Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very balanced point of views because the other languages weren't controlled by the influence campaign.

So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though.

Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.

Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.

Anecdote != evidence.

Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.

Seems extra “special case” to me.

> You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda.

What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?

I think your view of gamergate is absolutely fucking delusional. I watched it all go down in real time like many of us did. Saying Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism is roughly as accurate as saying the US Civil War was about "states rights". In that it is kinda sorta technically true if you ignore 99% of what was actually happening.

Perhaps it is your perspective which is biased and that leads you to project that accusation towards the wiki (and the gp commenter here)

> Q1: Can I use a particular article as a source? > A1: What sources can be used in Wikipedia is governed by our reliable sources guideline, which requires "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". If you have a question about whether or not a particular source meets this policy, a good place to ask is the Reliable sources noticeboard.

I think their comment is fair.

Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.

Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.

Wikipedia presents consensus as a proxy for the truth. Pretty sure the consensus on GamerGate is that it was a misogynistic harassment campaign.

You’re telling me there was a secret… listserv?! Truly, this conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

"Gamergate was actually 8chan communists fighting sensasionalist journalism but their message was then twisted and used against them to push people into far-right MAGA."

Amazing... I can't tell if you are trolling or seriously think this.

Is that like a secret Signal chat for the defense secretary's family?

Can you point out any factual errors in the article, with sources that demonstrate the error?

> The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side

The "pro-gamergate" perspective is described in the very first sentence under "Purpose and goals":

    The most active Gamergate supporters or "Gamergaters" said that Gamergate was a movement for ethics in games journalism, for protecting the "gamer" identity, and for opposing "political correctness" in video games and that any harassment of women was done by others not affiliated with Gamergate.

Gamergate folks are incredibly silent about other “ethics in Journalism” issues…

Same with all those “free speech wing of the free speech party” folks.

Then why are other language articles completely different? Have you gone and checked? Are all the other articles just wrong? Why is the "consensus" for the gamergate article citing direct primary sources that were involved and attacked by gamergate instead of reliable and impartial secondary sources? Nobody has even bothered addressing any of questions or points i brought up yet. Because they break the narrative.

The way the article is written is arguably biased and irrational on it's face, when reading it you should get the feeling of something being amiss and information being excluded. Sometimes you can just tell when writing is biased based on the language, it's a pattern that's good to learn.

Communists no, young progressives yes. It's kind of insane to believe that a majority audience of gamers in the year 2014 would be anything but progressive, at least until the entire media turned on them and orchestrated a misinformation campaign out of a combination of a core of malice then a majority of laziness.

You mean you watched people writing misinformation articles smearing people in realtime, or were you actually on the hubs where gamergate was organized? There is a big difference between these things, and no there were not people organizing for "misogyny campaigns" the discussion was 99% corruption and ethics focused. Especially in gaming circles of 2014 which were very progressive.

Quite frankly i find people who think there were actually some kind of organized misogyny campaigns in 2014 to be a form of insane, like something breaks inside a person because they need a bogeyman so badly that it becomes a core of their being even though it's incredibly irrational. At the time journalists would just take random twitter people who weren't affiliated with gamergate and hold them up as if they represented the movement. Reminds of me the tactics used against occupy wall street honestly. It's not a rational or reasonable belief.

I tried the spanish and japanese articles, translated back to english. Neither article seemed to be drastically different, at least not in the first few paragraphs. I'm just not seeing the bias, other than a bias towards reality.

There is evidence¹ that the whole gamergate thing was an organized harassment campaign pretty much from the start. Further, the "ethics in game journalism" argument was a calculated and intentional misdirection, used as cover to provide plausible deniability to the harassment campaign.

1. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/new-chat-logs-show-ho...