GamerGate ArbCom case, and imposed a two-week block. I privately appealed this block to the Committee, but it expired before the discussion concluded. A subsequent request to ArbCom showed those Committee members who commented on the edits did not dispute the edits I removed were a violation of the policy on claims about living people, but insisted it wasn’t “obvious” and therefore not exempt. When I noticed another defamatory claim about Gjoni, I removed it invoking the same exemption. HJ Mitchell, apparently smelling blood in the water and seeing a chance for petty revenge for my criticism of his conduct during the GamerGate case, imposed a one-month block falsely accusing me of removing the claim in bad faith. The anti-GamerGate SPA who previously fought me actually defended my removals against Bernstein in this case.
Unfortunately, my criticism of administrators in the GamerGate case created not shortage of them itching at revenge. I continued making comments on my page, such as noting my ban from Wikipedia “criticism” site Wikipediocracy where I privately corrected an admin on the site who mischaracterized my speculation about the departure of a controversial moderator shortly after a feminist user on the site tried to stir up resentment against said moderator. When I sought to alert a couple people to concerns I had about a user running for adminship who repeatedly made needlessly inflammatory attacks on conspiracy theorists in articles, 5 albert square, an associate of Mitchell who was subject to some embarrassment after imposing a horrendously bad bock on my account that was rapidly removed and was supporting the admin candidate I was criticizing, decided to join in on the dogpile to silence a critic by adding three months to my block and blocking access to my talk page for the duration. Editor Cla68 raised concerns to which Mitchell argued I violated my GamerGate ban by responding to serious false accusations made against me on the “Sea Lions of Wikipedia” blog. The user I raised concerns about would successfully gain adminship and proceed to abuse his position in furtherance of his side in disputes(See Appendix D), the very thing I was concerned would happen.
I made attempts to appeal both Mitchell’s and albert square’s blocks immediately after they occurred, but never heard back on those appeals with one Arbitrator telling me he could not find the appeal of Mitchell’s block. Under ArbCom procedures, such e-mails should have been processed within a day by then-coordinating arbitrator Roger Davies or his deputy. Around that time, I co-authored a blog post for Wikipediocracy describing how Davies was inconsistent on several ArbCom cases and seemed to fluctuate based off personal connections he had to the parties involved or other personal biases. Davies had protected an editor friendly with him by arguing harassment from third parties mitigated the editor’s actions, no matter how egregious, yet in other cases where his beliefs conflicted with editors citing harassment included misconduct from those editors towards those harassing them as cause for severe sanctions. In the GamerGate case he rightly dismissed harassment as a mitigating factor, but this was more a case of him being accidentally correct. Furthermore, in discussing the piece, I noted a case where Davies seemed to shift his position on recusing with respect to an editor to whom he had close connections in order to protect another editor who was friendly with him. He seemed to give me the silent treatment in subsequent discussion.
What happened after the series of blocks I received has been discussed in detail and was of significant controversy on Wikipedia. During my three-month block, an administrator I had previously warned privately about editing on matters where the administrator had conflicts of interest, resumed editing on such matters. Although repeatedly warning the user and noting how the edits were promotional, unsourced, or otherwise violated policy, the administrator continued and would not respond, cease, or disclose the conflicted editing as required. I reported the administrator to the Arbitration Committee, as I warned I would do if such editing continued, and the “anti-harassment” ArbCom proved their “effectiveness” in dealing with “harassment” by banning me indefinitely while making false claims about the reasons, which they later struck, in an apparent effort to confuse me as they deliberately hid from me why I was banned or that a ban was being considered (months later Wales confirmed it resulted from my report to the Committee). Ostensibly treating my report and prior warnings as “harassment” of the administrator, members of ArbCom heralded their actions in banning and smearing a whistleblower as proving they were sticking to the “anti-harassment” agenda for which they were elected, though it really served another agenda that they also represented.
Next: Part 9: One Year Since the Fall
Previous: Part 7: Knights with no Horses
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