Talk:Gamergate (harassment campaign)/Archive 58

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Lead: "falsely accused"?

I believe it supports a neutral tone to leave out "falsely", as it has a partisan tone to it. There is an edit war going on over this matter; I put my vote with simply "accused".--Quisqualis (talk) 04:31, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Per the sources she was falsely accused. Saying anything else would be partisan. Artw (talk) 04:40, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

We go with sources in these cases. Falsely stays in. PeterTheFourth (talk) 04:55, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

It's unclear what you mean by "partisan" here. This isn't a question of one political party's opinion vs. the other's on a matter of policy, it's a strongly-sourced statement of fact which is undisputed by any other reliable source. Moreover, to describe false allegations about a living person as anything but false is a clear and unambiguous WP:BLP violation, as doing so would portray that person in a false light. Neutrality does not mean that we treat reliable sources and anonymous gossipmongering as equally truthful. The claim that there was anything unethical about the relationship between Quinn and Grayson has been repeatedly investigated and dismissed as unfounded - Grayson never reviewed Quinn's games and wrote nothing about her games after entering into the relationship. These are documented facts. QED, there was nothing unethical about their relationship and hence the accusations were false. The cited sources are in the article, and for you to meaningfully dispute their conclusions here would require something significantly more than mere opinion. If you can't cite reliable sources for your argument, it doesn't belong on Wikipedia. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 08:49, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

In my opinion, this would require attribution on behalf of those who say it was false. We either leave it all out, or we attribute the accusations and the dismissals with RS. Other articles on misconduct allegations generally attribute every single sentence, including in the lead. wumbolo ^^^ 16:53, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Nope. See WP:YESPOV - it's unambiguous policy not to attribute facts: Avoid stating facts as opinions. Uncontested and uncontroversial factual assertions made by reliable sources should normally be directly stated in Wikipedia's voice. Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion, although it is helpful to add a reference link to the source in support of verifiability. Further, the passage should not be worded in any way that makes it appear to be contested. It is an uncontested and uncontroversial fact that the allegations are false. (Unless you have a reliable source which treats the allegations as true. If so, please present it here.) NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 17:08, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

NorthBySouthBaranof sort of beat me to it, but the proposal sounds iffy to me -- but there's every chance I'm wrong. If you'd like to present sources or draft something, I for one would certainly take a look. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:12, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@NorthBySouthBaranof: does that work with BLPs? wumbolo ^^^ 17:15, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@Wumbolo: I'm not sure what you mean. The named living person in question here is Zoe Quinn, and the allegations against her are documented to be false. Thus, BLP requires us to make that fact unambiguously known. That is the only BLP issue here. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 17:18, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@NorthBySouthBaranof: I mixed up the BLP policy. wumbolo ^^^ 17:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

This is incredibly straightforward. First of all the sources all rightfully point out the accusations are false. Secondly, the sources give the reason why the accusations are false, the articles written by Grayson were written before any relationship began. Thirdly, the ex who wrote the blog post himself is cited in the sources as saying the accusations were baseless: And Gjoni later updated his blog to say, "To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature." [1] This is on the same tier as saying "Queen Elizabeth II has been falsely accused of being a reptillian." "Falsely accused" is the only option that complies with BLP policies and isn't patently absurd. Brustopher (talk) 17:36, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't hear your example. "falsely accused" in your sentence is patently absurd because it is obviously false. wumbolo ^^^ 17:46, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

The case here is equally patently absurd, I believe is the point. This isn't a current event, this is a settled matter from 2 or more years ago. Like Pizzagate being a debunked, false conspiracy this was a false accusation as well. ValarianB (talk) 17:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I understand the case. I didn't understand the example. This is no ordinary event, this includes living people so it has to pass BLP, which was my concern. wumbolo ^^^ 18:07, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

BLP is also my concern, and I'm guessing others' as well. Let's say, arguendo, that it's an objective fact that I am not a murderer. Can you see how "Dumuzid was accused of being a murderer" carries BLP concerns that "Dumuzid was FALSELY accused of being a murderer" does not? Innuendo is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but it's best avoided precisely because BLP. I hope that makes sense. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 20:35, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dumuzid: All clear, thank you for the explanation. wumbolo ^^^ 20:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Final paragraph on lede

"Industry responses to Gamergate have been predominantly negative. Gamergate has led figures both inside and outside the industry to focus on better methods of tackling online harassment."

Hey, I think this final paragraph on the lede is a bit unclear and could use clarifying - where we write that industry response to Gamergate was negative, do we mean the response to the harassment campaign, the controversy around it, or the 'movement' that grew out of it? I tried to improve it, but Zero Serenity thought my edit here was lacking and reverted. Zero, what made my edit bad? Is there any other way we could improve it? PeterTheFourth (talk) 16:51, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Zero here, basically on stylistic grounds. When you ask "do we mean the response to the harassment campaign, the controversy around it, or the 'movement' that grew out of it?" I think the easy answer is "yes." Therefore the associated ambiguity is not an issue (at least for me). The current version to me reads a bit better and I think the wider ambit of the language is a feature, not a bug. All that being said, I am perfectly comfortable with either version. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 16:54, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

It's not that I think my edit is good/better - it's probably terrible - but I do think that the wording in general could be improved. PeterTheFourth (talk) 16:55, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, maybe also remove "to Gamergate" and merge to previous paragraph. wumbolo ^^^ 16:56, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I hear ya Peter. Here's the long form of the why to me: It feels like the way you wrote it the industry was condemning the "harassment campaign" which could be read to mean the "unaffiliated trolls" people keep yammering about, but not those who enabled them or basically made up the story to begin with. Zero Serenity ^{(talk - contributions)} 16:57, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Ah, ouch. I'm sorry I gave that impression in my writing, bad mistake on my part. PeterTheFourth (talk) 17:07, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Don't worry about it. I understand your intentions. Zero Serenity ^{(talk - contributions)} 17:28, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Also for the record, I certainly don't think there's anything terrible about the edit! And I am all for general improvements. Happy almost Friday! Dumuzid (talk) 18:05, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

My reading is that this part of the lead summarizes the "Gaming industry response" section" which is about the response to Gamergate specifically and which uses sources that uniformly name it as such. So the lead has to use that wording to rather than tiptoeing around it. --Aquillion (talk) 08:14, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Hot take

Instead of writing in the lede "Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy, the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it, and the loosely organized movement that emerged around the hashtag.", we could instead be writing "Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy as well as for the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it." I think this would A) jive a lot better with more contemporary, informed sources and B) be a lot clearer for the reader, given that there's no distinct seperation between the harassment campaign and the identical but sometimes differently marketed 'movement'. I could be completely wrong! I haven't done any edits yet, so let me know if I'm terrible? PeterTheFourth (talk) 02:28, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

I think your version is vastly preferable. I also feel (for all the good that does) that it is representative of the current state of play, so to speak. Count me as a supporter. Thanks. Dumuzid (talk) 12:58, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Concur. Go with $GOD.--Jorm (talk) 16:07, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Third. Zero Serenity ^{(talk - contributions)} 21:08, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback people. I've gone ahead and made the edit. PeterTheFourth (talk) 11:52, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Other parts of the article may need to be edited as well in order to keep it neutral and free of bias. Editing articles about things like this is always risky. We can’t make it appear that we are taking sides. Neutrality is key. A lot of allegations were thrown at people on both sides of the issue, and based on the sources I’ve seen, this wasn’t just a simple harassment campaign as some people have claimed it was. I’d also think you need to elaborate on what you mean by “more informed” sources. I also can’t help but notice you put the word ‘movement’ in quotation marks. There was a lot of variation amongst posts tagged #gamergate. Some of these were harassment and trolling, while others appeared to be more concerned with issues within the gaming community. It appears there was indeed a sort of movement beyond the harassment campaign. There’s also the related hashtag #notyourshield, for example, in which minority, women, and LGBT gamers stated that they stood with the gamergate movement against the anti-gamergaters. I think this article needs some work, as well as to be patrolled frequently, as the issues raised by Gamergate are still a hot button issue. Anasaitis (talk) 20:30, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

"the issues raised by Gamergate are still a hot button issue". No, they're not, and they never were. They were artificial issues raised as a smokescreen and everyone knows it now. We're not going to be revisiting this chestnut again.--Jorm (talk) 20:32, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Good afternoon! And I think I speak for most everyone when I say we are all for positive changes and improvements to the article, so suggest away. As for #notyourshield, that's a bit trickier than you present it. See, e.g., this article: [2] Other than that, cheers! Dumuzid (talk) 20:34, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I understand it’s complicated. That’s part of the reason I mentioned it. As for Jorm’s Accusations that the issues were a smokescreen, I would have to disagree. Gamergate was a complicated controversy. It involved such issues as representation in video games/the gaming community, online harassment, journalistic ethics, and corruption, among other things. Those issues are still very much relevant today. My major concern is that the article remain neutral. I know a lot of people are very opinionated about this issue, but we need to keep such biases out of the articles. One thing I noticed, for example, was that several references were deleted. Some of these references seem important. One of them was one of the articles which angered many of the people that started using the gamergate hashtag. One thing that was important to the controversy was the accusations that the gaming community was being personally attacked. This article, titled “Death of the ‘Gamer’ Identity”, is one of the Articles the pro-gamergate people cited as evidence. The title alone makes it clear why such accusations were made. Articles like this appear in many pro-gamergate videos, with some calling it ”proof” that they were right. I think this article needs to be restored to the references. Anasaitis (talk) 22:21, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Do not re-implement your BLP violations.--Jorm (talk) 22:27, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Jorm, I am well aware of the BLP policy. There was no need to post that on my talk page. My concerns with the article aren’t related to a specific individual. I am concerned with neutrality. Neutral Point of View is one of the three core content policies of Wikipedia. Nothing I am proposing violates the privacy of living people. I am not making sensational claims about the people harassed or those who used the gamergate hashtag. I am not trying to prove or disprove any accusations made about the women who were the targets of harassment. I just want to make sure the article has a neutral point of view. If you feel that I have violated BLP policy, then please explain to me why you feel that way. Anasaitis (talk) 22:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Your edit violates BLP by removing the impeccably-sourced statement that the accusations against Quinn were and are false, among other things. To imply an accusation is not false, when in fact it is, is a clear misrepresentation of the sources and thus portrays Quinn in a false light. You obviously have not read BLP, or you have not understood it. Either way, your edit is improper. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 22:54, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. I was not trying to imply that the accusations were true. I felt that the fact that the claims were labeled “accusations” was sufficient to imply that they were not proven facts. I was in no way attempting to state whether the accusations were true. I merely felt that the article didn’t have an entirely neutral point of view. Thank you for actually trying to discuss this with me. Anasaitis (talk) 23:40, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

No. I'm done giving Gamergators my time or explanations. The onus is on you to convince people that your edits are "neutral" and supported by reliable sources. I'm done talking with you now.--Jorm (talk) 22:55, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I am not a “Gamergator”. I do not appreciate your baseless name calling. This is a talk page, not some forum where we talk trash to each other. Please explain why you think I am violating the MLP policy. Anasaitis (talk) 23:09, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

The claims are not only "not proven facts", they're also false. By deleting "falsely" in this sentence "#gamergate hashtag users falsely accused Quinn of an unethical relationship", the implication is that the accusations might be true (they are not). You claim to be making the article more neutral, but you're skewing it towards the POV of Gamergaters. --ChiveFungi (talk) 23:48, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Anasaitis, just a quick note on our Neutral Point of View policy. It doesn't mean that we're supposed to tell every side like those ProCon books. NPOV says that we as editors are supposed to neutrally summarize (i.e., fairly, accurately, without bias, etc.) what reliable sources say about the subject, and that we're supposed to do so in a way that is roughly proportional to the weight of those sources. Our article reflects what virtually all reliable sources discuss, which is (a) harassment of mostly women in the games industry, (b) ethics claims that have been dismissed as trivial, conspiracy theories, or groundless, and (c) that this is a right-wing, anti-feminist and anti-diversity cultural backlash. Whether you or I or anyone actually agrees with that assessment doesn't matter. We're here to summarize what reliable sources say, that's all. Woodroar (talk) 00:00, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Best sources

There are certain lines of argument that have been rehashed so often on this page as to become predictable. Almost every difficult question eventually comes down to aspects of the NPOV policy. One or another person will feel some thing is false balance, or some other thing is cherrypicked. Often these allegations are made without any serious effort to substantiate the truth of the matter. Luckily, most of these arguments can be tested and subjected to falsification. We have the sources. The prescribed treatment for NPOV disuputes is WP:BESTSOURCES.

