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Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity

By Nathalie Collida
With research contributions from tarantino, James P. Persica, and Eric Barbour

Between what has become known as GamerGate and the Apple iCloud incident, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Internet has declared a full-on war on women’s privacy. Over 100 female celebrities have had their iCloud accounts hacked and personal, mostly nude photographs of themselves published on 4chan and Reddit. Video game developer Zoe Quinn endured a vituperative online harassment campaign from men’s rights advocates after her ex-boyfriend publicly accused her of infidelity – including, and, as it turned out, wrongly, of having had an affair with a journalist to ensure favorable coverage of her interactive fiction game, Depression Quest. In addition to being unfairly accused of corruption and called all kinds of names, both on the Internet and through anonymous phone calls, Quinn found her address revealed on Reddit together with illegally obtained nude photographs of herself.

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Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian recently went into hiding, after her latest series of videos analyzing how women are used as background decoration in video games resulted in death threats against her and her parents and the publication of their home addresses on twitter. Since launching her Tropes vs. Women project in 2012, Sarkeesian has become a popular target for misogynists. Attacks on the critic by men’s rights advocates and Internet trolls included graphic threats of rape as well as a crudely-made video game in which players scored points for punching Sarkeesian in the face. Following the latest Twitter onslaught, a slew of Angry Men on the Internet were predictably quick to suggest that she may have made up the death threats to garner sympathy and donations. Two men’s rights activists are now asking you to part with your hard-earned cash to help fund a documentary on Sarkeesian and her perceived transgressions against the straight white males of the gamer community.

A little knowledge …

How does Wikipedia factor into this? The site is prime real estate for activists of all persuasions, and gamers and men’s rights advocates, like many others, have been trying to influence its contents from the beginning. Sarkeesian’s Wikipedia biography was infamously vandalized after she started her online funding campaign for Tropes vs. Women, and has since been fought over by men’s rights advocates and feminists alike. To this day, the article and its discussion page focus prominently on the harassment she and her supporters continue to receive.

It comes as no surprise that Zoe Quinn’s Wikipedia biography has received an equal amount of negative attention. The issue: should a trumped-up non-scandal relating to someone’s very private life be included in their article? Should the harassment of Quinn kicked off by the actions of a vengeful, narcissistic ex-boyfriend be perpetuated on a site that currently comes up as the first google hit for her name? Should Wikipedia be used to shame Quinn through quoting selective online sources? For a few weeks, it looked like Wikipedia video game aficionado Woodroar and administrators like Mr. Stradivarius and Black Kite had been successful in keeping Quinn’s article free from mentions of the attempts at ruining her professional and personal reputation. Sadly, they did not prevail. Quinn’s biography now features a section devoted to the incident, and attempts have been made at including a section titled Accusations of personal and professional misconduct.

The talk page for Quinn’s article tells a long but incomplete story of the sustained battle between men’s rights activists and editors striving for neutrality. Some of the comments posted there were deemed so biased and intrusive that they were subsequently oversighted, which, in Wikipedia parlance, means that they are no longer viewable in the site’s public archives.

Most of the main advocates for depriving Quinn and other notable women of their right to privacy have a history of tendentious editing on Wikipedia and excel at gaming the site’s myriad – and in some instances contradictory – policies, which they can quote in their sleep. As you will see, they are an interesting bunch indeed. And by interesting, we mean that a screenwriter would have a hard time coming up with a selection of equally colorful characters.

Boys will be girls – Watching the watcher

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One of the anonymous Wikipedians who argued most vociferously for the inclusion of Quinn’s harassment in her Wikipedia biography and finally managed to do so at the end of August uses the handle Tutelary. That was not the first nickname this person went by on the encyclopedia. Until April 14, 2014, their pseudonym was Ging287, a nym they still use on Reddit. Five months after first appearing on Wikipedia, this user very briefly claimed a transgender identity before adopting a female online persona they named Danielle. Tutelary has been most active on the article talk pages for Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, with 70 and 58 contributions respectively. Other areas of interest include the frequently vandalized article about radical feminism, the 2014 Isla Vista killings, and the men’s rights movement. This Wikipedian can be quite subtle when masking their bias in article talk page discussions, and until you look at the bulk of their contributions in context, you may come away with the impression that this is indeed a woman or a transwoman writing from an anti-feminist perspective.

However, we have found written and photographic evidence which suggests that Tutelary/Ging287 is in fact a young man attending a high school in rural Michigan, although our standards of publishing prevent us from releasing certain personally identifying information about potentially underage persons. Suffice it to say that having first identified as transgender and now as a woman, Tutelary/Ging287’s gender is unclear. Pretending to be a woman on a site where women and transwomen constitute a tiny minority has been used successfully in the past by various sociopathic male participants including Robert Clark Young aka Qworty, a small-time American novelist and full-time Wikipedia contributor mostly known for defacing the biographies of his perceived literary enemies on Wikipedia. Other male editors have displayed a more benign but no less pathological urge to masquerade as members of the opposite sex.

And while Tutelary/Ging287 is a member of a Wikipedia task force aimed at countering the encyclopedia’s bias against women, and has repeatedly emphasized that they are giving their opinion as a woman, their activity on the site as well as their overall Internet footprint suggest a misogynistic agenda. In addition to complaining about Wikipedia being overrun by feminists on the men’s rights discussion board of fellow social networking site Reddit, they moderate r/womanlogic and r/unbirth, two extremely misogynistic subreddits, the latter of which is NSFW. The descriptions speak for themselves: “Woman logic is logic that contradicts itself, uses circular reasoning, or promotes special exceptions towards the woman and disqualifies males as an exception.” “This subreddit is for the display of images of the act of unbirthing; stuffing someone (entirely) within female genitalia for mostly pleasuring purposes. Since it’s obvious that a female cannot accomplish this in real life, it is mostly rooted towards drawn images.” r/sexycentaurs, another subreddit Ging287 set up, is likewise NSFW. The opinion they express on Reddit about the iCloud hacking incident indicates no empathy for the female victims; they choose to view this particular violation of women’s privacy and dignity as nothing more than a copyright issue: “There are no laws on the books that prevent people from sharing stolen images except copyright law. […] People are saying that speech that they don’t like should be censored, especially if they don’t like it. That’s wrong. Morality =/= legality.”

Even though this information is publicly available to any Wikipedia contributor who is mystified by a supposedly female colleague seemingly intent on attacking other women’s biographies and viewpoints, the site’s “outing” policy forbids any mention of it on Wikipedia itself. In the case of Tutelary, this rule, combined with Assume Good Faith, one of the fundamental principles of Wikipedia, means that while the few actual women of Wikipedia may know that they’re being played, the way the site is set up prevents them from doing anything about it.

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Dragon’s din

Titanium Dragon is another Wikipedia participant with an interest in Zoe Quinn’s biography. Over the past two weeks, he has made a staggering 100 contributions to Quinn’s article talk page, a number of which have been oversighted. His other areas of activity on the encyclopedia include the articles on furry fandom, Satanism, and the Virginia Tech massacre. Judging by this edit to his personal Wikipedia page, he has little sympathy for the victims of school shooters and spree killers in general. Yet while he claims that there is “entirely too much irrelevant material on Wikipedia, including such nonsense as the names of victims of spree killers”, and that his favorite webcomic “is probably more notable than they are, and neither belongs on Wikipedia,” he personally authored an additional section of Zoe Quinn’s biography dealing exclusively with accusations of personal and professional misconduct against Quinn that has also since been deleted. On Wikipedia’s administrator’s noticeboard, he subsequently accused other editors of censorship and justified his actions by opining, “The entire reason that Zoe Quinn has gotten coverage is precisely because of the controversies she has been embroiled in, and her notability is pretty much entirely contingent upon these controversies – and notably, per the standards people are claiming above, if we are complaining about single sources here, it is worth remembering that Zoe Quinn’s claims of harassment ultimately come from her.”

Excrement will happen

Who is Titanium Dragon, and what makes him a judge of Zoe Quinn’s notability? At the time of writing, he described himself as a colleague of Quinn’s, “a [sic] independent game designer working on a fantasy roleplaying game”. Like many Wikipedians, he uses his pseudonym in other Internet venues. Searching for his nickname will currently lead you to a site where male fans of the children’s television series My Little Pony publish mostly erotic fiction about the equine cartoon characters from the show. Titanium Dragon is a frequent participant and has produced 16 stories of brony fiction for the site. He also maintains a regularly updated blog where interested parties can read about his dislike for the prose of award-winning writers Zadie Smith and Denis Johnson, whose short stories he considers “dreary.” Many of his blog entries on the My Little Pony fan site make it clear that “Mr. Dragon” considers himself an auteur of sorts as well as a connoisseur of “the terminology used in literary circles”. He is also fond of the odd literary conspiracy theory, such as the one about Truman Capote being the true author of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. So fond, indeed, that he added it to the Wikipedia article for the classic novel and sourced it to a blog entry written by his fellow My Little Pony fanboy, who goes by the name of Bad Horse.

You could call Titanium Dragon eccentric. We prefer to call him Nathan Thomas Merrill, a 29-year-old brony currently running a one-man wannabe games developing outfit in a suburb of Corvallis, Oregon. His latitude may well exceed his longitude. As far as we can tell, this self-styled arbiter of Wikipedia notability has yet to publish a game of his own. Could his animosity toward Zoe Quinn be motivated by professional jealousy rather than outright misogyny? As the case of Qworty has shown, this can be a strong incentive for contributing to Wikipedia. Or is it more likely that, like so many members of his demographic, Merrill simply hasn’t spent much time around women and blames this on the evils of feminism?

Editor’s note: This blog post has attracted a lot of comment here and elsewhere. Of particular interest are the comments posted by “Nw” here and here:

I see Tutelary admits to pretending to be female over at hackforums:

The exploit ONLY works for Yahoo messenger, sorry I didn’t mention that. But it’s good for pretending to be a girl, all it takes is, “Hey, wanna see me naked? <3" and you've got another slave.


Oh, and he actually says on hackforums that he is a guy:

For all future clarification, I’m a guy.


Yes, they are without a doubt the same person. At hackforums Tutelary’s profile lists their real name as Danielle Leishman. On wikipedia Tutelary’s user page gives their name as Danielle. A mediawiki bug report refers to Tutelary as Danielle Leishman. Note that Tutelary has a hackforums article in their userspace. Note wikipedia Tutelary’s interest in RAT software. Note the overlap in MRA/anti-feminist crap. They’re the same person.

On hackforums.net, Tutelary speaks openly about impersonating women and using Remote Access Trojans (RAT) to gain control of other internet users’ computers. If these are the people who hijack gender gap discussions on Wikipedia, professing to speak for women, it is perhaps not surprising that Wikipedia is not making much progress with addressing its gender imbalance. The gender split from the 2012 Wikipedia editor survey has still not been released.

(Titanium Dragon’s address data were taken from an old version of his Wikipedia user page, where they were freely disclosed by him and remain publicly viewable to this day. An earlier version of this post contained a link to publicly viewable photographs (mirror selfies) of Ging287, which he uploaded to an image sharing site five years ago when a teenager. The link was removed upon request by a Twitter user.)

