Everyone’s heard of Wyatt Earp haven’t they? The gunfight at the OK corral, Dodge city, Tombstone and Doc Holliday are all part of the western mythology. Part of a place of heroes and baddies, white hats and black hats, where usually, in the end the good guys save the day, possibly riding off into the sunset.
For nearly as long as the antifeminist culture war known as Gamergate has raged across the internet, a microcosm of the battle has taken place on Wikipedia. Should Gamergate defined as a push for ethics in gaming journalism, or a paranoid campaign against women in gaming? This week, Wikipedia’s highest court made a major decision in favor of the former.
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If the phrase “Wikipedia’s highest court” surprises you, you’re probably not alone. Theoretically, the free encyclopedia is a purely democratic operation—anyone can edit Wikipedia, after all—but there is a byzantine and largely unseen hierarchy that governs disputes among editors, culminating in a Supreme Court-style panel called the Arbitration Committee. The committee’s latest decision: to punish a group of five editors who fought to maintain a Gamergate page that presented the “controversy” largely as an assault on women—that is, who fought to present Gamergate as it actually is.
Mark Bernstein, a blogger and Wikipedia editor, notes that the so-called “Five Horsemen” were not only barred from contributing to Gamergate articles, but from any articles relating to “gender or sexuality, broadly constructed.” By contrast, the only pro-Gamergate users punished by the committee, Bernstein writes, were “disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned.”
The episode punches a neat a whole in the idea that Wikipedia is a neutral and democratic platform. The Wikipedian community is something like 90 percent male, and if Bernstein’s numbers are correct, its highest ruling body has a similar demographic makeup. That the world’s seventh-most popular website would look at Gamergate and decide that what’s needed is a silencing of feminist perspectives is depressing, but it’s hardly surprising.
Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate. (via wilwheaton)
I think it’s time I stopped using Wikipedia, no matter how useful as quick research it may be. Who’s with me?
(via fluffyfemme)
Wikipedia has always been pretty useless when it comes to politically charged subjects such as Gamergate because of crap like this. You can still use it for random bits of specific trivia, but not to get uniased information on a current topic that talk about oppression.
(via a-little-bi-furious)
Photo By Richard Baxter
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