In particular it seems that the only way to really settle questions of weight will be using the best sources' assignment of weight. What I mean is, there are claims multiply attested by the likes of CNN, BBC, and NPR but are still alleged to be cherrypicking and false balance. What can anyone say to that? The environment is such that an editor's subjective assessment of weight across the whole body of sources will never find a consensus. In contrast, the weight given to a claim within any single source is much less subjective. It's right there on the page. The question of what the best sources are still has an element of subjectivity, but there are policies and guidelines for that. The theory that I'm working under is that a two-step process of identifying best sources, followed by identifying weight within those sources, still affords much less ground for subjectivity than making an argument about due weight out of the blue.

So what are the best sources? I laid out my thoughts on that about a year ago[3]. This included some scholarly articles, as well as many journalistic sources "of record" like the New York Times and The Guardian. There was pushback on that selection. Actual substantive criticisms were hard to elicit, but a few principles could be gleaned from the community's feedback.

1. Scholarly journal articles are to be preferred over journalistic sources.
2. Journalistic sources are to be preferred over online supplements or other scholarly output outside main journal articles.
3. Sources recent enough to form a broad overview are to be preferred over those in the thick of the controversy's origin.

Again, since I know what a suspicious lot editors can be, these are not rules I devised to give my arguments an edge. This is the feedback I got from the opposition last year. The take-home message is that our best sources will be recent journal articles.I add to that another stipulation on what it takes to be a best source for the particular purpose of assigning due weight: the source needs to actually be principally about Gamergate. An article that mentions the controversy in passing on the third page might have something useful to say, but it does not and cannot say how much weight to give that one thing in relation to everything else in the topic area.

To my knowledge, there are just four sources that pass all hurdles:

• Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
• Perreault, Gregory P.; Vos, Tim P. (September 30, 2016). "The GamerGate controversy and journalistic paradigm maintenance". Journalism. doi:10.1177/1464884916670932. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• Braithwaite, Andrea (October 7, 2016). "It's About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity". Social Media + Society. doi:10.1177/2056305116672484.
• Salter, Michael (February 14, 2017). "From geek masculinity to Gamergate: the technological rationality of online abuse". Crime, Media, Culture. doi:10.1177/1741659017690893.

That is not to say there are not or cannot be other sources considered best. If there are, I just don't know of them. Nor are these selected according to my personal preference. The criteria are exactly and only what I outlined above. The latter two in fact are not at all in alignment with my personal views on the topic. The first order of business is to find some consensus on whether these four are our best sources.

Rhoark (talk) 00:42, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Haven't we been down this line of argument before? Other than in the rejected RfC? At any rate, I reject any bulk rejection of the current articles sources. No reason you can't make concrete suggestions based on them, of course, but I think if they're suggestions that go contrary to other, less obscure sources you are indeed going to meet some pushback on that. Artw (talk) 01:02, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
  • Yeah, I think wanting to remove mainstream, high-quality news coverage from an article about a (comparatively) recent event - which I assume is the gist of this suggestion? - is an obvious nonstarter. And, as I've been pointing out elsewhere, it is not always true that recent academic papers are strictly superior sources to everything else. WP:RS warns against relying too heavily on individual recent papers, for instance, especially in a rapidly-evolving field; often, secondary sources reporting or covering them are preferable. They're very valuable, but they still have to be used with some caution (like any source.) And WP:BESTSOURCES itself certainly doesn't support the idea that eg. the New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, etc. are not best-quality sources (it suggests looking "online, in books, and in journals", not exclusively in journals.) That said, there's no harm in looking for more academic sources, since many new ones have appeared recently. Here's a few from a quick Google Scholar search. I haven't looked at these (or where they were published) in-depth, so they may not all be ideal, but... well, just glancing over them should give you the general idea. If anything they are far more blunt than our current article. Also note that these aren't cherry-picked; I did a Google Scholar search for articles from this year referencing Gamergate and grabbed the ones from the first page or so that seemed relevant (ie. not about ants, and not just mentioning it in passing). --Aquillion (talk) 01:49, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
    • This is not about removing anything, least of all the NYT. This started because of people copping the attitude that claims straight out of NYT were inherently undue or cherrypicking - that they could not be included in the page, regardless of what other material was brought along with it. You can look back to the beginning, "The instigators of the campaign are allied with a broader movement that has rallied around the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate, a term adopted by those who see ethical problems among game journalists and political correctness in their coverage. The more extreme threats, though, seem to be the work of a much smaller faction and aimed at women."[4] Or you can go with the post-Trump epoch, "But as #GamerGate, as it came to be called, grew, it coalesced into a movement that looked awfully political. Despite their self-presentation as ciphers, trolls have always had a point of view, and #GamerGate offered a platform for a whole coalition to express its distrust of media, resentment toward women and anger at progressive critiques of racism and misogyny."[5] Either way, the story is the same. Gamergate contains harassment, but Gamergate is more than harassment. It is and always has been a political movement. I'll put it to you straight, I want this article to reflect all of the sources mentioned in this thread, and right now it's not doing that. Knowing that, how would you like me to define best sources or due weight? Rhoark (talk) 03:24, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
      • Rhoark, I'm not sure you're making a useful distinction. Throughout the history of this mess, ideology/politics has served as "justification" for harassers and haters. --Orange Mike | Talk 03:39, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
      • I’ve not read the papers you mention, but glancing at the abstracts of them I’m not really seeing much to support the “Gamergate is bigger than a harassment campaign” angle you seem to be going for here. Quite the opposite TBH. Would agree with OrangeMike that the culture wars/alt-right politics angle are an aspect of the harrasment campaign, not something that makes it something more. As a “political movement” its only really notable as a precursor to something else. Artw (talk) 04:01, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
      • You're the one who asked for me to find up-to-date sources, though. Let me go over the ones I just found and, for the ones with easy-to-find descriptions, pull them out. (And, I'll reiterate, this is every relevant result I found within the first few pages of a Google Scholar search for coverage from this year):
        • In 2014, there was an escalation of online harassment against women involved in gaming. In a phenomenon that came to be known as #Gamergate, female gamers, reviewers and developers were targeted by often-anonymous participants within the games, as well as on a number of websites and through social media. First sentence of the abstract.
        • Nieborg and Foxman discuss the event known as Gamergate, a niche misogynistic online movement primarily targeting female game developers and critics. First sentence of the abstract again.
        • The 2014 harassment campaign known as GamerGate initially targeted... It then goes on to briefly cover the same stuff as our history. First mention of Gamergate in the article.
        • Gamergaters, a group predominantly made up of the industry’s constructed gamer identity, organized on anonymous message boards like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, as well as social media site Twitter. They planned a misogynistic harassment campaign against Quinn that included rape and death threats. Main description of Gamergate.
        • In this article, we examine how GamerGate trapped both its unwilling targets and willing participants in an unending cycle of rhetorical invention through a mechanism of aggressive, hostile, mob-like activism (Ames 48; Massanari 334; Mortensen 4-5). Influential elements within GamerGate, we argue, specifically subverted the functionality of Twitter as a corporate media platform in order to test a variety of loosely connected arguments to see what would resonate within whatever aggrieved audience the GamerGate collective could find - first sentence. (This article is particularly interesting because it analyzes the underlying tactics behind the campaign; more than the others, I think this one could add useful stuff to the article, unrelated to this broader big-picture debate over framing.)

And that's just from the sources I found just now, for just this year, putting aside all the ones already in the article. Meanwhile, that particular NYT article is from October 2014 (when events had only just gotten started), and, partially because of that, goes into far less depth than our other sources. The other one... look, I'd probably classify First Word as an opinion column, and it only discusses Gamergate in passing, but even if you don't, are you sure that's what you want to go with? Do you want the article to say that some of Gamergate's main driving forces were "distrust of media, resentment toward women and anger at progressive critiques of racism and misogyny" and that one of their main goals was to "silence feminist critics?" (In fact, I'd argue that that cultural dimension is mostly covered already in the existing article in our "social and cultural implications" section.) --Aquillion (talk) 05:23, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• As I expected, when rubber meets road we switch from, "I don't see why we wouldn't consider NYT among the best sources," to "here's why NYT is not the best source." That's why this section exists. I want people to participate in forming a rubric for best sources that is independent of what the sources say. Several of those you linked looked important, and I'll be diving deeper into those in the coming days. Rhoark (talk) 14:21, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

This appears to be some dorky point scoring excercise and not a good faith attempt to improve the article. As such this conversation should probably be closed. Artw (talk) 15:47, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• I mean, we've discussed that particular article over and over ad-nauseum, so you cannot be unaware of the problems with relying as heavily on it as you want to. The New York Times is a top-quality source, but obviously we're not going to write the entire article around a single line from a single piece from near the very beginning of the controversy, especially when it only touches on things in passing and makes it clear it didn't do much research into that point; "...seem to be the work..." doesn't carry much weight when contrasted with the extensive in-depth analysis later sources did into how the campaign was structured. That said, if you're going to read one in particular, I strongly recommend the Dark Patterns one, which seems particularly insightful with regard to how the whole thing was structured and why. It ties together a lot of the observations older sources made at the time (with regards to the ever-shifting claims and vague demands and the like) and explains why it was that way - like a few other sources, it notes that well-meaning people ended up getting dragged into it, but it goes into much more detail on the specific tools and methods that were used to manipulate them. My feeling (based on reading it) is that a lot of the "political" stuff you think you saw was really just what that paper describes as the result of how Influential elements within GamerGate, we argue, specifically subverted the functionality of Twitter as a corporate media platform in order to test a variety of loosely connected arguments to see what would resonate within whatever aggrieved audience the GamerGate collective could find. You saw things within it that appealed to you because the goal was to use those as bait for the purpose of instituting an us-versus-them environment from the outset. The targets of GamerGate quickly become a captive audience in GamerGate’s activist supraplatform with little choice to exit the GamerGate experience short of leaving Twitter. The hostility also created a bait and switch scenario for any in GamerGate who expected productive activism and engagement as the complete lack of consensus making tools within GamerGate kept the activism within a perpetual stage of invention, constantly churning loosely related arguments with no capacity for resolution. That is, people did, in fact, enter their sphere with the expectation of productive activism, but that this was always intended by the instigators (from the start, in the original planning documents) as a bait-and-switch intended to push towards not some set policy outcome or achievable condition, but rather the unconditional defeat and apology from an ever-growing list of enemies for behavior that is almost omnipotent as described above. --Aquillion (talk) 21:20, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• I knew full well it would not be accepted to use NYT in that fashion. Apologies for any gamesmanship, but it seems the quickest way to head off the idea that I'm engaging in some kind of subterfuge by suggesting some sources are less authoritative than others was to provoke someone else to argue the same line. Maybe we can agree there are suboptimal sources, including some from the NYT. Two things that can mark sources as not being the best are that they are opinion or that they are from 2014. Right now, such sources are carrying more than half the article. That includes every source cited for a claim of the form "Gamergate is..." or "Gamergate was..." It's possible to do better at this point. We can do better at using sources that have the authority to outline the controversy, and we can do better within the article about making clear statements in place of insinuations. I've listed some sources that can help, and you have as well. Scholarly orientation is an edge, but if people can cite more recent news publications that can hang in the same crowd as these journal articles, all the better. Rhoark (talk) 23:16, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
• I don't want to soapbox about the topic, but in response to speculation about where I stand on things: the first thing I ever heard about Gamergate was when the "Gamers are over" articles came out. From the start, there was already a "them" who seemed to have knives out for "us". I don't see how any 4chan trolls could have done anything to engineer that unless they managed to ghostwrite for Leigh Alexander. I think that people who say women are not gamers or who say women are not accepted by gamers are wrong. I also don't think people who share this view are automatically aligned with harassment. My view is a view that's represented in the best sources, and it's a view I want to see echoed in the Wikipedia article to the maximum extent policy will permit. Rhoark (talk) 23:29, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Do you have any concrete suggestions for changes based on the academic articles you provided initially? If not we should probably re-hat this. Artw (talk) 23:36, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Rhoark, I honestly don't doubt your good faith. But do you see why "I measure the chronology from my own awareness" is troubling as a basis? Moreover, the entire concept of "best" sources strikes me as not particularly useful. While some sources are undoubtedly better than others, robbed of context, the whole discussion seems a bit unmoored to me. That being said, if you have any suggestions for improvement, I am all ears. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 00:17, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