Image credits: Flickr/Daniel Svensson, Flickr/exfordy, Flickr/Carolyn P Speranza ~ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

157 comments to Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity

  • Kurt

    I hope this article doesn’t reflect the standard of rational thought that Wikipediocracy articles heretofore have been held to, because this article is complete and utter drivel.

    I would’ve expected that authors which are published here are required to uphold at least some minimal level of objectivity. Not the slightest trace of it apparent in this article. You’re actually defending the guilty and painting the victims as perpetrators and supporting it with nothing but equally biased articles written by others with the same, twisted, sexist ideology.

    • Peter

      So exactly how are people whose hobby is to spread malicious gossip about someone “victims”? Dumped partners might sometimes be entitled to a bit of righteous anger, but that doesn’t exonerate the Wikipedia editors bashing Quinn and Sarkeesian or explain their malice.

      • Titanium Dragon

        Given that these folks are complaining about people harassing Zoe Quinn, you know, by doxxing her and her supporters, and then proceed to harass people who are trying to edit a Wikipedia article by doxxing them, it kind of shows exactly what sort of person Zoe Quinn’s supporters are. No one named in this article has done anything wrong by trying to include reliably source information, appearing in places including Business Insider, Forbes, The Guardian, and numerous other sources. It is notable at this point – far more so than Zoe Quinn is as a person.

        I don’t care about myself (as I noted, who I am is not a secret), but posting pictures of a minor – an apparently transgendered minor – is -completely- out of line, and the person in question, as a supposed advocate for social justice, should KNOW this – not only are they a minor, but they might also be trans, and thus, are part of a vulnerable population. This is exactly the sort of thing that Zoe Quinn is whining about happening to her, except this is worse, because the editor in question – Tutelary – hasn’t spent years harassing people on the internet.

        I mean, seriously, if you’re trying to defend people from harassment, that’s fine, and sometimes people DO make attack articles on Wikipedia. When something appears in literally hundreds of reliable sources (and over ten -million- places on the internet at this point, according to Google) I think the idea that it isn’t noteworthy is pretty questionable. Wikipedia reports on what is notable, and it is hard to talk about the whole GamerGate nonsense without explaining what caused it (namely, an angry post by Zoe Quinn’s ex posting evidence of her sleeping around with game developers and journalists). The original person who did it didn’t realize what he was setting off; he was making an angry post about his ex, but because of the WHO, it blew up. It is really impossible to mention the claims of misogyny, corruption, censorship, ect. without explaining what started the whole thing. And yet, some folks are upset because they don’t want it included because it reflects badly on Zoe Quinn.

        It totally does. But Wikipedia is NOT a platform for making people look good or bad – it is a platform for disseminating information about noteworthy events. We have details on the Monica Lewinsky affair and the affairs of various royal family folk, we have articles which touch on numerous scandals, we have articles about all sorts of random things. The key is notability.

        When something shows up in hundreds of reliable source and millions of places on the internet, it is almost always notable to at least some extent. My interest is in documenting it. I sometimes try and go in to present events – shootings and the like – and make sure that the article maintains a neutral tone. People get emotionally charged about stuff.

        • John lilburn

          Why should anyone care about wikipedia commentards being doxxed? As far as I’m concerned you should all be editing either under a realname or one that that is registered with the WMF. None of you should be totally anonymous. That there are complaints about having a real life id associated with WP editing history, leads me to believe that you think their is something shameful in that editing history. Get the fuck over it.

          • Titanium Dragon

            I’m sorry, but if you can’t even distinguish between “their” and “there”, you probably are not intellectually capable of forming a coherent opinion on the subject matter.

            The reality is that people don’t like excessive attention; the reason doxxing works is because it is a threat of intimidation. It has nothing to do with people being ashamed of themselves; people are intimidated by the idea that someone is watching them and following their every move like some sort of psychotic stalker.

            Because, well, that’s what doxxing is about – stalking someone, or the threat thereof.

            I mean, just look at Zoe Quinn – she acts out and is pseudonymous. Do you think that she should be allowed to cower behind a fake name? She got pretty scared when her anonymity was removed.

            Or at least she pretended to be. Goodness knows, given her history of mental problems.

            But, in the spirit of full disclosure: why don’t you tell me your real name, address, telephone number, and place of work?

            I’m sure I won’t do anything bad with it.

            But you don’t believe me, do you?

            Also, if you hadn’t noticed (and clearly, you hadn’t), this is more of a pen name; when someone openly uses their real name in conjunction with their screen name, doxxing them is pointless because everyone can already know who they are.

            This was purely an attempt at intimidating people on Wikipedia because the poster is angry that they were banned for being uncivil and repeatedly attacking other users. I mean, that’s what this whole website is about, ultimately – sour grapes that they weren’t allowed to abuse other users and post “the truth” on Wikipedia.

            It is easy to complain about stupid things on Wikipedia. But when you complain about stuff like this, well, it doesn’t speak well of you as a person or editor.

            Incidentally, while she wrote an article a few days ago ranting about coordination, let’s face reality here – she is attacking in support of people with a specific point of view by attempting to scare off others, while users on the site behave in the same ill-mannered fashion. It is almost as if she is precisely everything which is a problem.

            Because she is. But she’ll never say that.

          • John Lilburne

            You seem so full of anger over what? Someone that has done nothing to you personally, yet here you are ranting and raving about her, because someone has done pretty much the same thing to you as you’ve been doing over on site for pissants with a grudge.

            BTW “well of you as a person or editor.” make you sound so full shit its like a septic tank has farted.

            If you want to play on the internet doxxing is a fact of life. Now stop playing with that tablet under the bedclothes turn off your torch and come back when you’ve grown up.

          • Jeff

            John, I don’t read anger in his words. Maybe frustration, but no anger. Making statements like that is an old way to try to dismiss a person, as if being angry or passionate makes you wrong. Your approach and attempt to demean him shows that you lack an argument, and you are using the same tactics that Wikipedians use to bully and abuse others.

            Why act in that way, especially in defense of a woman that you don’t know (using your own standard)?

        • HRIP7

          Titanium Dragon, all of that sounds wonderful. The problem is that what you posted on Wikipedia was so full of violations of Wikipedia’s Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) policy that it was not just reverted, but oversighted, i.e. permanently removed from public view. Oversight is not undertaken lightly on Wikipedia. It’s a procedure restricted to outright defamatory content.

          An encyclopedia article that is the top Google link for someone’s name should not be written by people who evidently feel incandescent hatred for the biography subject, to the extent that they are unable to follow a fairly simple and straightforward site policy.

          Here is a comment made by a Wikipedia admin in the course of the current discussion at Wikipedia’s administrator’s noticeboard:

          Support topic ban for Tutelary, Titanium Dragon, Puedo. Most of the time on this page we have a problem with people who are alleged to be good content creators but cannot be civil or collaborative. Here we have editors who, at least in their dealings with me, have been respectful and civil but are unable to create content within the bounds of the rules of Wikipedia. Editors on this talk page have advocated edits that run counter to fundamental rules of the encyclopedia like RS [Reliable Sources guideline] and BLP [Biographies of Living Persons policy]. They have challenged first-rate sources like The New Yorker and Time using arguments that amount to conspiracy theories based on Tweets while advocating the use of poor sources, blogs, and forum posts. While, to their credit, they have expressed a desire to conform to our rules, an article involving a vulnerable target of harassment and the focus of intense media attention is too important and sensitive to serve as a learning space for editors struggling to grasp our basic policies.

          Your words sound fine, but in the opinion of a majority here and on Wikipedia itself, your actions don’t match them.

          • HRIP7

            Titanium Dragon was eventually topic-banned by a Wikipedia administrator for posting unsubstantiated allegations against living people, in violation of Wikipedia policy.

      • Jeff

        Peter, I seem to remember you complaining about an Arbitrator having an affair with a certain someone, and how the two colluded against others. I remember a lot of WO bringing it up. So why this double standard? It is fine for you to criticize when Wikipedians abuse the system like that, but it is evil when someone outside Wikipedia abuses the system (and gets their friends to whitewash the pages and abuse admin powers in doing so)? That seems odd.

        • Peter

          Someone has told me that Courcelles and Fluffernutter are the people you are referring to. I don’t think that I’ve ever commented on either of them and have only a vague idea of the issue you are referring to.

          The initially nominated chair of the big child abuse enquiry that is soon to be held in the UK was forced to resign because her late brother was Attorney General at the time of someone of the events being investigated. In any situation like this, including on Wikipedia, it is good to have no appearance that someone scrutinising the behaviour of others has reasons why they may be loyal to certain of those others or antagonistic to them.

          I’ve not seen any firm evidence of Quinn or close friends or relatives of hers manipulating or paying others to manipulate pages related to her. Given how often this sort of thing happens on Wikipedia, it would not be particularly surprising if this has happened, but none of what you and others have said here has convinced me that it has. Much of the blame for when this sort of thing happens lies with Wales and the WMF. They may have changed their TOUs but the whole culture of anonymity and pseudonymity encourages it When it is used to gain power over others, malign them etc, then the people so doing are also to blame.

          Although the gamergate conspiracy theorists claim that Quinn has done such things off Wikipedia, the coverage in the mainstream “serious” press I have looked at on the matter suggests that these claims are unconvincing. Further any shenanigans involving a casting couch should be blamed on the people who own and manage the couch not on the people who are exploited on them.

          • Jeff

            Why does anything have to convince you? Isn’t it enough to see an admin with an obvious restart pass taking admin actions on the BLP page while simultaneously putting heavily promotional material about that BLP’s product? He so vigorously defends with an admin hat while promoting her with an editor hat.

            And this is and individual that you have at least one article where a company admitted that there was a relationship with her and the BLP subject. She has a history of convincing nerdy, lonely, socially outcast guys (i.e. the ones who tend to cling to the power of adminship on Wikipedia) to promote herself. That bears a close look.

          • Jeff

            By the way, what mainstream press? Because the only articles that have defended her have been minor blogs, while I did send a major newswebsite’s crushing analysis of it and attack on Quinn to your email. I hate when people pump up obscure websites while ignoring the ones with huge traffic merely to defend a bad point.

          • Peter

            Jeff, I can’t see anything from you in my email. I may not be the person you think. (Please do not say who you think I am here as there has been enough hate mail sent already by gamergate conspiracy theorists.)

            I mention two mainstream sources lower down the page, the New Yorker and the Independent (the UK one). The Daily Telegraph site also favours Quinn, as does the Guardian. “Zoe Quinn” does not show up on a search of the Financial Times site. So that means that all the UK “quality” press that I can easily check is on Quinn’s side. (The Times has a paywall.)

          • Jeff

            You are an individual on Wikipediocracy using the name Peter. That is a rather loaded name and seems to be misrepresentation, especially how you approached the comments here. So you either are Peter or not.

            The New Yorker is not a paper but a culture piece. The Independent is obscure and only favored here because it mentions Wikipedia. The Daily Telegraph is the same.

            http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Lying-Greedy-Promiscuous-Feminist-Bullies-are-Tearing-the-Video-Game-Industry-Apart

            Breitbart there has more views than all of them, and destroys the girl beyond all doubt and puts out counter claims that makes those other stories look shoddy and poorly researched.