• I understand what you're saying about "us" vs "them", which was very central to the mindset that Gamergate was structured to encourage. Again, the Dark Patterns source describes that as exactly the tactic that the people who organized this used to rope people in. GamerGate’s use of operational and community-building tweets reflect a platform with a clear us (GamerGate) versus them (feminists, critics, the media) nature. By roping people into this, they ensured an experience that would keep people in the fold: Each event would become its own happening, serving to fuel the cycle of news-promotion-discussion again and again without any move toward resolution nor any expression of achievable goals or end game. Over time, this cycle of accusation and amplification would result in a noisy hashtag where dozens of targets and claims of purpose existed: anti-feminism, media criticism, personal vendetta, and opposition to any number of progressive policies and beliefs that might feed the accusation-amplification model. In this way, GamerGate existed in a perpetual state of invention, spinning off argument after argument with no interest in selecting a consensus cause other than maintaining its amplified, aggressive, combative, and noisy existence. An initial wave of harassment resulted in responses that were then spun as corrupt collusion in order to draw people in; and by intentionally encouraging unity under a banner that continued such "noise", the organizers ensured that anyone who signed on to the "Gamergate experience" would face criticism drawn by that behavior, tying them further and further into the backlash against this vaguely-defined group of enemies. An initial wave of harassment prompted a backlash that was spun as an attack on all gamers and was used to draw people in, who were then encouraged to represent themselves as part of a faceless anonymous mass; then, when some members of this mass behaved badly, the backlash was further used to solidify the "us-vs-them" mindset. Through this process, the end-state of Gamergate essentially became (as that paper describes) the absolute humiliation and defeat of this vast, nebulous, ever-changing other - a goal specifically intended to be unobtainable and to keep the noise machine running for as long as possible. Not everyone who was roped into this intended to produce a wave of harassment, definitely (and our current article doesn't imply that that that's the case); but the larger structure (as laid out in the planning documents) was intentionally constructed to produce noise and harassment, not to actually achieve any coherent or meaningful goals. The people who were drawn in by those goals were being used as part of a campaign of harassment (and, later, once conservative media personalities latched onto it, recruitment) that meticulously spun together a web of fictions that would continuously justify further entrenchment and escalation. The organizers spun together a vague "them" for you out of a random smattering of articles; but this was mostly a rhetorical invention aimed at pushing buttons in your head (and was the result of an ever-changing assortment of arguments to see which ones would mobilize the most people), not something that reflected reality. And on this point, I feel the sources are in near-unanimous agreement. The only disagreement I see is the degree to which some sources emphasize that it was entirely directionless, with the goals being purely about harassment; and those that emphasize that it was the first move by what would eventually become the Alt-Right, testing a random assortment of lines of attack that would mobilize people towards their general goals and against their perceived enemies. That, we could probably go into more detail on in the article. But... look, I honestly, truly appreciate the fact that you were willing to lay bare the way you got roped into it yourself, since it does directly relate to what you want to add to the article and why it can't happen. The "other" you're talking about isn't real, not in the sense you mean. It was intentionally nebulous and poorly-defined, and at this point we have many sources detailing how and why that was. I get what you're trying to add to the article now - this nebulous "us-vs-them" feeling, this idea of Gamergate as a grand crusade against a poorly-defined but infinitely malicious Other - and while, yes, we can cover that in some form, outside of maybe "anti-feminism" (which is already well-covered in the article, I think), the sources that really take a hard look at that "grand crusade" feeling describe it as a tactic that was used to manipulate you. --Aquillion (talk) 02:14, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

• It's definitely a phenomenon that has happened. As a source, Dark Patterns is probably a good explainer on that. It should find its way into the article. As I've tried to explain, you miss the mark using the second person to towards me w.r.t. manipulation by 4chan trolls - unless you conjecture that the trolls are in the driver's seat when it comes to Leigh Alexander or even more mainstream sources that continue to this day to try to cast a very wide net of collective guilt for what happened to Zoe Quinn. Don't overlook how much that kind of behavior contributes to polarization, without which the trolls would have very little substance to work with. This is something that sources do touch on, and should be addressed better (within the confines of due weight). That's beside any edits immediately on the table, so if you'd like to continue on this theme it might be better on my talk page. Rhoark (talk) 19:57, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

References

My evaluation: #s 1, 3, 4, and 7 are RS and may have something to contribute, but mostly talk about tangential things like League of Legends harassment, Ghostbusters, Sad Puppies, or the concept of "fandom". Of the aforementioned, #1 seems most useful. #2 is very interesting, since it mainly sets out to describe what mainstream media coverage of the controversy was like. In that light it's principal value will be as a resource for us as editors looking back on the coverage. The thesis seems to be that journalists invoke Gamergate increasingly as a metonym for harassment. #s 5 and 8 look like solid meat and potatoes sources. #5 is narrowly about ggautoblocker, but will be a very good addition within that scope. #8 is a bit broader, with a theme of political influence campaigns via social media and specific tactics used in connection to Gamergate. #6 is an announcement of an event, so probably not reliable except as a statement of the event's agenda. Rhoark (talk) 00:41, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

suggestion per sources

Rather than talking about the sources, make some suggestions towards edits with the proper citations. I don't think anything appropriate will be turned down. I, also, think that some of your suggestions have the potential to compress some of the overcitations. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 04:15, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Honestly, based on the above description, I'm wondering if it might be worth combining and revising the "Gamergate activities" and "Debate over ethics allegations" sections into a single section describing Gamergate's broad tactics, structure, and membership. We have much better sources on those than we did when those sections were written (and a lot of the latter-day academic coverage seems to focus more on that aspect) - less talking heads arguing back and forth, less blow-by-blow from individual 2014 activities, more "these things were used to move these people; these are the core channels where it was planned; these are the buttons it pushed at various times to get people moving." And, also, we could probably stand to remove / replace some of the "talking head" quotes throughout the article - that is, quotes from people who are neither directly connected to the controversy nor relevant experts nor major figures in a relevant field. There was a period when people would drop op-eds into the article to argue points back and forth by proxy, which I don't think really improved it. --Aquillion (talk) 06:27, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. Artw (talk) 06:50, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

I wish I shared your optimism on that point, but I'll continue on a cautious timetable. I understand the sentiment of "just show me the edits" when conversation gets abstract, but it will be easier to navigate the inevitable disagreements if we maximize safe common ground. Clearing out some cruft like Aquillion has started to do is a great step in the right direction. It won't take long though to pick all the low hanging fruit, and then we'll need answers to some thorny questions. As I've mentioned, most of the article is supported by suboptimal sources. There are better sources that can re-support essentially the same claims, but doing that properly will involve re-contextualizing in places. Realistically, that's going to cause some fights.

Some things I've tried to introduce in the past have been called cherrypicking, and I want to make sure I'm responding to those concerns by having an open and transparent conversation about sources. I'd like us to develop a set of sources that we can agree is not just high-quality on an individual source basis, but also as a collection is reasonably complete coverage of the topic. If the set is trusted as a set then there's no cause for saying any source in that set is cherrypicked. A claim can still be cherrypicked out of a trusted set, but then there's an easily verifiable process to solve the cherrypicking by pulling in whatever else it takes to contrast or contextualize the first claim. Without that groundwork, it's more likely to devolve into shouting.

For now I will digest the additional sources Aquillion linked. I'll be watching the pruning with interest. Rhoark (talk) 20:50, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

I think that as long as you don't try to pull a "but it was really a movement about ethics" bullshit line, we'll probably be fine. Time has shown that argument the door. --Jorm (talk) 22:25, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Some of the aspects about journalism are in the sources. I'm not going to honor any special pleading about that, but you can be a watchdog on ensuring sources are used correctly. Rhoark (talk) 16:15, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

This conversation seems to have deviated from your initial "best sources" question, but reading From geek masculinity to Gamergate: the technological rationality of online abuse I see "Embittered by Quinn’s decision to end their brief relationship, Gjoni, also a video game developer..." Do sources confirm that, our article doesn't specify. It's a minor and arguably irrelevant detail for our purposes but if inaccurate (or fringe) raises concerns about the paper's reliability for statements of fact. James J. Lambden (talk) 17:38, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I did some looking into this, and apparently prior to their falling out, Gjoni and Quinn worked together on an unreleased game. So, while that's never been his primary occupation as far as I can tell, he has been a game developer. Rhoark (talk) 23:28, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Any journalism?

Best sources are often academic, but that doesn't have to be the case. What do people feel are the most reputable journalism references out there? We want later, evolved perspectives, but it's not in their nature for newspapers to revisit a topic out of the blue unless there's some major development. The last big wave of coverage was over SXSW. Narrowing the field to reports filed after the convention was said and done, the most reputable coverage looks like [6] and [7]. The other thing that makes journalists talk about Gamergate these days is Donald Trump, and this[8] seems like the most comprehensive take in that vein. Rhoark (talk) 16:41, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Sources

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

The lead doesn't cite any sources? Because the authors of the lead are giving background information from what appears to be a biased perspective that is laying specific accusations of harassment against one side in response to what the article calls "feminism", without detailing what was the issue with the so-called feminism. It then proceeds to draw a conclusion favorable to one side from the start, which perhaps shouldn't be done in the lead. Instead, I think the lead shouldn't go into as many details in order to encourage the readers to go on in the article and take a more in-depth look at the arguments from both sides to draw their own conclusion.Tolkien5 (talk) 10:31, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

The lead section is an introduction to and summary of the sourced content in the body of the article. As such, it doesn't need citations if that's what we, as editors, decide. If the lead does make any claims that aren't stated and sourced in the body, please list them here (or contribute to the discussion about that very subject above). Note that our neutral point of view policy requires that we fairly represent what reliable, third-party published sources say about the subject, and they're virtually all in agreement that GamerGate is an anti-feminist harassment campaign. (Although there's some debate about it being an "anti-feminist harassment movement" instead....) Woodroar (talk) 15:44, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Background section

The cultural background to the controversy is covered further down, in the "social and political implications" section. I don't feel it's appropriate to move that above the main timeline, since that timeline (still) covers the aspects that received, and continue to receive, the most intensive coverage (and which are generally most prominent in the sources.) There's probably some room to improve that section by merging aspects of the proposed background section in - and I added the sources to the points that this new addition seemed redundant with - but for the most part, it looks like all of this is already there. --Aquillion (talk) 06:20, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I've re-added some of the general overview info from that section that otherwise appeared to be missing. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:27, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Definition of Gamergate

Hey folks, since it seems you guys are the most relevant editors with respect to this topic, I was hoping you could chime in on some ongoing discussions at Talk:Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I feel that the accepted definition of Gamergate is being eroded in this article with language like "Progressive publications also reproached the views held by the game's director Daniel Vávra, who has been a vocal critic of what he believes is a progressive bias in video games journalism. Vávra associates his views on video game journalism with Gamergate." I feel like I'm getting brigaded by the "ethics in game journalism" chanters. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:03, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

To start with, you certainly make this sound like you are trying to WP:CANVAS a group of people you expect to share your POV on the topic. Do be more careful. Regardless, you'll find that even outside of Vavra's article there is little in the way of agreement or stable consensus on the basic definition of Gamergate, either among editors or in the world at large. Here's the best guidance I can offer.

In an earlier section on this page, I've been trying to foster a discussion about what our best sources are. One of those I consider to be the very best source to use as a skeleton outlining the whole topic is Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408. Some of the more recent 2017-2018 scholarship apparently shares my esteem, as I've noticed Mortensen is often cited as an explainer in the introduction to articles with a narrower focus. Here's some of what Mortensen says that speaks to the definition of Gamergate (elisions are mine):

What Was GG? As far as it is possible to tell, GG started as a harassment campaign aimed at developer Zoe Quinn, with her previous boyfriend Eron Gjoni as the initiator for the first accusations against her. Gjoni was drumming up sympathy for himself, justifying his anger through telling stories about Quinn in comments (later deleted) at forums Something Awful and Penny Arcade. [...] The barrage of hate messages online and off-line increased when a group of journalists wrote articles questioning gamer identity, the so-called gamers are dead articles. Some of these articles are sharply worded, and the outrage that followed brought more attention and more participants to the case, now mustering behind GG on Twitter. It was in this shape the event caught the eye of most journalists and researchers, and so the first efforts to understand GG focused on Twitter. Despite being an event that resonated with the subcultures around games and gaming, it was mainly played out in different social media. [...] Ethics or Harassment? The hashtag GG was coined by actor Adam Baldwin in a tweet linking to a later removed YouTube video by ‘‘Internet Aristocrat,’’ August 27, 2014. However, Gamergate Wiki and the Wiki curated by critics of GG, Gamerghazi Wiki, both agree that this conflict started before the hashtag was coined. According to the GG wiki the conflict dated back to 2007, and it was about ethics in games journalism: [...] Alexander and other writers in game and tech media wrote about the problem with gamer as a demography describing people engaging with digital games. Disregarding a connection to the accusations against Zoe Quinn, the common point of these articles was the great distance between people who happen to play games and people who identify as gamers. For the game community to cater mainly to the self-identifying gamers would be to ignore a significant part of the actual players. The reaction was immediate online retaliation, where Alexander became a main target. [...] In response to the flood of online and off-line aggression toward Quinn and her family, Quinn left her home and lived in hiding for the entire autumn of 2014 (K. Stuart, 2014). This caused the critics of GG to name it a harassment campaign against women. The evidence available in the mainstream media as well as from logs of discussions on IRC channels and archives from 4chan favors the critics’ point of view. There are still voices from an academic background that disagree strongly, such as feminism critic Christina Hoff Summers [...] It is vital to keep in mind that GG was not a unified group—the individuals of the swarm were not the whole. Many of those arguing strongly in favor of GG never knew how it had started, where the different ‘‘operations’’ were planned, and never agreed to the aggressive methods used since the beginning of the campaign.

Unfortunately, that's not very concise. There are enough exceptions and caveats that almost anyone could come away feeling Mortensen has agreed with them. If you want short and pithy, you might well turn to newspapers. Another source, Nieborg, David; Foxman, Maxwell. Mainstreaming Misogyny: The Beginning of the End and the End of the Beginning in Gamergate Coverage. pp. 111–130. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72917-6_6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help) reviewed newspaper coverage of Gamergate over time, and reached some of the same conclusions that I had, namely that the events around 2015's SXSW festival were the last major pulse of coverage about Gamergate, and that the NYT story about it is the best exemplar of that coverage.[9] That NYT story says, "Much of it has centered on the games industry and is associated with a grass-roots movement called '#GamerGate,' a term used by a group of people who are fighting against what they say are unfair portrayals of video game enthusiasts as anti-feminists and misogynists. But, paradoxically, people associated with the movement have systematically targeted and attacked women online, including women like Ms. Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic who focuses often on video games and game culture." So basically the mature, late-stage journalist perspective is that it's a he-said she-said story. Nieborg goes on to explain that news coverage beyond that timeframe tends to not actually be talking about Gamergate per se, but uses it as a metonymic shorthand for harassment. That's a sentiment that cannot be ignored, but also must not be mistaken for a definition. Later coverage tends to emphasize a Trump connection, like this Guardian piece[10] which seems archetypal of the trend. Even when operating in this mode however, quality publications do not define Gamergate simplistically as a harassment campaign. Although dripping with condescension for the idea of "ethics in game journalism," the Guardian documents what the concerns were and demurs from saying everyone talking about it was actually harassing somebody.

So there's some food for thought. Take it as you will, but I think an honest starting point has to be that opinions differ. Rhoark (talk) 21:39, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't believe this is canvassing at all. A lot of wikieffort (including yours) was spent on this page and others to come up with a neutral POV consensus for what Gamergate *is*, and to not acknowledge and build on that effort is a monumental waste. It is also vitally important to the mission of Wikipedia that this consensus be uniform across the project, or else be guilty of creating a WP:POVFORK where something means one thing here but other meanings are presented unchallenged elsewhere. I did not come here expecting people to agree with me; I came here to discover if my reading of the article is correct or not. Perhaps this can serve as feedback to you guys about how this article reads: my impression is that Gamergate primarily consists of a harassment campaign targeted at various people in the games industry with many members stridently claiming that their actions are justified by concerns over "ethics in game journalism". If this impression is incorrect, then the article should change to reflect a more accurate definition. Axem Titanium (talk) 22:05, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

This touches on what I was trying to get at under § Lead section wording, above: namely, that our article doesn't give a clear description of what GamerGate is. The best answer seems to be that it depends on whom you ask, as Rhoark suggested. Much of the disagreement here probably stems from trying to place a definitive label on something that defies easy categorization. But I have since come across some descriptions in academic sources (generally the most reliable) that might help here. To wit:

The term 'Gamergate' describes a shifting set of controversies played out online within the gaming industry and the broader 'gamer' community. It is difficult to provide a definitive history or overview to Gamergate [...] The recurrent themes within Gamergate social media activity are frustration over the perceived impingement of progressive politics into the video game industry, and the right of 'gamers' to enjoy gaming free from criticism about sexism, racism, and homophobia. To legitimize this frustration, Gamergate has developed a constantly proliferating set of justifications whose logic is somewhat incoherent outside of 'gamer' subculture, ranging from complaints about unethical conduct in video game journalism to conspiracy theories about mass collusion between feminists, journalists and video game developers.
— Michael Salter, Crime, Justice and Social Media, 2017, pp.41–42

Under the banner of 'ethics in gaming journalism', gamers began a coordinated campaign of abuse and harassment targeting those who were critical of abuse and harassment in gaming, with a particularly intensive focus on Quinn and other prominent women in the industry.
— Salter, p. 45

The harassment campaign known as GamerGate, however, is associated with a young game designer named Zoë Quinn [...] When actor Adam Baldwin used the hashtag #GamerGate for the first time in 27 August 2014 in regard to the Quinn corruption conspiracy, the tag quickly spread and has come to stand in for an online movement that alleged a breach of journalistic ethics, ostensibly caused by conflicts of interest between game makers and professional game reviewers [...] leading to a broader online movement against so-called feminist 'Social Justice Warriors' or SJWs out to destroy games, which circulated on websites, Reddit subthreads, 4chan and 8chan threads.
— Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space, 2017

These sources and others in the news media (and cultural commentators) describe GamerGate variously as a "movement", a "harassment campaign", a "controversy", a "culture war", etc., along with stressing the lack of a unified definition or purpose. So we as encyclopedia editors seem to have our work cut out for us in creating a cogent summary of the phenomenon. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 17:53, 4 May 2018 (UTC) (edited 03:04, 20 May 2018 (UTC))

And maintaining that perspective across the project, which is an equally daunting but vital task. Axem Titanium (talk) 18:03, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. The Nieborg and Foxman source mentioned by Rhoark also adds to the picture of GamerGate as a harassment campaign pretending to be about ethics:

For the uninitiated, Gamergate is best understood as a self-organized, largely anonymous group of 'hooligans' engaging in 'leisure-centered agression' against a small group of women and their supporters (Mortensen 2016) [...] Gamergate's agenda is frustratingly incoherent and contradictory. Clearly, gamers felt that their domain was under attack by unruly women and "Social Justice Warriors" who were perceived as trying to take their games away (Braithwaite 2016) [...] Ultimately, Gamergate supporters created a 'campaign of systemic harassment' (Massanari 2015, p. 2) and, as Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández (2016) found when 'issue-mapping' over 230,000 tweets, they were 'absolutely not concerned only or even primarily with "ethics in games journalism'" (p. 92).
— David Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman in Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment, 2018, pp. 113–14

—Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:16, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Lede edit

Since there hasn't been any forward motion lately, I made a bold edit to the lede[11] in light of this section and the "lede section wording" part above. @PeterTheFourth: reverted, but several hours on he has neglected to discuss the change or raise any cogent objection. While we await his fulfillment of that obligation, I'll lay out my thinking.

1. The lede needs to start off directly informing the reader of what the topic is. Starting off by saying what the Gamergate controversy "concerns" rather than what it is is obfuscatory.
2. Next it can explain why the reader is likely to care, which is that certain people were harassed. This comes as soon as possible after the reader is oriented as to time and place. It's not being hidden or minimized in any way.
3. It has to say though that Gamergate is known for harassment rather than simply that it is harassment. The latter wouldn't reflect the sources at all, as in terms of inches of paper, the sources are more about the cultural context than the harassment at no less than a 5:1 ratio.
4. Finally, in the briefest terms the lede has to describe the movement. The relation of the movement to harassment cannot be glossed over nor oversimplified. We can work on the language, but the underlying situation is that there's disagreement about responsibility. The lede therefore must not give the impression that the question is settled.