            The “UK Quality” sources are not on Quinns side. You didn’t even find anything in actual quality papers from the UK. No FT, no Times, no BBC. Instead, you have a few wannabe rags that had poorly written articles by people seeking attention. You then use them to promote silliness for what reason? Hell, they couldn’t even do the research to get her real name when it was clearly out there. Pathetic. You would do well as a Wikipedia admin – clueless, have no problem with abuse while clearly involved, and no ethical standards for research.

          • Jeff

            By the way, Peter, did you even read the New Yorker piece? http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/zoe-quinns-depression-quest

            It isn’t glowing or positive. It simply puts some things out there without judging. It gives Quinn the ability to respond, but doesn’t give authorial weight to it like the topic post does.

            Even major gaming websites are unwilling to shill for her, giving weight to both sides and criticizing many of her claims: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/137293-Exclusive-Zoe-Quinn-Posts-Chat-Logs-Debunking-GamerGate-4Chan-and-Quinn-Respond

            Your “Independent” piece? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/zoe-quinn-and-the-orchestrated-campaign-of-harassment-from-some-gamers-9715427.html

            Under “voices” and “comment,” i.e. its an opinion piece, not a journalistic piece.

            Your reporting on the matter is a sham. Why lie when it is easy to check these things?

          • LeftField

            You realize that Breitbart has about as much journalistic credibility as the National Enquirer, right?

          • Jeff

            And the others have any other? None of those sites are legitimate, so I put Brietbart up to show how an illegitimate news site with far more hits attacks the girl to prove a complete lack of integrity when reporting what the internet actually says.

    • John lilburn

      *bzzzt*.

    • Joshua

      Wanna know how I know you’re an MRA?

  • Radiant Orchid

    It seems like this might be a good time to mention Tutelary’s interest in “remote access tools” like the kind that are used to steal personal information and images from people’s computers. Like “darkcomet”.

  • Let’s play ‘Spot the Men’s Rights Activist.’

    Doff your trilby, sirrah. Or is it more like an Akubra?

  • Jeff

    I’m surprised that there is no mention Mr. Stradivarius, who is obsessed with Zoe Quinn, created the page and owned the page, even though Zoe Quinn fails notability or anything that could even be determined as notable.

    • HRIP7

      The underlying problem is that Wikipedia has too many biographies. These sorts of disputes often arise in biographies of people who are just about notable by Wikipedia’s standards, but would not be notable by the standards of pretty much any print encyclopedia.

      The English Wikipedia has nearly 675,000 biographies of living people, vs. around 3,000 highly active editors. (The English Wikipedia also has an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 articles that no one – no one – has on their watchlist.)

      With those numbers, there are many things that slip through the quality control net, both puffery and hatchet jobs. You can’t crowdsource and maintain encyclopedic biographies that way: we’ve seen enough cases where the “crowd” consisted just of the biography subject and/or someone who hated them.

      Besides, Wikipedia’s reliance on low-brow press sources often results in fairly dismal biography writing. That’s a natural result of Wikipedia’s low notability requirements – there simply are no good biographical sources for hundreds of thousands of people Wikipedia has “biographies” on.

      Returning to the specifics of this case, looking at Zoe Quinn’s biography I see no evidence that Mr Stradivarius created the page or exerted undue ownership. As far as I can see, he only made his first edit to it in mid-August 2014, probably as a result of BLP concerns. The biography was created by user Shaun Edmonds in May of this year, well before the controversy arose. Notability was contested, but judged to meet Wikipedia’s standards by sysop (and former WMF employee) Sarah Stierch. The article was nominated for deletion a few days later, and the decision was “Keep.” Neither Sarah Stierch nor Shaun Edmonds nor Mr Stradivarius appears to have participated in that deletion discussion.

      • Jeff

        HRIP7, you obviously didn’t do your research:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Depression_Quest&oldid=621882277

        That is the page that was center of this whole argument. That is the topic that is ignored by the original post because they have no clue what they were writing about. That is the page Mr. Stradivarius created as part of his ongoing promotional obsession with Zoe. And Sarah Stierch, well known paid editor and person who attaches her name to anything feminist to promoter herself and the subject? You didn’t bother to look further into that?

        Going further, the problem is that Wikipedia has too many -promotional- biographies, and it is obvious that Mr Stradivarius had a personal connection to Zoe to have put up all of that information regarding her so early and without any real notability.

        Part of the outcry against Zoe is that there is a lot of evidence showing her ability to manipulate traditional “nerd” organizations to promote herself. That happens quite often on Wikipedia, and it is no coincidence that Mr. Stradivarius acts the way he does. That should have been the real analysis of the article instead of a silly puff piece that doesn’t look at the facts of the issue and instead diverges into strange assumptions with no proof.

        There is a lot of evidence that shows that this issue is really about abuse of Wikipedia for self-promoters, and people close with the subject and connected to self-promotion are heavily involved. We didn’t get that article. Instead, we got a crappy rant that reveals more self-hatred than critical analysis.

        • HRIP7

          You are talking about a different article altogether, i.e. the one on Quinn’s game, Depression Quest. But I am at a loss to see what you call Mr Stradivarius’ “ongoing promotional obsession with Zoe”. That article was only created three weeks ago. It has had 123 edits (compared to 395 for the biography, almost all of them in the past month). Is there more to this that I am missing?

          • Jeff

            You are missing 99% of it as per what you stated above. At least the article mentions that this issue is actually about Depression Quest: ” as it turned out, wrongly, of having had an affair with a journalist to ensure favorable coverage of her interactive fiction game, Depression Quest.”

            That wasn’t wrong. Even the website that hosts mentioned that there is, indeed a relationship: http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346

            Notice their dispute – they claim that his affair with her started after the article. However, there is a lot of evidence online that the two knew each other for two years before that period, and there has been no other refutation about her relationships with the other writers.

            Stradivarius white washed all pages mentioning problems while simultaneously putting adverts to her non-notable works.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Depression_Quest&diff=623010928&oldid=622697396

            It is written exactly like a puff piece. Every piece criticized regarding Quinn was criticized for being a puff piece written solely to advertise her works. That game received a lot of negative press from depression groups and from gaming websites, but none of that makes it into the article.

            You can’t be the one claiming “negative statements” are “unsourced or poorly sourced” then using shadier sources to promote the same subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Zoe_Quinn&diff=prev&oldid=621765372

            Involved admin with a long history of iffy problems jumping to the rescue of someone who he is probably connected to in some manner while also promoting the individual. That is the real story here, and that happens so often with Wikipedia. Admin abusing power to help their friends make money.

          • Jeff

            https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Mr._Stradivarius&dir=prev&limit=500&target=Mr.+Stradivarius Have you ever bothered to find out who Mr. Stradivarius is an obvious sock of yet? Or done any in-depth look at his really poor performance over the years?

          • HRIP7

            Jeff, you say:

            That wasn’t wrong. Even the website that hosts mentioned that there is, indeed a relationship: http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346

            Did you actually read the link you posted there?

            The allegations have been extreme. Nathan has been accused of in some way trading positive coverage of a developer for the opportunity to sleep with her, of failing to disclose that he was in a romantic relationship with a developer he had written about, and that he’d given said developer’s game a favorable review. All of those are troubling claims that we take seriously. All would be violations of the standards we maintain. Having spoken to Nathan several times, having looked closely at the numerous messages sent our way by concerned readers and, having compared published timelines, our leadership team finds no compelling evidence that any of that is true.

            On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he’s written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn’s game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review.

            This type of wilful ignorance of published facts, combined with a desire to have personal conjecture converted into encyclopedic content, is exactly what went down on the biography’s talk page.

            And are you truly complaining that Stradivarius did not add controversial content to a living person’s biography based on this source? Geekparty.com? Wikipediocracy has a better Alexa rank than that blog.

          • Jeff

            HRIP7, before you try to lynch people and speak to what you don’t know, the Kotaku reporter involved himself in the Game Jam controversy, where Zoe Quinn attempted to destroy the careers of multiple female developers she considered rivals then had her love interest bash them in Kotaku.

            As for complaining about him not adding controversial stuff, what a lie. I said he was adding puff pieces, which he clearly did. That does not mean that I said he should add criticism but that the non-notable stuff should not be up nor should it be written by someone claiming to be an objective admin.

            So far, you have abused Wikipediocracy to destroy editors, defend abusive admin, and utterly lie about what sources say. Why are you still even allowed on the site? You need to be shown the door fast if there is to be real criticism, because it is obvious that you have jumped so far into trolling that you have no legitimate reason to even be allowed to view the site.

            You lied, and were caught. Now you will probably either cry, abuse power, or both. ANI should have a ban proposal for you for your shenanigans and canvassing.

          • HRIP7

            The quote contained in my post preceding yours refers to the 31 March Game Jam article. You are thus not telling me anything new when you say that Grayson was involved in the controversy. As for the appropriateness of his involvement, note that even Ms Quinn’s ex saw fit to amend his post, stating—

            There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. 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 reason to believe that it was sexual in nature.

            This correction is consistent with Kotaku’s official statement quoted above. It appears that in the interim people tweeted about this, and others wanted to write Wikipedia’s biography of Quinn based on those tweets. You contributed to Wikipedia long enough to know that it does not work that way, and for good reason.

            You posted two diffs. In one, Mr. Stradivarius refused to add controversial biographical content based on Geekparty.com. Geekparty.com is an obscure blog, and nowhere near an acceptable source for such content. There is nothing anyone can do but commend Mr Stradivarius for his decision. It is fully supported by BLP policy.

            In your other diff, Mr Stradivarius added material sourced to Forbes, Venturebeat, Gizmag, Ars Technica, the Sydney Morning Herald, Rock Paper Shotgun and Giant Bomb. Those are widely read publications, all of them with Alexa ranks below 7,000. Segmentnext.com is not quite so widely read, but passable. One source he used, gamepolitics.com, I would consider weak and obscure; however, it was only used for factual descriptions of the game, such as the release date and a brief description of gameplay.

            Your tone is becoming needlessly unpleasant, Jeff.

          • Jeff

            “The quote contained in my post preceding yours refers to the 31 March Game Jam article. You are thus not telling me anything new when you say…”

            So you are admitting to trolling by claiming that the author didn’t abuse his station merely because he never mentioned Depression Quest while knowing that he did to help her in other ways?

            Nice, just nice. You lied a lot throughout, you promoted straight out abuse, and you attacked people in a vicious and nasty manner. You are a piece of work. You really are.

            It is sad that you are able to be allowed near the internet. You represent all of the worst possible behavioral types all in one neat package.

          • Jeff

            “In one, Mr. Stradivarius refused to add controversial biographical content based on Geekparty.com. ”

            More obfuscating and lies. In the one diff, Mr. Stradivarius was ACTING AS AN ADMIN. You can’t do that while building content on an article. How do you not get that?

            How do you not get that you don’t allow for bad behavior because it sides with your political values then abuse people viciously for disagreeing? That is what makes Wikipedia wrong, and that is why you need to go.

          • Jeff

            “Those are widely read publications, all of them with Alexa ranks below 7,000.”

            The third type of lie and even worse. Being widely read does not make one a legitimate news source. The fact that you would put “Rock Paper Shotgun” or “Giant Bomb” is just flat out revolting.

            Do Wikipediocracy regulars actually agree with such an abuse like you are perpetrating? You committed three gross abuses in one post, each of a different type as I outlined above. Flat out lying, flat out political abuse, and a pure willingness to deceive about content.