Rhoark (talk) 00:01, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

The sources are not in agreement with you, the matter is very much settled. Also in the close of your RFC you were specifically asked not to whitewash Gamergate. Please do not make efforts to do so. Artw (talk) 00:03, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

If you want to talk about sources, you can start anytime. Make your case. Up to this point, certain people have been very diligent about research, and certain other people have tried to get those threads locked. What is whitewashing except trying to quash information that doesn't support your view? Rhoark (talk) 00:29, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Pretend discussion of sources that are cover for rehashes of old arguments with stupid gotchas are also unwanted, yes, so please cease doing that as well. Artw (talk) 01:47, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Rehashing "ethics in journalism"

1. "The controversy relates to sexism in video game culture and how journalists write about it" - this is not well supported, especially the last part. It became clear in recent years that the RS view the "ethics in journalism" thing a bit of cover for the harassment.
2. "gamers criticizing video game journalism." see prior comment
3. eliding this "Statements claiming to represent Gamergate have been inconsistent and contradictory, making it difficult for commentators to identify goals and motives. As a result, Gamergate has often been defined by the harassment its supporters committed. Gamergate supporters have frequently responded to this by denying that the harassment took place or by falsely claiming that it was manufactured by the victims." is very wrong. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 18:58, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

"The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy as well as for the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it." -> "The Gamergate controversy stemmed from a harassment campaign conducted through the use of the hashtag #GamerGate. The controversy centered on issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture. Gamergate is used as a blanket term the harassment campaign, for the controversy, and actions of those participating in it." -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 19:33, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

" Gamergate proponents claimed to be a movement, but had no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. " satisfies criteria 4 in the briefest terms the lede has to describe the movement. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 19:35, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Lead section wording

The current text of the lead section strikes me as unduly vague and digressive, starting off with "The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture..." and moving on to "...supporters of the Gamergate movement..." without explaining what either the controversy or the movement actually are or what the difference might be. To clear things up, I propose changing the current first two paragraphs to the following, with some additional context inserted:

Beginning in August 2014, several women in the video game industry were the targets of an online harassment campaign accompanied primarily by the hashtag #GamerGate. Media outlets use the term Gamergate to describe the pattern of harassment as well as the ensuing controversy, which drew upon issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture.

Gamergate-linked harassment was initially directed toward game developer Zoë Quinn; this followed allegations of an affair between her and the journalist Nathan Grayson published by a former boyfriend of Quinn's. Users of several gaming-related online forums then began to accuse Quinn of using the relationship to obtain a favorable review of her game Depression Quest. Soon, the campaign expanded to target game developer Brianna Wu and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, along with others who spoke out in defense of Quinn.

Online harassment against the women included doxing (publication of personal information such as addresses and phone numbers) along with rape and death threats. Gamergate supporters claimed to oppose growing progressive influence over video game culture, alleging unethical collusion among journalists, feminists, and progressive social critics. Analysts have largely dismissed these concerns as groundless, trivial, based upon unsupported conspiracy theories, or unrelated to actual ethical conflicts.

(Note that the exact article title need not appear in the lead if it doesn't easily fit with the text; see MOS:BOLDTITLE.) The changes would make the lead slightly longer, but since the article is currently more than twice the recommended length at 175 KB, this doesn't seem excessive. Any thoughts? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:48, 27 April 2018 (UTC) (edited 03:17, 20 May 2018 (UTC) – see comment below)

Yeah there's a lot of dead stuff that needs pruning in the article. I've corrected the 'movement' bit. PeterTheFourth (talk) 10:47, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I like the re-working a lot. Two small things--I might say "often accompanied by the hashtag Gamergate" rather than "primarily," simply because as I recall it, there was a lot of harassment not carrying that particular label (which I know we all know). Secondly, can we call it a "claimed" controversy? I have trouble rationalizing how we deal with this "one sided fight," so to speak. That's about the best I can muster. But those are really minor quibbles. Happy Friday to all! Dumuzid (talk) 12:54, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Your concerns are valid but the proposed solution is not. A search for "movement" in the talk page archives returns several results. The most recent "official" conclusion appears to be this 2016 RfC which was closed with the following:

• "There is clear consensus that referring to Gamergate as a movement can be appropriate and is supported by the sources..."

That result can be overturned with a new RfC or consensus of a broad range of editors. In the meantime WP:BOLD changes and edit-warring counter to the RfC close are ill-advised. James J. Lambden (talk) 17:04, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Mr. Lambden, I would caution you against misusing the quoted RFC; while it certainly says that referencing Gamergate as a "movement" can be appropriate, nowhere does it say we must do so in any particular context, much less so that we must do so consistently. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 17:34, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

That RfC was closed on 17 April 2016 and clarified by the closer on 25 April who included the following:

"Gamergate should be discussed as a movement briefly (but not exclusively) in the lead as per WP:Summary style and MOS:LEAD"

As that clarification is explicit and followed your and subsequently PeterTheFourth's removal of "movement" from the lede, we should consider its inclusion settled barring new and firm consensus. I would encourage @Jorm: to self-revert this recent removal. Edit-warring to reverse the results of an RfC is disruptive. James J. Lambden (talk) 18:01, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

My comments on the RFC stand. Movement and Harassment Campaign are not mutually exclusive. In fact you can have harassment by a movement. Koncorde (talk) 19:37, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

That was over two years ago. A more recent discussion concluded with the new wording being fine. Consensus changed, as it does. PeterTheFourth (talk) 23:11, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

• Saying that the people who harassed Quinn, Wu, Sarkeesian and others were part of the "harassment campaign" is actually less incisive and aggressive than saying that it was done by members of some formal Gamergate movement, isn't it? In that it specifically only describes those who were axiomatically responsible for harassment, rather than everyone who was drawn in. If we feel we must use the word "movement", it would be better-placed in the second sentence of the third paragraph, as in As a movement, Gamergate had no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. That sentence is clearly summarizing the description of what Gamergate was like when viewed as a movement, so it seems uncontroversial to put it there. Looking back, this was in fact the context where it was placed immediately after the RFC. --Aquillion (talk) 23:26, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Aquillion. The reference to "movement" recently removed from the lede was added soon after the RfC and remained stable in the article since April 2016 [12]. Have I misread the history? James J. Lambden (talk) 18:49, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• Per WP:SPADE, "harassment campaign" is exactly correct. This is the kind of "movement" where certain people claim there are "fine people" on both sides. Guy (Help!) 22:53, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

• Per the RfC, there is a movement that should be called a movement. There was also a harassment campaign, and per SPADE it should be called a harassment campaign. Following the sources, we can craft appropriate language about whether the movement is responsible for the campaign, but calling the campaign a movement or vice versa is a category error. Rhoark (talk) 23:23, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Or rather, since SPADE is more of a wiki civility guideline, the relevant policy is WP:YESPOV. There are several forks to that, and the forks don't all come down on one side or the other. We'll need to work together on this. Rhoark (talk) 23:31, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

• Putting it in the first paragraph of the lead (especially with all of that added interpretation) definitely strikes me as a nonstarter and would fairly drastically change the weight and tone of the lead from the consensus version. I also strongly disagree with your interpretation of what it was a movement about; as the lead itself implies further down, that was poorly-defined and changed rapidly. See my suggestion above; I think simply modifying the second sentence of the third paragraph to As a movement, Gamergate had no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. should address any concerns. This is a small change that doesn't drastically alter the meaning of any part of the lead. Most notably, that is very close to the actual solution that was implemented after things settled down following the RFC; and since that sentence already describes / evaluates Gamergate as a movement I don't feel it's particularly controversial. --Aquillion (talk) 23:30, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

• Okay, try something out. Somewhere down the line, the article needs to be more explicit about how the movement relates to harassment, but I don't see it starting with the lede. Rhoark (talk) 23:55, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't think 'movement' is supportable by contemporary sources. Harassment campaign is the more accurate wording. It's not that the 'movement' relates to harassment- it's a harassment campaign veiled as a movement. Do you not understand this, or? PeterTheFourth (talk) 00:16, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

If you've changed your mind about not wanting to talk about contemporary sources, that thread is active. Rhoark (talk) 00:53, 28 April 2018 (UTC)#

Movement is definitely supported by over 80% of the contemporary sources. I started listing every single use two years ago, but it doesn't fit with the terrible embargo on language that exists on this article so it was largely ignored. Gamergate may have been defined by its harassment, but it was not the sole event, nor the only undertaking by the people who identified as part of the group. Koncorde (talk) 10:05, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• FYI I tried out As a movement, Gamergate had no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. It reads poorly and bit confusingly without changing the surrounding sentences. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 08:43, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• FWIW, 1) There was a claim to a movement. Which is largely viewed as cover for a harassment campaign. 2) As a movement, Gamergate had no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. 3) Most of the various claims around the movement were unfounded, dismissed, or debunked. We should probably state those thing more clearly in the lede. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 08:46, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

• I realize many editors have strong feelings about this issue but if anything that is more reason to follow procedure. The RfC closer specified "movement" was appropriate to include in both the body and the lede as existing sources reference it. As of now every instance of "movement" (excluding direct quotes) has been removed in contravention of that close. Persistent removal and edit-warring without clear consensus is not helpful and arguably disruptive. James J. Lambden (talk) 18:49, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
  • Please stop beating the dead re: a two year old RFC and 2) that you are interpreting in a strained way. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 19:44, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Clearly my lead-section proposal needs work; for now I've added some additional information to the article body along with several academic sources that should help to give a better overview. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:17, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

a link farm of more "recent" coverage

I'm going to put this here so people can review some of the more "recent" coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_controversy/Archive_56#A_review_of_%22what_is_gamergate%22 -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 08:38, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

heads up #dndgate

hashtag dndgate on Twitter. Might turn into something. Might fizzle. It explains some recent activity. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 17:07, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Unless said gate leads to The Temple of Elemental Evil, it is obviously invalid. Dumuzid (talk) 17:17, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

The Five Horsemen

• https://thinkprogress.org/the-five-horsemen-of-wikipedia-paid-the-price-for-getting-between-trolls-and-their-victims-9c835aeafdc8/
• http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/03/06/the_gamergate_wars_over_wikipedia_show_that_wikipedia_s_neutrality_measure.html
• http://internet.gawker.com/wikipedia-purged-a-group-of-feminist-editors-because-of-1681463331
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/23/wikipedia-bans-editors-from-gender-related-articles-amid-gamergate-controversy
• http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/The-Wikipedia-backlash
• https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/7927425/wikipedia-bans-gamergate-editors-violating-policies
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01/29/gamergate-wikipedia-and-the-limits-of-human-knowledge/
• http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/02/wikipedia_gamergate_scandal_how_a_bad_source_made_wikipedia_wrong_about.html
• https://www.themarysue.com/wikipedia-gamergate/ (I keep forgetting the status of MarySue as RS)
• https://www.popmatters.com/190800-wikipedia-controversy-and-the-myth-of-neutrality-2495558873.html -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 08:06, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm probably going to add a Wikipedia and GG section. Heads up. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 00:36, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

History happening elsewhere, I still plan to get to this. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 18:00, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

A possible source for the journalism aspect

I don't have time to look into this too much, but this source in Journalism, titled The GamerGate controversy and journalistic paradigm maintenance looks at the journalism aspect of Gamergate. It is based on interviews with about 20 gaming journalists at various publications. If someone is interested, could summarize it in the article. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 09:02, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Undefined term: Gamergater

While I think it is efficient to say Gamergater, I think the term needs defining, and the use of the term will need some RS support. Otherwise SYNTH. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 17:58, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

I think the term is pretty self-explanatory. At any rate, a large number of the sources I've seen that try to explain Gamergate seem to use Gamergater or GamerGater without the need to define it explicitly, for example Barnes (2018), Murray (2018), Nieborg & Foxman (2018), Jane (2017), Massanari (2017), and Mantilla (2015).

See also Dewey (October 14, 2014): "Initially, the 'movement' appeared to be about Quinn [...] But within days, Gamergaters had also attacked Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and media critic"; Hathaway (October 10, 2014): "Gamergaters demand to be seen simultaneously as a 70-million-strong market force, too big for the industry to ignore, and as a persecuted minority"; and Singal (October 20, 2014): "despite the fact that Gamergate 'isn’t about' feminists or LWs or SJWs in general, all these figures and subjects have a weird, pesky habit of continuing to pop up wherever gamergaters assemble" (among other similar uses). —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:00, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree it seems self-explanatory, although someone in a discussion I saw recently (I don't recall where) did point out that sometimes stating the "obvious" is useful. If it is felt worthwhile to include a definition, I wouldn't think it would need to be obtrusive or inline; it could take the form of a footnote ("'Gamergaters' refers to those who participated in Gamergate" or the like) or wikilinking the first instance to Wiktionary's entry (the definition of which could be discussed on its talk page and revised if necessary). -sche (talk) 03:38, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

"self-explanatory" is not a safe idea. I think it's pretty easy to grasp, but it needs to be clearly stated in the article. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 15:55, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

BLP & Quinn

"long with inferences about Quinn's sexual history" doesn't cross BLP, but "had affairs with several men in the video game industry" treads very close to BLP. Especially without specifically mention that these allegations were false. The encyclopedic voice should not rebroadcast falsehoods.

Please note my comment is defamation around having affairs. The Grayson aspect is debunked.

-- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 16:02, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Valid point that "affairs" is probably crossing a bit too far. Not sure what you mean by defamation in this case though. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 16:31, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

elided a word: Please note my comment is about defamation around having affairs. There is no RS support saying Quinn had affairs; a report from a disgruntled ex doesn't count. It's defamation of character. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 14:41, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

There is no BLP problem here. One is simply reporting what the blog post was about, without any implication that the post was true. There are sufficient disclaimers and caveats mentioned in the paragraph. I do not want to expand upon this matter too much because it's a private matter; but the alleged affair with Grayson was not debunked (indeed the relationship was acknowledged by Grayson and Kotaku). Only the claim about Depression Quest (which the blog post didn't make, but some people on 4chan and elsewhere inferred from the chronology in the post) was debunked; this fact is clearly mentioned in the paragraph. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 16:42, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

That it was an affair is not supported by RS. That Quinn and Grayson had a relationship is supported. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 14:41, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Also, Gjoni's claims about other relationships is not supported by RS. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 14:52, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't even know what we're arguing about, but I do not have any problems with simply saying the post dealt with their breakup.

I am, however, concerned about the statement that Gjoni "implied" that the alleged affair with Grayson was in exchange of positive reviews. I know that some sources linked do say something like this, but it's clearly not supported by the post itself. The post does not even mention reviews or Depression Quest. Many other sources simply say that this (incorrect) allegation was spread by some self-styled sleuths on 4chan. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 15:41, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

The RS is clear that the gamergaters used the implication to justify their harassment campaign. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 16:32, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Gjoni's claims don't have to be supported by anything. That's likely arguing a flat earther a logic must be supported by science for us to include it a.n.other article about flat earth arguments. This article is significantly about the allegations, inferred or literal, so should cover the basics.

And before anyone says anything retarded; the largest amount of those sections are overly detailed and would be best served by being culled for brevity and simplicity.

We don't need to make spurious arguments to achieve positive changes to the article regarding "BLP" or "RS". Koncorde (talk) 16:50, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

CIVILITY would be nice, too. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 18:18, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

How about AGF. If you are going to push edits behind arguments that are unnecessary then all you end up doing is drawing criticism, debate and more arguments over needless content and unnecessarily raising crap on the talk page. There was no need for this section for the edits you contributed. There was no need for the arguments that you have made in this section. Koncorde (talk) 21:24, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Nuclear take

Rename the article from 'Gamergate controversy' to 'Gamergate harassment campaign'.

Pros:

• More descriptive.

Cons:

• Less direct use in sources. (somewhat due to Wikipedia's own article being titled as such I'd imagine.)

There are likely other pros and cons, and I think 'more descriptive' has a lot more weight as an argument than my two word sentence gives. Thoughts? PeterTheFourth (talk) 00:09, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Endorse.--Jorm (talk) 00:29, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

...seriously? That's like saying WW2 should be renamed "Nazi invasion of France". Massive underselling of the content of this article, or the focus of a significant amount of the content. Koncorde (talk) 00:50, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I think the current title is a bit like labeling WW2 (the event) as 'Nazi controversy', if that makes sense. PeterTheFourth (talk) 00:54, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I'll be the first to say "fucking horseshit" and get it over with then. I really can't believe this is even a suggestion, it's so fruit loop and utterly disconnected with any discussion over the last 4 years that I actually cannot fathom what has prompted it. Koncorde (talk) 01:46, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Ouch, dude. PeterTheFourth (talk) 02:11, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't think I can make my opinion of this any stronger. To reduce this down to "harassment campaign" ignores a significant level of the content. This seems like an attempt to force a POV. I can't see how anyone else can see this as anything but that. If this passes via straw poll then you will have single handedly fucked any pretence at 'balance'. Koncorde (talk) 10:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

"If hundreds of thousands of suns were to rise at once into the sky, their radiance might resemble the effulgence of this take." -- Bg 11.12, basically. I'd like to support the change on some level, but I don't recall seeing the phrase very much. I have been known to be wrong, however! Dumuzid (talk) 01:02, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

How about simply 'Gamergate', which is what it is widely known as? The 'gate' part is a derivative of Watergate, and Watergate has always been known as Watergate, not 'The Watergate controversy'. It is popular shorthand that encompasses the notion of controversy, notoriety, etc. Gamergate accomplishes that entirely in just the one word. Anastrophe (talk) 01:48, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

There is already an article called "Gamergate", and in 20 years this little harassment campaign will be a footnote but the Ant will remain.--Jorm (talk) 01:52, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

The Gamergate ant won that competition on day 1. It was then a debate between "controversy" versus "movement" with entrenched editors ignoring the very sources used to avoid referring to it as a movement at all costs (when I did the raw pull-up of the first 60 or so articles, a significant majority used the term in some fashion). As such it stayed a "controversy" as the only thing notable about it was the controversial aspects of GamerGate. Koncorde (talk) 01:55, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Then I'd say the current name is entirely accurate as-is. Anastrophe (talk) 01:57, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I'd support that rename. Calling it a "controversy" is vague and makes it sound like it wasn't purely a harassment campaign. I imagine it was named "controversy" in an attempt at being balanced, but it seems like false balance to me. --ChiveFungi (talk) 03:04, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Are we reading the same article? It clearly was not "purely a harassment campaign" according to the article. Attempting to reduce it to that seems like an attempt to introduce 'false balance', rather than keeping it neutral according to the sources. Anastrophe (talk) 03:22, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

The history section has three headings; 'origins', 'further harassment', and 'coordination of harassment'. Sounds like it's about a harassment campaign to me my guy. PeterTheFourth (talk) 03:51, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Interesting. I see quite a lot of actual content other than just three article headings. Let me double-check....yep, there's an actual article here, not simply a select subset of all of the article headings used reductively to imply that they are the whole of the article. The article would be much more readable if we got rid of all that superfluous content. Anastrophe (talk) 03:58, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

They're also about the harassment campaign, and the responses to it. About the only section that isn't is the 'Debate over journalism ethics allegations' - I could be wrong in the article primarily being about the harassment campaign, but I'd need something more convincing than 'nuh-uh', y'know? PeterTheFourth (talk) 05:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

The article is primarily Gamergate as a whole, however the 'notable' element of Gamergate was the 'controversy' that came about due to the allegations of harassment and the wider uptake on the social aspects within the industry. That this article is written like a bunch of navel gazers got together on their lunch break to write about their pet peeve is why this article is a hot mess (and has been for so long). Unfortunately since day one it was made quite clear that any attempt to include anything but the narrative harassment would not pass the reliable sources test, which is fine. However when the same sources used a particular phrase (movement) the most bullshit arguments ever seen appeared and / or those arguments were never even taken seriously.

Now after 4 years of gerrymandering the content, there is an attempt to reduce again the scope of the article purports to be about (because that what this does).

This should have been written as an encyclopedic article from day 1. Koncorde (talk) 10:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Is your issue the current state of the article, or the proposal to change the article? It's unclear. If you have concerns about the article beyond my dumbass take, you should start a new section probably. I'd rather keep this one about my suggestion. PeterTheFourth (talk) 10:46, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Both, they are one and the same thing. Article has always been a hot mess built around a perpetual edit wars and POV push rather than encyclopedic content. It's always been gerrymandered into its current catastrophic version that reads like a laundry list of internet drama. Changing the article to "harassment campaign" does not fix the underlying issue, it just emphasises how truly terrible this article is and has been since SPA and co were allowed to drive wikipedia. Koncorde (talk) 12:26, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@Anastrophe: Could you point to some content in the article that indicates Gamergate was anything more than a harassment campaign? The "Debate over journalism ethics allegations" section talks about the claims made by Gamergaters about ethics, but the general gist of the section is that the claims were unfounded ("Many of Gamergate's claims have been rejected as ill-founded and unsupported."), the claims were only there to provide an excuse for harassment ("After analyzing a sample of tweets related to Gamergate, Newsweek concluded that it was primarily about harassment rather than ethics, stating that the sample "suggests that ... contrary to its stated goal, Gamergate spends more time tweeting negatively at game developers than at game journalists"."), and that the Gamergaters were ignoring actual issues with AAA games in favor of targeting indie developers ("Alex Goldman of NPR's On the Media criticized Gamergate for targeting female indie developers rather than AAA games publishers"). --ChiveFungi (talk) 11:48, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Don't look to the current article if you want to get a sense of ground truth for the sake of discussion. The current article is a poor, incomplete, biased, erroneous, and misleading presentation of the topic. A much improved version can be found at [13]. An RfC on the draft found no consensus for replacing the article all at once, but a general sense that it could be improved by importing text piecemeal. I've had no time for that project, but it should get underway this summer. Rhoark (talk) 15:28, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

That is... somewhat contested. The linked draft has major POV issues and constitutes an attempt to minimize the harassment campaign. It is not usable. Artw (talk) 21:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Also have misgivings over this version, it repeats much of the issues this existing version has in many ways. Koncorde (talk) 21:32, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, the conclusion only supported improvements to reflect the less controversial aspects like simplifying the language and structure, which to my knowledge have already been implemented. That was, after all, a year and half ago, and the article has seen significant progress since then. More importantly, the core conclusion of the RFC was that the draft itself was biased (not the current version - only the stylistic complaints were supported): However, there is a huge, colossal, immovable objection to this draft, and it is that the draft is seen as a whitewash. I don't feel there's anything useful to be gained from it at this point. --Aquillion (talk) 21:57, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I'll grant that there have been improvements, but there's much more yet to do. Rhoark (talk) 22:56, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

• FWIW I did track coverage for a while last year with the aim of doing an article update. I fell behind on that a little but I think it shows that as time goes on coverage has pretty much settled on discussing Gamergate as a harassment campaign and as an online trolling wind of the 'alt-right [14]. I doubt results would be much different if we did a similar survey of coverage in current sources today. Artw (talk) 00:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
  • I suggest: Gamergate Harassment -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 01:02, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
• To me, Gamergate harassment campaign seems to imply a higher level of organization and leadership than GamerGate really had. In my reading of GamerGate coverage in recent scholarly monographs, e.g. Barnes (2018), Jane (2016), Mantilla (2015), Massanari (2017), Murray (2017), and Salter (2017), it's virtually always called simply Gamergate, #Gamergate, or GamerGate. These authors all stress the amorphous and self-contradictory features of GamerGate; it seems simplistic to try to label it as either a "movement" or a "controversy", since it's not typical of how either term is commonly understood. Frankly, the labeling endeavor seems to be the source of more friction and heated argument here than it gives back in terms of clarity. I'm not sure why GamerGate was rejected originally; to me that seems the least bad naming option despite not being as commonly used as the others, and distinct enough from Gamergate per WP:SMALLDETAILS. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:00, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

It was initially Gamergate, but that was an immediate clash. So it because #Gamergate but this is rejected too as Wikipedia isn't about hashtags. So the only thing left that could be objectively sources was the harassment and controversial statements by a variety of public figures. It therefore because the "Gamergate controversy". This then was occasionally referenced within news articles. The refusal to consider 'movement', or lend any weight towards actually tackling Gamergate as an amorphous but actually existing cultural group (or at least it's primary individuals) is part of the reason this article is so heavily out of kilter. Koncorde (talk) 09:46, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

"The refusal to consider 'movement'" There is no movement; no real goals. Which is actually separate from "lend any weight towards actually tackling Gamergate as an amorphous but actually existing cultural group". There clearly was a group that harassed people while hiding behind "ethics in journalism". -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 16:37, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Irrelevant, we base our verbiage on the reliable sources which overwhelmingly used the term movement. The RFC about that very topic was quite extensive and included an analysis by {ping|Ryk72} of the 250 or so sources then used to cite the article which showed a significant use of the phrase. We're not responsible for evaluating their usage. Koncorde (talk) 17:24, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

If you want to engender a paranoid and delusional narrative that Wikipedia is run by liberals who want to discredit the alt-right without actually presenting an argument, you should be all means change the name. If you want to stay true to the source material, consistent with the Wikipedia-side material, and not cause further radicalizing in US politics, I'd suggest leaving the name the way it is. The article is already stating a lot of dubious things in the header without a single source to back them up. I've just double-checked, and no sources in the header is not SOP. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 06:36, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

What's the controversy?