            A ban proposal on Wikipedia on you is long overdue because it is obvious that you do not belong on the internet let alone on Wikipedia where you have been proven to cause gross harm to others.

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            Jeff: if you have a problem with my editing, I’ll be happy to talk with you about it. Rather than just making accusations about my involvement with Zoe-Quinn-related articles, it would be better to actually talk through the issues and resolve them, no? It looks like you are most unhappy about this diff:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Zoe_Quinn&diff=prev&oldid=621765372

            This was actually an edit request for a semi-protected page, not a fully protected page, and any autoconfirmed editor can answer those. If it was a request to edit a fully protected page then there might have been a problem, but that wasn’t the case.

            Also, you’ve implied that I have a personal connection to Quinn. I can’t disprove this, obviously, but I assure you that no such connection exists. Actually, the reason I got involved with the Quinn article was through patrolling the related changes of [[Category:Living people]]:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Living_people

            I happened to be patrolling just as “GamerGate” was breaking, and the edits to Quinn’s page stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s why this revert was my first edit to the page:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zoe_Quinn&diff=prev&oldid=621762903

            (Looking at that now, I’m surprised it wasn’t revdelled.)

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            And now it is revdelled. Well, there you go.

          • Jeff

            “It looks like you are most unhappy about this diff:”

            No, and it is obvious that you didn’t read anything I said. I am most unhappy with you acting as an admin while simultaneously writing a puff piece on the subject. That is the definition of being involved. You cannot do that, and it is clear that you are a restarted account who played the sock game to get head in the Wikipedia circle.

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            I thought that diff was the one in which you thought I was acting as an admin in Zoe-Quinn-related articles. I didn’t see any other diffs or links above where you said I was acting in an admin capacity there. Perhaps you’re talking about my protection of the Depression Quest article? If so, you should read this AN thread if you haven’t done so already. Or maybe it was something else?

            As for the sockpuppetry accusation, I’m really not sure why you would think that. [[User:Mr. Stradivarius]] is my first account (though I did get renamed early on – check my userpage for that). I never edited as an IP either. I think I might have been investigated by checkuser one time as well, when I got hit by a rangeblock just after the start of my RfA. You say above that I’m an “obvious” sockpuppet, but it’s lost on me. What are you basing that reasoning on?

          • Jeff

            It is obvious that Mr Stradivarius, renamed or no, is your first account. A brief glance at your editing history has you follow to a T the restart sock puppetry guideline. Your quick adoption of scripts plus user page objects that new people do not use shows that you were clearly far familiar on day one of your account than people being around for even 6 months are not.

            Even though you self-reported the action on that does not mean you had the right to abuse it. A person who calls in to report that they robbed a place still robbed a place. You don’t get points because you turned yourself in. You abused your position as an admin multiple times beyond just that diff and that protection. You used the threat of adminship as a weapon to win a content dispute and to chase people off with legitimate concerns.

            http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/12223-The-Escapist-Publisher-Issues-Public-Statement-on-Gamergate.4

            As the Escapist points out, as others, Zoe Quinn’s side lost because they were liars, unethical, and were doing it all to screw over actual women who were connected to Game Jam. You abused admin ops to promote Zoe Quinn and to put in illegitimate sources, i.e. opinion pieces and blog pieces, while threatening admin action against actual sources that revealed the real substance of the issue.

            If we had a just country, you would be thrown in jail for abusing the internet like you did.

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            About those scripts and user page gizmos – my first monobook.css edits were (unsuccessful) tests for a MediaWiki installation that I was planning for another site, to see if I could make the colour scheme match. I didn’t know all that much about CSS then, though. (I don’t recommend you try out this code in your Wikipedia skin.js, by the way.) And my user page code was lifted straight from Jimbo Wales’s page. All I did was change the colours – I didn’t understand what all of the code did until later. I don’t think I would choose Jimbo’s page to copy from if I was starting a new account now. It seems a bit presumptuous.

            And about the “thrown in jail” remark – is that really necessary? I’m sure we’re capable of discussing this without resorting to personal attacks. (Also, I probably don’t live in your country.)

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            Oops, that should be skin.css, not skin.js.

          • Jeff

            “tests for a MediaWiki installation that I was planning for another site”

            Even Poetlister comes up with more credible nonsense than that when trying to hide the origins of his socks. Your poor attempt to cover up your blatantly bad past only furthers how awful you are. You proven yourself time after time full willing to abuse your position as an admin, and your socking past is enough to show that as long as Wikipedia has people like you, it will always be dysfunctional.

          • Mr. Stradivarius

            Well, you don’t have to believe it, but it’s the truth. If you don’t want to believe the truth, then there’s not much I can do here.

          • Jeff

            Said every single sock master ever.

  • Titanium Dragon

    I’m afraid you’re kind of going out on a limb here.

    First off, I’m not involved in video game development; I’m involved in tabletop roleplaying game development. They aren’t actually all that different on some levels – they both exist for the purposes of entertainment – but the TTRPG industry is vastly different from the video game industry.

    Secondly, if you’re going to try and doxx someone (which you are), it probably helps to try and doxx someone who actually keeps who they are a secret. Your revelations are SUPER SHOCKING, unless you realize that it is more of a pen name than a pseudonym – unlike Zoe Quinn (AKA Chelsea Van Valkenburg), I use my real name in association with my online name and don’t attempt to keep it a secret. I mean, seriously, I use the two in conjunction on my Deviantart page.

    Look, here’s reality: Wikipedia is about the documentation of notable things, people, events, ect. Zoe Quinn isn’t actually especially noteworthy as a person or a game creator; most indie game devs are not. The primary source of her notability is various controversies she has been involved in. This is a problem from the standpoint of Wikipedia. The truth is that she probably shouldn’t have a Wikipedia article, as I noted in the article comments (repeatedly); she is more of a controversy attached to a person than a person attached to a controversy, and writing a Wikipedia article about someone whose notability comes primarily from controversy is always tough, because you end up with WP:UNDUE issues all over the place. You’ll note that Michael Brown doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, nor do a large number of spree shooters or crime victims, because their sole notability comes from an event they were involved in rather than as people themselves. If we have a Zoe Quinn article, it needs to make mention of this because it is far more notable than anything else she has done, per our general guidelines. If you feel that the article should not exist, then it should be deleted. I’m good with that.

    I didn’t make the GamerGate article; others were involved with that, but I joined in because it was relevant.

    The sad truth is that I’m not actually all that interested in all the crazy conspiracy theory nonsense; to me, it is a fairly clear-cut issue of lack of integrity (and frankly, the most disturbing part of this is her sleeping with her boss prior to getting hired by him, and no one batting an eye at this – do indie game devs expect young women to sleep with them to get jobs working for them? The whole thing about his wife is pretty messed up, too, as is the idea that disclosing any of this would hurt “the movement”). The main reason I’m even involved is because I made a few edits, and then a bunch of people yelled at me, and continue to yell at me about my involvement with it – from both sides, I’ll note. I’m not really sure why people think that being involved in Wikipedia is something that they themselves cannot do, but whatever.

    My goal in the article is not to smear Zoe Quinn, nor is it the goal of any other editors. My goal is to present a factual, NPOV overview of the whole situation. Who, what, where, when, and if possible why. As it should always be on Wikipedia. What happened is important to understanding the gigantic explosion which followed – there are now hundreds of articles in reliable sources, and tens of millions of hits. It is a gigantic mess, and it is Wikipedia’s job to try and summarize what happened so that people can understand what happened. It is not our job to summarize every stupid little kerscuffle on the internet.

    • HRIP7

      Again, everything you say in your last paragraph sounds fine. But whatever your goals and intentions, in the judgment of your peers on Wikipedia, it bears no relation to what you actually did, or tried to do.

      • Jeff

        ” it bears no relation to what you actually did, ”

        What you actually die was lie about sources, defend abuses by one group to wage political warfare against another, and violate every core policy of Wikipedia in your war. That is really sickening.

  • Transphobia

    >Suffice it to say that having first identified as transgender and now as a woman, Tutelary/Ging287′s gender is unclear. Pretending to be a woman on a site where women and transwomen constitute a tiny minority has been used successfully in the past

    Oh my God. Are you really doing this?

    • Radiant Orchid

      This isn’t a case of transphobia. No one has said or even implied that there is anything wrong with being trans.

      This is a case of not believing what Tutelary is claiming. Incidentally, they no longer claim to be trans. Now they are saying they are not a man and not trans, but a woman.

      • Titanium Dragon

        Which is very common for trans people. They frequently don’t identify as trans; they identify as belonging to whatever gender they believe they are a part of, and get upset at the idea that by being trans, they are any less of (insert gender here) than any natural-born member of said gender.

        We really have no idea. The whole thing is, fundamentally, an attempt to discredit and intimidate the person in question.

      • Transphobia

        Misgendering IS transphobia. You people are nuts.

  • nunya bidness

    You are just as bad as the FYAD goons that bullied the Wikipedia user ty peppar (clayton olney)until he committed suicide. You should be ashamed.

  • Slim

    You are such a fucking nasty person. Seriously? Doxxing a person because they don’t agree with you about what should be included in a fucking Wikipedia page? This is a perfect example of a SJW talking about horrible people harassing and being nasty to someone, then turning around and being a nasty bitch to someone else. Total hypocrisy.

    And no, Zoe Quinn doesn’t deserve a wiki page. And if she HAS to have someone, and you HAVE to mention the harassment, then how about talking about the reasons for the harassment? Even if you make a note of saying that it is speculative.

    • John lilburn

      Did your friend get his real id associated with his online shenanigans? Poor little diddums. Shall we call you a whambulance?

      • Titanium Dragon

        No one involved here was involved in outing the details of Zoe Quinn’s personal life. They’re editors on Wikipedia. The people who doxxed her are some idiots on Reddit or 4chan or some other random website, or her ex, who was a fellow social justice person. All Wikipedia wanted to do was note what happened, because that’s Wikipedia’s job – to neutrally report on notable events.

        And when something ends up in hundreds of news sites and tens of thousands of blogs, it is probably notable.

        So either you must assume that the writer of this article is a horrible person because she doxxed some people, because even the mere MENTION of what happened by third parties is horrible, and by extension the perpetrators of it must be even worse, or you must assume that her complaints about documenting this are groundless, and ergo, she’s attacking people for no reason at all and is, ergo, a horrible person.

        I mean, what other possibilities are there?

        Morton’s Fork is fun like that.

        • John Lilburne

          If commentards and bloggers on WP who want to record internet gossip get what they deserve.

    • taiki

      Following someone’s digital breadcrumbs is “doxxing” now? I thought Doxxing was like, using LexisNexis to get someone’s home address and SSN.

      “Don’t go digging into who we are through easily findable means! That’s doxxing!”

      • Titanium Dragon

        That is all doxxing is, really – the removal of anonymity. Most such documents are actually accessible to the public; it is all about knowing where to find them.

        • HRIP7

          So if a guy says in one forum that he’s a guy impersonating women (and a lot else besides …), and claims on Wikipedia that he is a woman speaking for women in general, and starts arguing with the Gender Gap people “as a woman”, your opinion is that no one should call him out for it?

          Perhaps you could translate this into a more normal situation, off the internet. Here is a guy claiming he is an expert plumber, and he wants to fix your mate’s heating system for $1000. But you know that yesterday he told someone else that in fact he knows nothing about plumbing, and just scams people for fun.

          Does that mean that you should not tell your mate to steer clear of that “plumber”? Because it would be “harassment” of the fake plumber to do so? Get a grip, for Christ’s sake.

          I thought Wikipedia had grown out of this puerile stuff after the Essjay controversy.

  • Derpen

    Well, so much for you guys not doxxing anybody. Seriously, did you guys go full hypocrite and go dox some random supporter of #GamerGate? You guys are just despicable.

    Also, atricle is based fully on ad-hominem.

    • Titanium Dragon

      I wouldn’t really even call Tutelary a supporter of GamerGate; to the best of my knowledge, they just edited the article and spoke up on the talk page.

      I’m not really all that closely involved either; my involvement is pretty much entirely BECAUSE I worked on the article. I read about it briefly, originally, and as I am often wont to do, I went to Wikipedia to see what the Zoe Quinn article had to say about it. I ended up getting pulled back in when Google News had it hit their actual news feed, and then people started messaging me because I had edited the Wikipedia article (many of them thanking me for trying to make sure that it kept a neutral tone). The only reason I used #GamerGate on Twitter is because of this incident.

      The whole thing has been brewing for years. Arguably decades; John Romero’s whole Daikatana thing really is an infamous instance of people not really respecting their audience, and given that much of the gamer audience are people who were bullied themselves, they are very sensitive to perceptions of being bullied or talked down to. The gaming press clearly does not respect them in many cases, and some of the more brazen instances of conflict of interest has upset them for ages.

      On the other hand, a lot of these people ARE introverts and not very good with people, and have a tendency to lash out and insult people. It is hardly surprising that they can be very nasty, because they often don’t have the best of social skills, and their private activity being soemthing that they can do in the privacy of their own home without face to face interaction. They DO have a massive sense of entitlement, as shown by the incredible anger over the ending to Mass Effect 3 which, while rather poorly written, did not warrant the incredible amount of anger shown. And that is hardly the only instance of such. Many of them want exactly what they want, and want it now.

      And misogyny is to some extent an issue in the gaming industry, but the thing is, blaming the gamers for misogyny in games is more than a little misguided. Moreover, a lot of the complaints are simply nonsensical; complaining about Princess Peach and GTA is stupid. Princess Peach IS an object, a MacGuffin; she isn’t meant to be a character in the mainline Mario games, she’s an objective. And that’s fine! Those games barely have a plot at all; it is a pure excuse plot. On the other hand, GTA is a power fantasy for a specific demographic of gamer; I don’t like it at all, and I’ve often looked down on it in the past (and, frankly, still kind of do so), but after reading about why people enjoy power fantasies like that, and listening to people, and actually getting over myself and asking myself “why DO people like that?”, I’ve come to accept their existence.

      No, the issue is with the disempowerment of women (like in Metroid: Other M) and inappropriate sexualization of female characters (King in King of Fighters, Samus and her Zero Suit) in games. If someone is an object, that’s fine. The problem comes when you take someone who isn’t an object and make them into one – that’s potentially demeaning. And if you do it to women far more often than you do it to men, then there’s an issue.

      Putting in nearly-naked ladies into things which aren’t power fantasies like GTA is bothersome as well and I don’t like it very much, because that’s not why I play video games – and I’m sure that gamers have no shortage of places to look at scantily clad women on the internet. And it IS offputting for women.

      The dearth of female protagonists is also problematic. I don’t think women in video games are actually all that poorly written on the whole – I just think that they are underrepresented in certain roles, as “real characters”.

      But I digress.

      Point is, I actually agree that the gaming industry should do better.

      The problem is that Zoe Quinn and Phil Fish are exactly a part of the nasty gamer subculture they supposedly despise – they are very nasty people who harass and demean others. Zoe Quinn has complained about slut shaming while simultaneously demeaning virgins, not recognizing that virgin-shaming is exactly the same as slut-shaming – in fact, slut-shaming and virgin-shaming are caused by each other. They are inextricably linked. And people like Phil Fish called everyone who complained about Zoe Quinn rapists.

      The original bout of censorship was what catapulted this into prominence; had they not deleted all the stuff off of Reddit and various other places, it probably wouldn’t have exploded. But the suppression made the people who were angry about it believe that they had something to hide – perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly. It doesn’t really matter at this point, because it looked like it to them. And indeed, I am very strongly anti-censorship, and this is partially why – when you tell people that they aren’t allowed to discuss something, you are fundamentally telling them that whatever it is is real and that you have something to hide. This is why I believe all hate speech laws are severely counterproductive – making denying the Holocaust illegal implies that you are scared that if people were allowed to ask these questions, they might find “the truth”. If you leave it legal and make fun of the people who deny the Holocaust, it just makes them look like the crazy nutjobs that they are.

      In this case, it is really hard to say – the problem is that the industry is unquestionably corrupt and in many cases really doesn’t understand proper ethical conduct. The question is whether or not any particular case rises to the level of being a problem. Honestly, as one of my friends pointed out, the Grayson thing is a lot less questionable than the Boggs thing – how many nerdy gamers would be thrilled to have some pretty woman who is into gaming express interest in them? A lot of them, I’m sure. Would they really think about the implications that it would look like they had written a positive press piece about someone that they started a relationship with shortly thereafter? Many of them probably wouldn’t. It looks terrible, but that doesn’t mean that it WAS – but we, the world in general, has no way of knowing whether or not what happened was inappropriate or not.

      Boggs, on the other hand, slept with her shortly before hiring her. That’s incredibly awful. If you’re a young female game developer looking for a job, and you hear that someone got hired after they slept with their future boss, and NO ONE IN THE INDUSTRY SAID ANYTHING BAD ABOUT IT, how would that make you feel? What would that make you think was the expectation for behavior in the industry? Is that not, itself, rather misogynistic? Because I sure think it is. And that’s ignoring the fact that he was married, and that apparently Quinn claimed that the whole thing coming out would be bad for “the movement” and would “silence” her voice for feminism, and that, thusly, the wife should keep the affair quiet. That is unconscionable.

      But no, everyone is talking about Grayson. And so, the article is very likely to only very passingly mention, if at all, the whole thing with Boggs (it has been mentioned, but it is only very briefly mentioned as being a side show, and the only article which went into any real depth about it which I found was an opinion piece, which isn’t a RS), while it will go into great depth about the stupid blowup over game journalism over something which may or may not have even been wrong. Stupid, yes, and something he shouldn’t have done, but there’s no evidence of evil there, just people who can’t keep their pants zipped. But that’s how Wikipedia works, and that’s my job as a Wikipedia editor – I don’t insert my opinions into things, I have to document it. So I have to document stupid internet fight which the press covered, and people yelling about misogyny and corruption, and I can’t really talk at all about that stuff.

      And I’m okay with that. Wikipedia isn’t my personal voice piece, and I would be wrong to use it as such. The entire reason why Wikipedia is useful is precisely because it isn’t anyone’s personal voice piece. The article will contain plenty of great information on the subject matter so people can go back in ten years and be like “Wow, people in 2014 were really dumb.” It won’t contain everything I might like for it to contain, but I can write articles on the internet or whatever talking about my personal point of view, and that’s much better than contaminating Wikipedia with what I consider to be important – Wikipedia is bigger and better and more important than that. That’s what makes Wikipedia great.

      When people – such as the writers of this piece, or the #GamerGate folks, or the anti-global warming crazies, or racist people, or anyone else – try to push their point of view into Wikipedia, that’s a problem. Wikipedia is MEANT to be neutral. It is meant to take a neutral point of view. And we use reliable sourcing and other things to help make sure that Wikipedia does not suck.

      They made fun of the stylo thing in the article, and I probably shouldn’t have linked to that (even though stylystic analysis tools are publicly available on the internet, so anyone could verify the information) because it isn’t something which can be confirmed as a reliable source. Who Bad Horse is is not public knowledge (even though I do know who he is, and he is less unreliable than you’d think), so linking to that blog is inappropriate. And I’m glad someone caught that and fixed it, because, well, we all screw up. We write things which are slanted or incomplete, or use bad sources, or write the wrong name, or misquote a source, or do any number of other stupid things. Wikipedia is awesome because when you screw up, someone else will come along five minutes later and fix it.

  • Ross McPherson

    There is no fine line at Wikipedia between encyclopaedia and tabloid gossip. In fact the social dynamics there are also driven by gossip. Indeed, Wikipedia’s two great pillars of editor recruitment are Gossip and Error. People are drawn in by the urge to join the feeding frenzy or by the conscientious desire to fix things. The conscientious ones don’t last long of course. Wikipedia merely needs a constant supply of them. The scandal merchants are scandalous enough to hang around in spite of everything.

    On a more personal note, I would rather Wikipediocracy didn’t name and shame people. There is no need for it. The anonymous antics at Wikipedia are shameful enough.

  • Alex

    Gotta love how Tutelary shows up in all discussions about women and starts his comments with the phrases ‘as a fellow woman’ and ‘fellow female editor here’, followed by a rant about why women need to suck it up and why men’s rights websites are totally legit. I remember when Tutelary brought his extra special female presence to Jimbo’s talk page and told everyone why he as a woman supported close-ups of naked tits as illustrations of Power Girl.

    • Titanium Dragon

      I don’t see why anyone cares. One of the beauties of the internet is that who we are doesn’t matter as much as what we do. Look, I consider being transgendered to be a mental illness, because it IS one, and we have to give people treatment for it (which is sadly highly ineffective; the suicide rate amongst transgendered folk is horrifically high). But humoring someone about what gender they are doesn’t hurt me in any way, and so I call transgendered people by their preferred pronouns; when I fail to do so, it is a mistake, not because I am deliberately “misgendering” them or whatever.

      I DO understand why some people are leery of sharing bathrooms with transgendered individuals, but on the internet? It really, really shouldn’t matter. Especially not on Wikipedia. Be they male, female, transgendered, it doesn’t really affect my opinion one way or the other.

      And telling a transgendered individual that they are NOT, in fact, whatever their preferred gender is is a great way to start a fight with them.

      • Radiant Orchid

        Titanium Dragon, why do you keep talking about trans people? This post isn’t about trans people. This post is about misogynistic behaviour.

        • Titanium Dragon

          The post in part tries to shame someone by implying, via claiming that they are trans, that they are not, in fact, a “real woman”, and, therefore, their opinion on the issue (and women’s issues in general) are less valid.

          Are you not familiar with this?

          Now, look, I understand this point of view.

          But it doesn’t make it any nicer.

          She posted pictures of a minor and noted where they lived, and claimed said minor is a transgendered individual.

          Do you not understand how that might be problematic, depending on said person’s home life, if that got back out?

          We have no real knowledge of whether or not said person is openly transgendered or not IRL. That sort of thing can be very problematic for people.

          It was a clear attempt to demean the person and their point of view, as well as to intimidate them.

          The article is about the writer being afraid that Zoe Quinn (and by extension, her defenders) is going to look bad because someone is going to mention something on Wikipedia which has been mentioned in literally thousands of places on the internet, including hundreds of reliable sources. I’m sorry, but it is a bit late for that.