1) There was no journalism ethics issue. 2) It has been pretty well established in the most recent coverage that "the controversy" was ginned up to mask the harassment.

-- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 16:05, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

"Prolonged public disagreement or heated discussion" yeah, qualifies. Or "a discussion marked especially by the expression of opposing views". Yep, again. Koncorde (talk) 17:51, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

The evidence shows that the "controversy" was manufactured - there were not substantive issues beyond harassing women. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 18:46, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

The academic literature certainly seems to bear this out: Mantilla (2015, p. 84) analyzes the evolution of GamerGate tactics, saying that Gamergaters "realized that criticizing Quinn for having had various sexual relationships wouldn't gain much traction [...] They instead shifted the focus of their attacks to the idea that the ethics of journalists who cover games were in question"; she goes on to quote The Verge's Sottek, who says that "Chat logs released soon after [Gamergate] broke reveal the movement was focused on destroying Zoë Quinn first, reforming games reporting second" (Mantilla 2015, p. 85); Nieborg and Foxman (2018, p. 114) tell us that Gamergaters "were 'absolutely not concerned only or even primarily'" with ethics in journalism; Salter (2017, p. 46) says bluntly, "the Gamergate rationale of 'ethics in gaming journalism' was a deliberate confabulation invented on 4chan to deflect criticism away from their ongoing abuse of Quinn". The bulk of these sources' discussion of GamerGate is devoted to the abuse, death threats, rape threats, etc., along with complaints about SJWs "destroying" games and vague accusations of "collusion", which seems like a pretty one-sided "controversy". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:02, 23 May 2018 (UTC) (edited 04:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC))

The methods and behaviour is what is controversial (trying to close out advertiser's, sponsors etc, the sudden interest of right wing reactionary individuals). It sparked debate about misogyny, women in gaming, and the odious behaviour of the gaming space (which then prompted a backlash relating to 'freeze peach') and the exploitation of the harassment to spark a 'movement', and then exploitation of that movement to expand and diversify the harassment. At no point is the argument that their stand on ethics is the crux of the controversy (which is clear from this article). The culture war aspect and whether the motivations were politically motivated, or based upon X, Y or Z is far more significant.

As stated on multiple occasions, this article is a largely poor representation of the 'controversy' because it was itself written to defend each claim of the harassment in a blow by blow manner during the initial 'controversy'. Until such time as people get over themselves and let the article be edited into something close to an encyclopedic standard it will remain a laundry list at best. Koncorde (talk) 09:38, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

"The methods and behaviour is what is controversial" umm... no, that's just harassment. The reaction to the harassment sparked debate etc... There is no controversy. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 16:34, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

What, you don't think that the harassment was controversial? You don't think emailing sponsors was controversial? You don't think wikipedia having to put special measures in place might indicate 'controversial'? You don't think the banner header on this page stating "The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute." is a measure of controversy? You don't think KotakuInAction, Basedgamers failed attempts, the hacking of the 'movement' for reactionary purposes, or the updating of policies by news media was controversial? Or even the use of the -Gate suffix may just a smidgen suggest that there was some kind of 'controversy' relating to Gamergate?

Now the fact that 99% of the content of the subject matter should be dealt with by half a dozen other wiki page,s but we have decided to fork the shit over here in an effort to create a silo of terrible content rather than a wikipedia article, I have been pointing out for the better part of four years now (in which time I have made less than 30 edits to the main article and watched it become even more bloated and full of unwarranted self importance). But nobody seems to want to go back to the beginning now we have the opportunity to effectively re-evaluate the actual meaningfulness of the whole debacle in the light of the fact most vandals have screwed off. Koncorde (talk) 17:12, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Remember that the 'gate' suffix was first used on twitter by a guy who was not the brightest bulb in the cabinet. PeterTheFourth (talk) 21:17, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

He could have been as mad as a box of frogs and it wouldn't have mattered. When there is a section of the talk page about the 5 Horsemen; alone that would qualify one of the many outcomes of "gamergate" as controversial. Koncorde (talk) 01:12, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

1. There is no controversy re: ethics. These were debunked.
2. There is no controversy re: whether harassment happened. The harassment is well documented.
3. There is no controversy re: -gate. Naming something doesn't make it a controversy.
4. That this article is contentious is not actually a controversy - beyond what was ginned up. The 5 Horsemen were a further instance of harassment

Almost everything boils down to harassment and fake outrage by the pro-gamergaters.

The most appropriate name is Gamergate Harassment Campaign -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 13:18, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

The circular logic is strong. Debunking is irrelevant, the controversy existed about the claims (if only because there was a massive debate about the ethics of the individual versus the rights of the victim). The harassment happened, the controversy about those that supported, fence sat, or opposed the harassment existed and spawned innumerable articles and created two clear camps (the alleged SJW vs the self described Gamergate). Naming something is relevant, it indicates that someone somewhere believed the events were controversial (as evidenced then by the months and years of outrage). Changing Wikipedia's definition to suit is nice, but evidence of you clear bias. The 5 Horseman was very controversial, both within Wikipedia and as an article that itself drew criticism.

The same charge may be laid at your feet - you are a pro SJW, so therefore it suits you to push your POV.

Me personally, I just want to actually make an encyclopedic article without the POV pushing from either side. Koncorde (talk) 14:04, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

@Koncorde: This isn't the first time you've directly commented on editors & their motivations ('pro SJW'), but could it please be the last? There doesn't need to be a battlefield here. PeterTheFourth (talk) 22:31, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

If someone is going to cast aspersions about the motivation of a group in order to make sweeping assertions despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, and trying to subvert 3 years of consensus (however terrible), then their "motivation" should also be questioned. There is a clear objective being wielded here and it isn't by me, and that isn't being retracted anytime soon as it's a factual observation.

The battlefield mentality has been set by everyone else. Fighting to change what is a terrible article to be something even worse to suit an agenda by what are largely ideological SPA on both sides of the spectrum has been the status quo for the longest time. This article could be done properly, neutrally, factually etc but it wont so long as the the stupid lines in the sand are so ferociously defended.

At some point this article will be encyclopedic. Right now Rationalwiki is more coherent with more extensive factual coverage. Koncorde (talk) 23:36, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

The title should remain "Gamergate controversy". Changing it to "harassment campaign" violates NPOV; it uses a partisan label to pass moral judgment on one side of the controversy, which should be avoided (eg the American Civil War page is not titled "The War of Northern Aggression" although that interpretation is covered). One side claims this is about harassment of women in gaming; the other claims this is about a lack of ethics in gaming journalism, conflicts of interest, and the propagandizing of identity politics. Also keep in mind that one side has institutional support while the other is essentially an insurgency, which tends to skew sources. Given how heated and divisive this is, we should use caution in covering this topic. Unfortunately, this page more closely resembles a battleground than an encyclopedia article, and I don't think that will change until the dust settles. Xcalibur (talk) 20:36, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

With all due respect, WP:NPOV does not mean that we strive to find our own balance on controversial subjects. It means we follow the reliable sources. Thus, if there were a critical mass calling it a "harassment campaign," it really shouldn't matter what the "sides" say. Cheers! Dumuzid (talk) 20:48, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm aware of that. As it happens, there are reliable sources advocating both sides, one of which has greater representation due to institutional support. When RS are divided, it's important not to overlook the opposing narrative. In general, we should be careful in how we use sources, especially in a recent controversial topic which is far from settled, and has seen plenty of partisan edits. Too often, I've seen WP used as an ideological battleground, when it's supposed to be neutral territory. Xcalibur (talk) 22:13, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

RSs are NOT divided on that matter. That is simply not an issue. If anything we are currently devoting too much of the article to a false narrative spread by unreliable sources. Artw (talk) 23:42, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

I beg to differ. Here are some useful sources to consider: [15] [16] [17] [18]. There's also the nature of this conflict to take into account. The pro-GG side is criticizing the gaming industry and gaming journalism, which creates a conflict of interest when media outlets report on a movement that is hostile towards them; this is all the more reason to use sources carefully when writing this article. I don't object to coverage of the anti-GG stance, as long as both sides are given adequate representation. Xcalibur (talk) 12:31, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

So, as far as I know, there is still no real consensus on how to deal with Forbes contributor blogs; but let's say your first two sources are both fine as representing the opinions of Mr. Kain and Ms. Young. I don't know that "Game Objective" is a reliable source--I'd want to see at least a little evidence of editorial oversight and a reputation for accuracy. Your Australian source comes to this conclusion: "Finally, and most importantly, the GamerGate banner has to go. It is far too tainted by death threats and polluted by vitriol to do any good anymore." That, to me, would seem to argue against the interpretation you are advancing. Again, no offense intended, but the scale feels very one-sided to me, so to speak. If you do a google search for "Gamergate," the so-called 'anti' view seems to predominate in the top results. When I am presented with The Washington Post as opposed to Game Objective, I am going to tend to lean in one direction. All that being said, I don't think arguments in the abstract help much (though I am as guilty of them as anyone). If you have any concrete changes to suggest, by all means do so. Even when we disagree on large themes, it's surprising how often we agree on details. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 13:04, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

The Australian source has much more to say than that one statement -- it gave an overview of the two sides and the causes of the conflict. As for sources, what about engadget.com, dailydot.com, polygon.com, and thedailybeast.com? These are sources of questionable reliability which are currently used in the article. Here's a couple more sources: [19] [20]. I think realclearpolitics.com qualifies as reliable. I'd like to share a couple quotes from gamingreinvented:

And (gulp) what’s with the GamerGate article on Wikipedia? It’s pretty insanely biased against the movement. This is for two reasons: A lot of bigger media sites dislike GamerGate, and Wikipedia’s ‘reliable source’ rules seem to treat popular sources as more reliable by default. So it can be hard to find ‘reliable’ pro GamerGate sources for the article. A fair few Wikipedia editors oppose GamerGate, and basically control the pages’ edits with an iron fist. Again, it’s a common problem over at that wiki. Too many articles end up controlled by whatever person has the free time to monitor a certain page 24/7 and the stubbornness of a mule to go with it.

Has there been doxing or threats? Yes there has been. What’s more, it’s been against both sides. Either way, pretty much all these threats were found to be hollow when investigated (like by the FBI here), so it mostly comes down to the usual trolls and idiots.