          Seriously. I understand her motivation very clearly – it is an attempt to intimidate people into not editing the article. A lot of people are afraid of being doxxed.

          • HRIP7

            The point is much simpler, and probably as lost on anyone who has a stake in gamergate as it is obvious to everyone else: it’s to show how vulnerable Wikipedia biographies are to malicious editing, and how these articles are overrun by hordes of activists of one persuasion or another. Wikipedia is a cesspool.

            Incidentally, there is currently an arbitration request related to Wikipedia’s Gender Gap Task Force. The complaint is that the GGTF is disrupted by men who think the gender gap is just fine and the project aimed at closing it shouldn’t even exist.

            The Wikipedia community is at stark variance here with the Wikimedia Foundation’s aspirations. Misogyny is part and parcel of large swathes of Wikipedian culture.

            (By the way, you do realise that these pictures are five years old, don’t you, and the person shown in them would be correspondingly older now. I consider it unlikely that they are still a minor.)

          • Transphobia

            >The point is much simpler, and probably as lost on anyone who has a stake in gamergate as it is obvious to everyone else: it’s to show how vulnerable Wikipedia biographies are to malicious editing, and how these articles are overrun by hordes of activists of one persuasion or another. Wikipedia is a cesspool.

            I have a feeling you can make that point without harassing and humiliating people. This is an outrage.

          • John lilburn

            @Transphobia See Goose, see Gander.

          • Titanium Dragon

            @HRIP7: So what you’re saying is, because you have a stake in this, the point is lost on you?

            Because I totally got the point. “Waaaah Wikipedia is reporting what showed up in Al-Jazeera and it makes me look bad!”

            Because that’s precisely what is going on. Look, I understand you are deeply invested in an insane conspiracy theory, drawing all these lines… but the sad, sad truth is that you’re no different from the crazy GamerGate folks who are doing the same thing.

            You are exactly the same. Having some big huge conspiracy theory against you makes you feel powerful, it makes you think that the world makes sense, it makes you feel important.

            I mean, it would be terrible if you were just totally insignificant, and the world was rudderless, right?

            It all has to be a conspiracy!

            Otherwise, your failures would be your own. And all the things that don’t go your way aren’t because you were overpowered, but because you failed. Or were simply wrong.

            The world IS rudderless. There is no great conspiracy. Sure, people work together, and try to do things… but the fact of the matter is that when you see the whole world working against you, it means you’re crazy, because it isn’t.

            Your problem is not the world. It is inside of you. And that is true of almost everyone on this planet in the developed world.

            The only reason I’m even involved in all this garbage is because of people like this person, and people like you, to attempt to intimidate and bully others. I find the whole thing inane and frustrating. And crazy people who rant about conspiracies out to get them all aren’t helping.

            It isn’t organized. It is a bunch of idiots running around yelling and screaming, with some very marginal low-level, local leadership. That’s reality.

            And that’s reality for both sides. People are pushing for their agenda, splitting up into tribes, and generally being stupid.

            I’m not much of one for tribes. I get annoyed by tribalism. It is the province of primitive, shallow minds. And even still, people yell at me to help them, or see me as part of their tribe.

            I think the reality is that Zoe Quinn is a terrible human being, but I don’t think she slept with people to get ahead in the world. I do think that she hides behind feminism as a shield for her own ill actions, because she’s a terrible human being, but that is true of many people – just as the writer of this blog is hiding behind a shield of justice to justify lashing out at the world and attacking people.

            It is always the province of such people to not take responsibility for themselves and their actions, because if they did so, they’d have to admit that they were wrong, that they did wrong, and that they should do better. Much easier to criticize the world than to better yourself.

            As for the reason why people whine about the gender gap task force – it is the exact same reason you’re whining about this. They’re afraid that they’re irrelevant and will be pushed out, without realizing that they’re the aggressors.

            Though let’s face reality here – the real reason that the gender gap exists is because women aren’t interested in editing Wikipedia. This isn’t because of systematic discrimination against women, it is because people – like the person who runs this blog – are jerks, and because a lot of them simply aren’t interested in nerding out and writing and editing Wikipedia articles obsessively. The task force is a ridiculous farce, not because it wouldn’t be a good thing to get more women on Wikipedia – it would be – but because there is no easy solution to the problem. People need to WANT to work on Wikipedia, and the problem is that many people – male and female alike – simply are uninterested in doing so.

            I suspect that if you could increase overall engagement with the site, you’d see a close in the gender gap – making the site more user friendly and more friendly to new users in general would probably result in disproportionately more women editing the encyclopedia. I think if you made people – like your friends here – less nasty, more people would join. A lot of people have noted that they’ve felt bitten by these people.

          • HRIP7

            “@HRIP7: So what you’re saying is, because you have a stake in this, the point is lost on you?”

            No, I am saying that because you – and others – have a horse in this race, you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’re so eager to mould Zoe Quinn’s biography so it fits with your mental image of her that you fail to notice that this is no way to write the top Google link for a person’s name.

            I have no interest in computer games. What I am interested in is how Wikipedia throws people’s biographies to the vultures to pick and fight over. It’s a very, very ugly spectacle.

          • Transphobia

            Discussing an article on the talk page is in no way comparable to doxxing people and going “This person is trans! And this person is a brony! Haha! So funny!”

            You people are monsters.

          • John lilburn

            Maybe a regiment even.

            There, there, never mind do you need a tissue?

            The truth remains the horror of doxxing (what a quaint phrase) is something that no one other that reddit, gamer, and wikipedia care about.

          • Titanium Dragon

            @John: You mean like Zoe Quinn, who this person is acting in defense of?

      • Alex

        I’m not sure if you’re trying to be king of the straw man or if you’re genuinely confused. Tutelary isn’t transgendered and nobody here said anything against transgender people. Tutelary’s a male men’s rights activist who is pretending to be a woman to give his misogynistic rants more of a punch. He’s not a clever bullshitter. Who says ‘fellow female editor here’ three times in one comment? I wonder what the people who are throwing a pity party for him are thinking. Poor MRA, how dare anyone expose his agenda and connect his delusional Reddit ravings to his POV pushing and harassment of women on Wikipedia?

  • Marty

    This is disgusting. You think photos of an effeminate young male(I say effeminate due to ring/necklace/bracelets/watch/long nails/”done” hair/clear skin and ponytail) from 5 years ago is proof that they are not TG today? You think photos do not constitute “certain personally identifying information about potentially underage persons.” Are you mad? Do you know that most TG people identify as such online long before they do in real life? And what do you get from potentially outing an underage TG identifier, internet sleuth points?

    The other half of this article is just a “look at this icky neckbeard furry brony”. Have you not seen enough jokes targeted at furrys on the internet? Is his being a furry relevant, or is posting it just part of your amusement?

    If this site has standards this will get deleted immediately.

  • Tarc

    I had fun on Wikipediocracy for awhile pretending to be a black conservative. Can’t really say why or when it started, it just kind of came about during some discussion or other, that it’d be fun to be something else and argue as if that was important. So I rolled with it. “As a black man…” can be quite an argument-buster if wielded correctly.

    We can smell our own; Tutelary is complexly, Grade-A full of shit.

    As for the rest of the rabble at the Zoe Quinn and related articles, it’s a continuation of the original harassment she endured; the overlap of white, single 18-35 yr olds who are both gamers and Wikipedians is sizable.

    • Titanium Dragon

      To be entirely honest, when I first got to the Zoe Quinn article, I was really expecting to have to work to keep it from being way too biased towards the gamers; I was unpleasantly surprised to find the opposite being the case. A lot of gamers seem to be somewhat leery of editing Wikipedia for some strange reason, given how many folks have poked me via Skype and other things to ask me about my mad expertise as an experienced Wikipedia Editor. Of course, it might be because some folks are intensely hostile towards them.

    • Jeff

      The thing about “smelling” stuff is that chances are, you are only able to smell your own stink. 🙂 The sinner always wants to assume others are sinners so they don’t feel so alone.

    • Anon

      You’re mistaking harassment for criticism. Most people were criticizing Zoe for a number of shitty, abusive shit, just like social justice people always say we’re supposed to call out shitty, abusive behavior in our communities. That doesn’t excuse harassment or doxxing Zoe, but harassment and doxxing is also what’s going on right here. What is this website anyway?

  • Tarc

    *Completely, that is.

  • Radiant Orchid

    Tutelary now says: “Though I will note one thing; I am a woman, and the fact that they are deliberately counteracting that by trying to frame me as a male or trans because of a slip of copy and paste is downright insulting.”

    So the folks who are upset because this is an attack on a young transwoman can put down the torches now. It isn’t an attack on trans people and never was. No one said or even implied that there was anything wrong with being trans.

  • Stupid

    “The confected outrage and point dodging in the comments is hilarious.”

    From their forum thread on this, to which I say, that’s because there IS no point here, you stupid shit. All I see is dox after dox after dox; how the fuck is there any point?

    Also, what word were you going for when you typed “confected”? “conflicted”, perhaps? Because that doesn’t fit either.

  • Lockefan

    Yet another article that tries to bend the truth regarding ZQ’s nudes: those weren’t illegally obtained. Piracy not privacy. She worked as an softcore adult model for brokendollz under the moniker Locke, the image sets are still available. Still: posting said pictures was a bitchmove by stupid assholes. Especially in prude Murica.

  • Tutelary

    I was thinking of running for adminship pretty soon but since I recently had a block and got doxxed by TERFS it probably won’t happen. I explained my faulty block on my user page but nutjob Drwmies removed it yesterday. Feminists are pretty much running the show, case in point, the admin who blocked me (Dreadstar) was the admin who blocked CSnarrow because he criticized feminism. Wikipedia needs more neutral admins to counteract the feminist dominance.

    • A. Danvers

      Dream on, buddy. You’d never survive a request for adminship, even if it weren’t for your masculinist agenda and chronic lies.

      You’re a single purpose account and all your edits outside of your preferred topic area are generated with Twinkle, barely masking your SPA status. Even voters who share your paranoia about impending female world domination and your compulsion to check for feminists under your bed wouldn’t vote for you.

  • Mybe

    Interesting to see that Tutelary/Lakai is also a scammer.

  • Nw

    I see Tutelary admits to pretending to be female over at hackforums:

    The exploit ONLY works for Yahoo messenger, sorry I didn’t mention that. But it’s good for pretending to be a girl, all it takes is, “Hey, wanna see me naked? <3" and you've got another slave.

    • Nw

      Oh, and he actually says on hackforums that he is a guy:

      For all future clarification, I’m a guy.

      • Titanium Dragon

        Interesting. Is that the same Tutelary, though? While I am the predominant user of the name “Titanium Dragon”, I am hardly the only person who uses it – http://titanium-dragon.tumblr.com/ is not me, for instance, and there’s some sort of Titanium Dragon WoW clan which is completely unrelated to me (I’ve never played WoW). Having the same username doesn’t really mean a whole lot – Tutelary is semi-obscure term for guardian or protector which is used periodically in video games and other places.

        Just because two people have the same user name doesn’t mean they’re the same person. I’ve actually chatted with a few of the other Titanium Dragons in the past, telling them I’m totally the real one and they’re all fakes <3

        Do they ever identify themselves as the same as the Wikipedia Tutelary? Because there appears to be someone who is involved with hardforums who uses that same name: http://hardforum.com/search.php?searchid=27143679

        Indeed, Tutelary only seems to have been using this name for less than a year, which means that it postdates the posts you're linking to – given their previous use of a different username as documented in the article, I think it is pretty unlikely they're the same person, unless there is some other confirmation, such as them actually saying they're the same person or a shared IP address or something similar.

        • Nw

          Yes, they are without a doubt the same person. At hackforums Tutelary’s profile lists their real name as Danielle Leishman. On wikipedia Tutelary’s user page gives their name as Danielle. A mediawiki bug report refers to Tutelary as Danielle Leishman. Note that Tutelary has a hackforums article in their userspace. Note wikipedia Tutelary’s interest in RAT software. Note the overlap in MRA/anti-feminist crap. They’re the same person.

          • Radiant Orchid

            I wonder when someone will be getting in touch with the real Danielle Leishman to ask if they know about all this. I’m guessing they don’t.

          • Ging-Boy is one creepy dude

            It’s possible that the real Danielle Leishman knows him. These creeps sometimes tend to impersonate women they know like the girl they had a crush on in school or the girl that rejected them.

          • Titanium Dragon

            Well, seeing as this already links to stuff: I’ll note that the person you’re talking about on those forums actually does claim to be trans in posts dating from 2014, well before this incident took place (circa March 2014). Impossible to tell if they really are or aren’t trans.

            And no, I didn’t go digging for it myself; someone on Twitter notified me about it privately, wanting to post it publicly to shame these folks, not recognizing that, you know, the entire point of why this was so bad in the first place was that it was outing someone as trans who might not be out in public yet. They seem to identify as female, judging by the name.

            I don’t really care if the person is trans or not, to be quite honest; the problem is that A) it is dangerous to out a trans minor, which they seemed to suggest the person might be and B) it is really a pretty lousy personal attack.

            Then again, let’s face it; the person who wrote this doesn’t actually care about misogyny or social justice, or else she wouldn’t have attacked me for being a fan of a very feminist children’s show. The reality is that they are simply tribalists, who are out to attack anyone who they perceive as threatening any member of their perceived tribe.

            You know, exactly the sort of people who we exclude from editing Wikipedia because they don’t care about a neutral point of view or communicating information, but about issue advocacy. It is hardly surprising that these folks have been banned from Wikipedia from prior infractions.

            But of course, they’ll simply claim it was all persecution for their viewpoints, and not at all the result of their own poor behavior.

          • Nw

            @Titanium Dragon

            Are they are really a minor? They have several online accounts that give their birth date as Oct 24, 1990, e.g. their wulfhowl account (if you need confirmation that this is tutelary and not some other danielle leishman, this soundcloud account links them together), and their facebook says they are a community college graduate.

          • Nw

            I messed up the quotes in the href attributes of those links, here are the corrected links: wulfhowl and soundcloud.

          • Nw

            Note they’ve now deleted an audio track from their soundcloud account that was titled ‘Lakai’s Guardian Application’ with subtitle ‘From HF. Lakai. My application.’ You can still see the track in google’s search results. It was an audio application by tutelary/lakai to join a group on hackforums, uploaded May 2013. I saved a local copy.

        • Transphobia

          Oh shit. So, these people could be harassing a completely unrelated individual. I hope this article will be taken down.

        • Peter

          Interesting that you are suddenly interested in every t being crossed and i being dotted in what Wikipediocracy says about Tutelary, but you two were pushing lots of rumours about someone’s private life into a top ten website which is the first Google search on most of the BLPs it contains.

          Wikipedia is a whole different kettle of fish from places like Wikipediocracy, or indeed Reddit etc. It claims to be a neutral reference source and asserts that its reliability is on a par with that of Britannica and other paper encyclopaedias. It is supported by donations which have charitable tax advantages.

          No one assumes that everything in Reddit or various private blogs is neutral or necessarily accurate. Far too many people have been convinced by Wikipedia’s propaganda and take what it says as gospel.

          The sexual tittle-tattle that people like you shove into people’s biographies is rarely encyclopaedic and, even when it is, its presence in the instantly Googleable Wikipedia can have a damaging effect on a marginally notable person’s life. This should be treated as a far more serious matter than the chance for the prurient to get suitably titillated by writing and reading about it.

          One of the ways to try to redress this to have the people who add the tittle-tattle subjected to scrutiny themselves. Spreading it around that the tittle-tattle in Wikipedia is added by people who fantasise about talking ponies having sex or who lie about their gender and trans-status might help the general public learn that they need not take seriously anything that this bunch of losers say.

          The preoccupation with gossip is widespread in Wikipedia. I noted today that the Wiki bio of a former sports professional has mentioned for almost three months that they were charged with a drugs offence. No one has bothered removing this claim now that the charges have been dropped after someone else has been identified as responsible for the offence. How long will the first searched file about this person contain the misinformation suggesting that they abuse drugs? The over-zealous attitude of people like you who think that adding every factoid in the news to Wikipedia is good generates libellous content that does real harm.

          Unfortunately too many Wikipedians are so socially dysfunctional that they fail to see that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. (See the then Wikimedia official who thought that his bondage photos should be suppressed while he was also re-adding links to a sex video into a woman’s BLP.)

          • Jeff

            The real problem is the inclusionary standards, the same crappy sources that contain negative statements are allowed when they contain positive statements. There needs to be true uniformity.

            Then there is the problem of people who are stepping in as admin against one type of sources happen to be the same ones putting in the crappy fluff sources.

            The knife should cut both ways and rules applied equally, or there is no point in having such a false pretense.

          • Jeff

            Peter, one of the things the article lacks is Zoe’s real name, Chelsea Van Valkenburg. This is out there in very reliable sources. Also in reliable sources is her background as a pornographic model.

            Though this may be embarrassing, it is not a BLP violation to contain this information. But some White Knights are doing what they can to prevent anything but a very selected view to be produced. Isn’t that a tad odd?

          • Jeff

            That Dailybeast article represents how bad these blog reporters are – the youtube comments are no different than every other youtube comment. Hatred and “death threats” tend to appear throughout comment sections regardless of the subject. Then there is the fact that they ignore that the video itself was flamebait put out there simply to generate clicks through angering others. “A harmless woman” is one who is directly waging an online campaign to attack another group.

            Why is it that the other side’s vices must be exaggerated when your side’s ignored? How does that help anyone or why is that appropriate? “Violence against __” and “Hatred against ___” is the wrong mentality. Violence and Hatred need to end, not against one group.

            The problem is that people are trying to get attention to sell a product, and they don’t care if it is negative or positive. We have the Kardashians, whose only product has been one inane sextape. We no longer have people who are willing to be honest with themselves or others, or to actually produce something for the good of humanity. Instead, we just have a lot of selfish children that only care about making some quick money.

          • @Jeff

            Jeff: “But some White Knights are doing…”

            The Daily Beast: ““White knighting” is a pejorative term bigots use to undermine such actions from men who are using their voices for support, not for condemnation and misogyny. Bigots use it to claim men are supporting women in the hopes of sleeping with women. Because, apparently, that’s the only reason you would ever want to treat someone as a person.”

            We get it, you think that Sarkeesian is “directly waging an online campaign to attack another group” because she criticizes the portrayal of women in video games. And you think that she got what she deserved, a barrage of rape and death threats and threats to her family. I pity you.

            Do not use Wikipedia to vent your hatred of Sarkeesian, Quinn and the “white knights” who won’t let her BLP become a sounding board for your rage.

          • Jeff

            White Knight is a trope, a behavior. To say it is a pejorative is silly. To use The Daily Beast as anything but a blog with people who can’t get published in the legitimate press is silly. To use an anonymous name to make claims about me editing Wikipedia when it is obvious to everyone here that it is impossible for me to do such is silly.

            I was the one that brought this story to the attention of many people on August 20 because I noticed that there were admin that were involved abusing their powers on Wikipedia to protect her while simultaneously promoting her works in a way that makes paid editors blush. The one admin is a clear restart account with a long history of bad decisions.

          • Transphobia

            >Interesting that you are suddenly interested in every t being crossed and i being dotted in what Wikipediocracy says about Tutelary, but you two were pushing lots of rumours about someone’s private life into a top ten website which is the first Google search on most of the BLPs it contains.

            That’s unfair. Nobody was pushing a smear campaign against somebody through a Wikipedia. They were discussing on a talk page. That means discussing an article, what sources are reliable, what sources should be given due weight, etc. The Wiki article doesn’t have BLP violations and nobody was trying to make it to.

            Putting Wiki aside, ZQ is mainly being criticized for specific instances of harassment and abuse. Not comparable to dragging someone’s hobbies or very identity through the mud for the purpose of intimidation.

          • Peter

            >Not comparable to dragging someone’s hobbies or very identity through the mud…

            Funny that I decided to use Google News to look at what reliable sources say on this matter and picked one from each side of the Atlantic which I had not read before. The European one was The Independent and I found this:

            “Gamers’ latest wheeze is another hashtag, this time #notyourshield, in which a load of sockpuppet Twitter accounts pretending to be women and people of colour who claim that gamers can’t be sexist because a handful of women are on their side. Have a quick browse; yesterday I saw a handsome cartoon fox earnestly invoking Martin Luther King in an effort to express gamers’ struggle against oppression. To co-opt the language of real struggle for something as facile and, well, obviously bigoted as gamer culture clearly shows itself to be is breathtakingly offensive.”

            Turelary’s pretending that he is a woman or a trans-woman is described there. He and you are offensive because you wrap yourselves in a cloak of hypocrisy. You don’t give a fuck for real trans-people. You just pretend to because it is part of your infantile game to try and score a point by pretending that real oppressed people support your side.

            As for the rest of your crap, the American source I looked at, the New Yorker, is just as forthright as the Independent in making clear that the harassment, abuse and intimidation is coming from dishonest male gamer jerks like you.

          • Jeff

            The Independent is an opinion piece, and “Peter”‘s claims are wrong as exposed above.

            http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/12223-The-Escapist-Publisher-Issues-Public-Statement-on-Gamergate.4

            The Escapist issued a major statement about how they were suckered into failing for Zoe Quinn and screwing up: “Our editor-in-chief, Greg Tito, having reviewed the facts at hand, concluded we ourselves have been imperfect in maintaining journalistic standards. A particularly problematic article, the one which generated his review, was about the alleged harassment of an indie developer by a forum community which denied the allegations but was itself victimized as a result of them. The article failed to cite the harassment as alleged, failed to give the forum community an opportunity present its point of view, and did not verify the claims or secure other sources. Mr. Tito has personally updated the article and spoken to all our editors about the importance of adhering to standards that will prevent such bad incidents from happening again. We, as a team, apologize for this error, both to our readers and to the forum community that suffered as a result. I, personally, apologize for this error, as well.”

            Zoe Quinn was a bully and destroyed Game Jam to spite other women. She then abused her position to get other people to aid her bullying. She was exposed, and her friends tried to defend her in awful ways. She is not right, and anyone who tries to side with her will not win this. Evil does not prevail.

  • Gamaliel

    If we had more power to block obvious SPAs and agenda pushers, then less of this stuff would happen, but every time we even attempt to take action against these types, there’s a chorus of OMG ADMIN ABUSE!!!!1!, and the loudest ones are people from this site. Make up your mind.