Yes, we can agree on details while disagreeing on larger ideas. It's hard to make concrete suggestions, because I think major changes are in order. The goal should be an article with two opposing narratives clearly and adequately represented. The current state of this article falls far short of this concept. Xcalibur (talk) 13:39, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Alright then! Well, when you have a consensus, by all means make the changes as you see fit. Have a nice day! Dumuzid (talk) 14:01, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Same to you. What we need is civil, rational discourse; especially on controversial subjects where it is most difficult. Xcalibur (talk) 14:10, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

The goal should be an article with two opposing narratives clearly and adequately represented. That's not how we write articles, though. We don't seek to have "opposing narratives." Our job as Wikipedians is to write articles based upon what reliable sources say about a topic. The overwhelming majority of reliable sources clearly describe this issue as our article currently does. Your apparent disagreement with those sources is interesting, but of no consequence to our work. Questioning the reliability of Polygon and Engadget — longstanding technology and gaming news sites with identifiable writers, established editorial structures, etc. — while arguing that we should use "GamingReinvented.com" — a pseudonymous blog with no identifiable writers or editorial structure and where literally anyone can post anything (Gaming Reinvented now uses a simple membership system where anyone who registers an account can post content on the site) suggests that you should review policies such as WP:BLP and WP:IRS before editing in this area further. There is no universe in which "GamingReinvented.com" is an acceptable source for this project. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 14:56, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Granted, gamingreinvented is not adequate as a source. I mainly cited it to quote a couple important points on harassment and this article. And that was just one of several sources I mentioned: what about Forbes, ABC, and RealClearPolitics? To quote from IRS, we should cover all majority and significant minority views, and I believe the pro-GG stance qualifies as a significant minority view. While we usually don't write articles with an 'opposing viewpoints' format, we do cover multiple perspectives on a single topic. Given that this topic is dominated by both the anti-GG majority view and the pro-GG significant minority view, I believe it makes sense to structure the article with this in mind. Xcalibur (talk) 15:43, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Any sources at forbes.com/sites/ URLs are outside the editorial control of Forbes magazine or Forbes Digital. Right under the by-line and bio link it says "Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own." That means the Kain piece is essentially an op/ed on a self-published blog. ABC is not a great source for content like this. The author, Tim Dean, edited a gaming magazine in 2001 and a PC magazine from 2001 to 2004. That's 10+ years before writing that article. In 2014, he was a "philosopher, editor and science writer" as well as a PhD student. (And hater of the serial comma, apparently. But nobody's perfect!) According to his profile at abc.net.au, he was an intermittent writer of mostly opinion pieces. (Strangely enough, the article in question isn't listed in his profile.) So a one-off "what is GamerGate?" article by a philosopher PhD student who was "once a games/tech editor" in no way compares to actual games journalism by a full-time journalist. And we already use Cathy Young as a source twice in the article, any more would be UNDUE given her relative lack of background in the area, plus they're mostly op/eds anyways.

Also, a quick note on balance here. You say that you believe "the pro-GG stance qualifies as a significant minority view". What is this based on? You've mentioned a handful of sources, most of which have been discounted. By comparison, the current article is based on 236 sources, virtually all of which are critical of GamerGate for one reason or another. Dozens or hundreds of similarly critical sources have been removed over time, mostly to trim the article of fluff and redundant sources. (You may have noticed that most claims have multiple sources. If only one source says something, it's probably not appropriate to include. Likewise, if ten sources say something, we only need to include the best three or four. This is just one of the ways that we've kept this article manageable.) And that doesn't even include the hundreds of reliable sources that were found at Talk to be redundant or trivial or extraneous or simply not interesting enough to discuss. UNDUE says we need to balance viewpoints "in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources". That doesn't mean that we balance articles around which sources we choose to bring to Talk, or the sources that happen to be in the article. We balance around all reliable sources that have been published. And they're virtually all critical of GamerGate. Woodroar (talk) 17:44, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

The sources I posted were only a small selection, the purpose of which was to show that there is a significant minority view. In my earlier statements, I explained why this topic is an exceptional case, and why we should consider sources carefully; i.e. the majority view may be over-represented by sources, and the minority view under-represented, due to conflicts of interest undermining their reliability. I think it is important to take this into consideration, rather than going purely by face value.

I could provide more RS for the minority view, but I'd have to do more digging. Xcalibur (talk) 20:03, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, please provide reliable sources. I will say, however, that arguing some sources are "over-represented" due to "conflicts of interest" is a non-starter. Nowhere in WP:NPOV does it say that we can downplay or dismiss reliable sources because someone else imagines a bias. (And especially when this is a documented tactic of GamerGate.) I mean, I get that some media outlets have turned "calling everyone else biased" into a business model, but we have actual standards. Woodroar (talk) 20:50, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Of course there are standards here, and I work with those in mind. But I think rules should be combined with judgment. To reiterate, the pro-GG side claims that this is about ethics in gaming journalism (among other things). This means we're relying on gaming journalists to give fair coverage to a movement that is calling into question their professional and personal ethics. Ideally they would be fair, but this does present a conflict of interest, which complicates matters. Also, I'm not saying the article should be 50/50, it could be 70/30 or 80/20, my concern is properly covering a significant minority view. As for sources, I'll do a proper compilation when feasible. Xcalibur (talk) 21:51, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Not really seeing a widely discredited 2014 peice and a bit by Cathy Young, Culture Warrior as the great gamechanging source’s you are I’m afraid. Artw (talk) 15:00, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Motion to close this thread as ground we've treaded a zillion times and just wastes everyone's time? We all know what's going to happen: Bigdan is going to come back with a handful of personal opinion sources and youtube videos, the same ones we've seen before and have been rejected, and we'll patiently try to explain how Wikipedia works to the gamergator yet again and then there will be some sort of escalation where everyone is called biased and then odds are 50/50 that they go away or get blocked for going off the rails.--Jorm (talk) 02:08, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I find your statements quite unbecoming. The sources I listed above were from a brief initial search. When I post sources again, it will be after more thorough research (I have other priorities of course, so I can't give a precise ETA for that). I believe my conduct here has been within reason. Xcalibur (talk) 11:52, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Well, go find those resources that you're sure to exist but which no one else has ever returned with and stop wasting everyone's time.--Jorm (talk) 15:35, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi, just wanted to say that I haven't disappeared. I'll be back in due time once bigger fish are fried. I still think the article is in need of revision, but instead of an overhaul, I'll work within the current framework. I'll make a new thread for that when the time comes. Xcalibur (talk) 13:21, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

1. I don't think that changing the article title to "harassment campaign" is a good idea. Reliable sources support the notion that Gamergate was not about ethics in journalism in any meaningful sense. To the extent there was a media criticism angle in Gamergate, it was narrowly focused on the perceived biases toward games that touched on progressive themes. The real common denominator was anti-feminist/anti-progressive backlash. That said: Gamergate is the far more common name, and "harassment" seems to narrow and too mild to capture a social phenomenon that also included boycotts, doxxing, bomb threats, and lots of naval-gazing and manifesto-writing.
2. Regarding the "movement" argument: the definition of a social movement is really incredibly broad, and it almost certainly includes Gamergate. Renaming the entry as "Gamergate movement" is unhelpful, because "Gamergate" is also a slogan and the name of a specific historical event. Similar slogans/movements/events like Black Lives Matter, Ni una menos, or the Tea Party also don't specify "movement" in their titles. That said, I think the statement in the intro that GG "claimed to be a movement, but had no leaders, spokespeople or manifesto" makes it sound like those are prerequisites for a movement. They really aren't. Nblund ^talk 16:09, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

RFC Vote

Think we could use one? This feels like it could have traction. Zero Serenity ^{(talk - contributions)} 18:21, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

{ping|Zero Serenity}, FWIW I think there is a certain amount of RFC burnout when it comes the GGC article. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 18:02, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm disputing the neutrality of this article

I've seen a wide consensus outside of the liberal croud that GamerGate is not a harassment campaign, but rather a campaign to encourage ethical practices in the games journalism industry. However, this article seems to heavily promote the view that GamerGate is just an attack towards female game developers and dismiss the other view as misinformation. Thus, I am worried that this article does not have a neutral POV. However, I am biased towards the ethics in game journalism stance, so I want to have a discussion on this with you all.

Here's the most current revision as of time of writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gamergate_controversy&oldid=848677657

Feel free to compare this to the first version of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gamergate_controversy&oldid=624457713 which I feel is more neutral.

Thanks! --Linkfan321 (talk) 23:12, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I am certain that you are more than happy and willing to provide reliable sources that support your concerns, unlike the previous six or seven hundred others like you who could not. Until then, I'm going to remove the POV tag, as it's not accurate.--Jorm (talk) 23:22, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

It clearly isn't 'just' about ethics (and all demonstrable sources make it clear that the significance of the campaign for most sources is the harassment of individuals) but the absence of reliable sources about the 'ethics' aspect largely precludes it as a subject. We have been waiting 4 years, as Jorm said, for sources outlining the ethical arguments. At best a few sources reference the anti feminist / anti SJW stance but there's almost no evidence to support any ethical stance. Koncorde (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I think this article's biggest fault is that it fails to separate criticism from harassment and it's lumping it all together. While harassment certainly did take place, it should be noted that nearly all of it was anonymous. Prominent voices within Gamergate, such as Carl Benjamin, not only discouraged harassment, he outright told his viewers to report threats of violence to the FBI. Whether or not you think the reasoning behind this movement was justified, the fact of the matter is that there was not a single public individual who openly supported Gamergate that encouraged people to send death threats or otherwise harass the people whom they were criticizing, and almost all harassment was carried out anonymously. While it is true that Gamergate had no centralized leadership, it did have several prominent voices within the movement, many of whom did not operate anonymously and gave their names out freely. The fact that there is not single instance of any of these individuals inciting harassment or violence or doing anything else than engaging in harsh criticisms of the individuals at the center of the controversy speaks volumes. At the very least it might be prudent to dedicate a portion of the article to individuals who did openly support the movement to separate them from the anonymous harassment that was occurring. Also, I think the entire opening section of the article needs to be rewritten; not a single statement in those opening paragraphs is sourced and it's filled with a lot of conjecture and weasel words. –Nahald (talk) 07:00, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

@Nahald: Friend; could you provide me with an example of what your ideal lede for the article would be? PeterTheFourth (talk) 08:39, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

That would take some time to do and I don't think I exactly have the perspective to provide an accurate summary of the whole situation. But I those first few paragraphs should all be sourced like the rest of the article, otherwise it more or less just reads like someone's opinion piece. –Nahald (talk) 00:48, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

With the leads of articles, sources can either be provided in the lead or the body, and in this case it seems the decision was to leave the references in the body. As the lead is intended as a summary of the body of the article, any statements in the lead are expected to be properly sourced in the text from which they are summarised. - Bilby (talk) 00:53, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

So you wanted to come in here and complain but not help or do any of the heavy lifting? Cool, cool, cool. --Jorm (talk) 00:54, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

At this point, I think it's worth creating a version with all the references these the-lede-needs-refs people want. Put it up, and then revert it. Then they can go look at what 200ish references crammed into a lede looks like. -- ForbiddenRocky (talk) 05:33, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

The Unraveling of Lane Davis

here is an interesting article about how various outlets manipulated impressionable dudes into becoming aggressive gamergators and how, uh, one of them murdered his dad. There may be something usable here.--Jorm (talk) 16:13, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

That article only mentions this topic a bit, but I feel that we really ought to have a section describing the relationship to the alt-right in more detail. It's a notable focus of most recent coverage. --Aquillion (talk) 00:37, 27 July 2018 (UTC)