    • John lilburn

      SOFIXIT!

    • Hersch

      You use your blocking powers very selectively. Hence the chorus. If Wikipedia policies were applied in an even-handed way, without the double standards, there would be less criticism.

  • Anthonyhcole

    @Nw. Thanks.

  • Tarc

    A weeabo, a brony, and a rabbi walk into a bar…

  • […] The war over Zoe Quinn’s Wikipedia page is revealing a very ugly world of male editors who impersonate women and trans people to smear women’s Wikipedia pages, and propagate a strong culture of virulent misogyny. This, I know personally. Wikipedia and the war on women’s dignity […]

  • wth

    What the hell. Doxxing for the good cause? It’s okay when the right people do it? REALLY?

  • […] Publié dimanche 7 septembre sur Wikipediocracy, un site de surveillance critique de l’encyclopédie collaborative, il fait suite aux nombreuses et récentes polémiques sur les outrages faits aux femmes […]

  • HRIP7

    Wikipedians are now voting on a site ban for Tutelary.

    • Jeff

      Wikipedians vote to site ban just about anyone who has ever posted on or had anything to do with a Wikipedia criticism site. This kind of thing is expected.

    • gamaliel

      And at least one of the loudest voices against such a ban is a prominent user of Wikipediocracy.

      • Peter

        Well that puts the lie to the claims of some of your colleagues that Wikipediocracy is a of conspiracy of Wiki-banned types in which everyone works together to do some sort of evil.

        Of the top 30 contributors here, I can see one opposing the ban in the ANI thread, one commenting but the words seem to be more an oppose if the closer bothers to read the comment, and three supporting. But last thing I heard, one of those three was banned from the forums here. There’s also a chance that some of the other not voters may be pseudonymous here.

        • Gamaliel

          Obviously, they are wrong. It’s very uncoordinated evildoing.

          • HRIP7

            🙂

            Like Wikipedia, we have a fair number of people with strange opinions contributing to the forum here. That’s not an endorsement of their views, any more than it is in the case of Wikipedia itself.

          • Jeff

            “Like Wikipedia, we have a fair number of people with strange opinions contributing to the forum here.”

            And they have policy abusers like you that try to use the forum to wage war against those you disagree with politically. That isn’t criticism or legitimate behavior. That is flat out abuse.

    • Nw

      Some people seem to be taking what I posted above as conclusive evidence that tutelary is neither female nor trans. The former is true, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to believe that tutelary is in fact transgendered, even considering their denial on wikipedia. Since posting that declaration of masculinity back in 2013, they’ve posted saying they were in the closet about being MtF transgendered and have then stated that they are transgendered on ask.fm and hackforums. Looking at their social media and other online accounts gives me the impression that this is sincere.

      • Bull

        I call BS. Tutelary himself wrote that him identifying as transgender on Wikipedia was a “slip of copy and paste”.

        Quote Tutelary: “Though I will note one thing; I am a woman, and the fact that they are deliberately counteracting that by trying to frame me as a male or trans because of a slip of copy and paste is downright insulting.”

        He is most definitely not trans.

        • Nw

          People don’t always want to out themselves as transgender to every community they’re a part of, especially when they’ve been leveraging their notional experience as a woman to provide a cover for their misogyny. What makes the denial on wiki more convincing than the contradictory assertions elsewhere?

  • Michael

    The frustrating part is that in most cases there are no on-wiki consequences for the users whose agenda-driven editing is exposed off-wiki. Take User:Shakehandsman, for example: https://wikipediocracy.com/tag/shakehandsman/

    He is ten times worse than Tutelary in terms of BLP violations. He stopped editing for a while after Wikipediocracy wrote about him but he resumed editing this year. He is obsessed with adding gossip about British female politicians from tabloids such as the Daily Mail and creating redirects like “Woman A” and “Woman B” and then slapping Category:British criminals on them. His goal is to inflate the number of women listed in the criminals categories in order to achieve numerical equality between male and female murderers and sex offenders. Shakehandsman also has a very disturbing habit of overemphasizing violence against white people.

    Shakehandsman and Tutelary run with the same crowd, for example, they were both among the editors who opposed a topic ban for their MRA friend Memills.

    But Shakehandsman kept quiet about his Wikipediocracy article while Tutelary was dragged to ANI by Titanium Dragon. So it’s unlikely that there will ever be any consequences for editors like Shakehandsman although they do more damage to living people and Wikipedia.

  • J.M.

    Tutelary deleted some of his more obvious Reddit posts. Looks like he’s been using WP:OUTING to game the system and redact other editors’ perfectly acceptable comments. Went on a Twinkle and Huggle binge to make it look as if he’s actually contributing something beside the usual MRA balderdash.

  • Ross McPherson

    Wow this thread is just like being at Wikipedia again. It is not the best article here and it has generated a mountain of contentious crap. Will the visiting Wikipedians please return to the holes from which they emerged and leave us ex-Wikipedians in peace. Thanks.

  • Hersch

    Editor’s note: this blog exists for the purpose of criticizing Wikipedia. We have no interest in hosting a debate about the pros and cons of feminism, so please keep your comments on topic.

  • metasonix

    It’s nice to see that Wikipedians are just as insecure and easy to provoke as ever. Having people like Rob “Gamaliel” Fernandez, one of Wikipedia’s most abusive administrators, show up here to splutter about poor little Titanium Dragon is just icing on the crap-cake. TD is doing a great job of hanging himself with his own spluttering. He doesn’t nee your help, Rob.

    So….is it any mystery that content writers and administrators are quitting Wikipedia in droves?

    • gamaliel

      So what exactly is your complaint here? That I’m being “abusive” to someone whom you guys just labeled as a problem and doxxed? You think you’d be cheering me on. Yes, ban the problem editors! No, admin abuse! I see some of you folks are as inconsistent as ever. The only consistency is that you hate Wikipedia, whatever position you have to take to do it, even if you just took the opposite one an hour ago.

      • HRIP7

        I don’t endorse Eric’s comment and yes, that is a weakness of quite a bit of commentary on this site.

      • Anonymous

        Why don’t you just ignore these people? They are complete monsters and should have no say in an encyclopedia. You shouldn’t feel under pressure to give attention to bullies.

  • J.M.

    Interesting that the MRA posse around Tutelary/Ging287 is now frantically scrambling to cover their tracks. After 123chess456 got called out (https://archive.today/rBFut) on his activity in the same misogynistic Reddit forums as Tutelary/Ging287 (https://archive.today/CFd1o), he changed (https://archive.today/togrv) his Wikipedia handle and deleted his Reddit account. Too bad it’s still there in the Google search results.

    Then the MRA posse went after User:Kaletony with an SPI, started by none other than User:Memills, another Redditor and MRA extraordinaire. It’s really not that difficult to find out who Memills is and what he and his students have been doing to Wikipedia.

    • Jeff

      Misogynistic forums? http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/editorials/12223-The-Escapist-Publisher-Issues-Public-Statement-on-Gamergate.4 Escapist put out a retraction of their earlier claims of such and pointed out how such by others in the industry was wrong.

      Nice try, though, J.M.

      • J.M.

        I think that the subreddit The Red Pill that 123chess456 frequents and that I linked to in my comment is misogynistic. Threads like American Women are Whores and Most women truly have no honor or accountability are some of the more “harmless” ones.

        It’s sad that you don’t consider the forums where 123chess456 and his ilk hang out misogynistic. But it explains why you have defended Tutelary and other MRA editors.

        • Jeff

          You mean the off topic ones that have nothing to do with the GamerGate stuff, but you throw around “forum” in a desperate hope to smear them with your straw man stuff, right?

          • J.M.

            I mean exactly what I said: the misogynistic Reddit forums where Tutelary/Ging287 and Chess/123chess456 hang out and where they’ve been trying to cover their track since their MRA activity in the forums was exposed. Don’t take your anger out on me just because you didn’t understand my comment and brought up some article that doesn’t even mention the forums.

  • Radiant Orchid

    According to Titanium Dragon, he has had media requests for interviews. He is currently banned from talking about “gamergate” or Zoe Quinn on Wikipedia. If he does the interviews and they get published by “reliable sources”, can they be used in the Gamergate article?

  • […] directed at Quinn and Sarkeesian, doxing and hacking of Quinn's supporters, and ongoing editing wars on Wikipedia pages related to GamerGate. They have also included the creation of a hashtag called […]

  • songthe

    For what it’s worth, running different portions of Ging/Tutel’s writing (text taken from reddit and wikipedia) through the GenderGuesser returns them as 72-84% chance of being male, every time.

  • […] seen accusations of GamerGate-rs having been doxxed (which turned out to be exposing someone lying about their identity in order to avoid blame). I have yet to see someone who opposes GamerGate decide to sic a private investigator on a […]

  • Carol Moore

    As a bit of any update, here are some relevant David Auerbach articles.
    http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.html
    *Mentions my being site banned, though doesn’t realize that the snotty thing I said was after I was banned. But it’s so great to NOT have to be on one’s best behavior any more and call thus be able to call circle jerking wanking gang bangers just what they are. 🙂

    http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/02/wikipedia_gamergate_scandal_how_a_bad_source_made_wikipedia_wrong_about.html

    And a new one on above topic from Amanda Marcotte
    http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/03/06/the_gamergate_wars_over_wikipedia_show_that_wikipedia_s_neutrality_measure.html

  • Spike Lechat

    I don’t see how r/unbirth is misogynistic. It’s NSFW, but the most it does is objectify women; it doesn’t criticise them.

  • Dory

    Hi Nathalie: while I agree with most of your points, I have to say i was more than a little disappointed with your biased portrayal of this one, obviously highly disturbed Brony, Titanium Dragon or something rather. I am a brony myself and I can definitely say that brony- bashing has been used multiple times as an unfair advantage for ultra- macho editors and sneering androgen- filled admins to get me and my fellow bronies booted from wikiwhatever more times than we can count, even with fingers instead of hooves lol. Seriously though many of us bronies absolutely DO NOT condone the sort of perverse worldview or licentious behaviors of this so called “Fan of Love and Friendship”, and many are like me busy, overworked parents who simply enjoy the show as much as their kids do, seeing it as nothing but a potential for harmless fantastical world- building IF not corrupted as TD tried to do. While I don’t think that you meant to bash all bronies non- specifically, although I may be mistaken, I just wanted to let you know that your article casts a very diverse group in a decidedly negative light, and i just wanted to offer my um two “bits” as we bronies would say haha. Thank you very much for all of your hard investigative work, and have a wonderful day.

  • Vivian

    I came to “Wikipediocracy” a few days ago. I more or less stumbled upon it while searching for proof of bias in Wikipedia’s articles … especially articles outside of the realm of the hard/mathematical sciences.

    I loved everything about Wikipediocracy … UNTIL THIS ARTICLE.

    This is by far the WORST article on Wikipediocracy … in fact, this article could easily pass for a Wikipedia article. (Whether you consider that an affront to your dignity or a compliment) is up to you.

    The author(-ess) is obviously a feminist pushing a feminist agenda … and should be quite at home over at Wikipedia.

    Keep up the good work. But purge the feminist/SJW garbage. That belongs over at Wikipedia, not here at Wikipediocracy.

    Good luck.