Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Gamergate draft

Page rationale

Talk:Gamergate controversy is subject to WP:30/500 restrictions as a page-level (not topic-level) sanction. This page is being used to host a Request for Comment with full community participation. Page protection sanctions are intended to prevent disruption, not to privilege the contributions of autoconfirmed over unregistered users. The Gamergate controversy talk page was sanctioned to prevent two types of disruption[1]: 1) New accounts re-raising old issues, and 2) Incivility by a particular user. Neither is applicable to this page, as it is 1) Being used by an extended-autoconfirmed user to raise a single issue, and 2) the incivil editor is topic banned. Any page protection should be used only when proven necessary. Rhoark (talk) 03:03, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Request for comment

Regarding the Gamergate controversy, is this draft an improvement relative to the existing article? Rhoark (talk) 03:03, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Relevant prior discussions can be seen here:[2][3][4][5] Respondents are encouraged to make reference to applicable policies which could include but are not limited to WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:WWIN, and WP:BLP. Please focus on the articles and avoid soapboxing on the topic. Rhoark (talk) 03:07, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

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• Reject. The existing article rapidly explains to me, as one who has only limited exposure to this subject, what it's about and why it's a problem. The revised draft looks suspiciously as if it's all about ethics in videogame journalism. I like, on the whole, matter-of-fact articles on contentious issues, but this is way too far over that line. "People representing various points of view about Gamergate have faced harassment, doxxing, and threats of violence". Technically true, but the vast majority of them, and all the early ones, and all the ones that caused the shitstorm, were women or people who defended them. The draft puts GamerGaters and "SJWs" on an equal footing, as if social justice is a bad thing and misogynist privilege is just a point of view, not something demanding challenge. It started with the attacks on Quinn and Wu, that's how any article needs to start, but your draft minimises that and contextualises it as just one of a number of playful spats between equally matched opponents. I could go on, but basically this reads as if it were written by a Gamergate apologist. I do hope that is not what you intended, but sadly it is what you achieved. Guy (Help!) 07:31, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Being too factual is a curious indictment. I responded in more detail on Jimbo's talk page about whether its "all about ethics", with the answer being plainly, "no." The draft does in fact begin with the harassment of Quinn, as you desire. Harassment is the largest focus in both versions, the difference being that the draft also follows WP:NPOV's instructions to report fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. We should not, as the existing article does, highlight the WP:OUTRAGE. Rhoark (talk) 12:40, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Note: The limited arguments advanced for accepting the draft below seem to me to offer far better support for a careful copyediting of the existing article, through discussion and consensus on its talk page. The current article has undoubtedly suffered fomrt he back-and-forth of competing ideological edits, but the solution is not to replace it with a well-written whitewash, it is to review and sharpen the existing text. Guy (Help!) 08:17, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

It reads as if it were written by a partisan on the GG side, albeit one who is at least prpeared to acknowledge that some independent sources (read: virtually all) put the blame squarely on the GG trolls. That is how it reads to me, and when I compare the two, I find that this one feels less neutral and more like an apologia. I know you think it's more neutral. I disagree. You asked for people's opinion and comment, that's what you got from me. Actually the current article is improved over the version current during arbitration, no doubt due tot he additional scrutiny it received, so I don't even see what problem we're supposed to be fixing at this remove, let alone with a weholesale rewrite that seems to me to offer a massive dose of false balance. Guy (Help!) 12:50, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject. More whitewash/scrubbing/false equivalences. Rhoark knows this, too.--Jorm (talk) 14:49, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

  Clarification: Rhoark knows that it is a common position that his draft comes off as an attempt at whitewashing and false equivalences. He also knows that his draft will not be accepted by the majority of editors working in the Gamergate area. Why he wants to get a larger audience about this, I do not know. Just know that this is a well-worn path.--Jorm (talk) 15:54, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject - Primarily per Guy: this draft seems like a pretty blatant/obvious attempt to put 2 very different perspectives about Gamergate on an equal footing, when in reality the vast majority of RS (and the highest quality RS) make it very clear that our article should not do that. WP:WEIGHT requires that our article portray and discuss Gamergate primarily as the mainstream media have, and not cobble together a collection of lower-quality, outlying sources and pretend that they represent a perspective on Gamergate that has equal weight. An example that's really troubling to me: in the section titled "responsibility for harassment," we find the phrase In public discourse, Gamergate as a controversy or movement has mainly been associated with harassment of women, and this has severely damaged the movement's credibility. OK, well, if that's the case, then we should be portraying gamergate primarily as the harassment of women. I'm not seeing enough sources of high enough quality anywhere in the draft article to justify an article which notes the consensus of most RS about what Gamergate is/does/did, but then proceeds to pretend that that view is just one of two equally-weighted perspective. Fyddlestix (talk) 14:56, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Could you please identify specific uses of "lower-quality, outlying sources" or how the draft coverage differs from mainstream coverage? The reliable sources report that harassment is a minority of activity within Gamergate, but they focus on this minority, and media comments on itself about how it focuses on this minority. That is exactly the mainstream reliable sourcing that I have summarized. Most of the article weight is given to harassment, but weight is not a reason to contradict the reliably sourced fact that it's a minority. I'll note also that the mainspace article's first and boldest claim that Gamergate is mostly about harassing women is the attributed opinion of Stephen Colbert. Is that representative of due weight? Rhoark (talk) 15:24, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Rhoark, that reads as a bit disingenuous. Given your familiarity with the subject, you know that many of the 254 sources in main space echo Colbert's opinion. As a notable personality (especially with the generation primarily caught up in GG), his opinion was considered relevant, but he is not by any means the sole basis for due weight. 2600:1005:B169:195A:8D65:EFAC:3C3A:82F7 (talk) 20:57, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Stephen Colbert, acting in character, has probably agreed with mainstream political positions on a lot of questions, and half the time he was probably sincere. That doesn't make it due weight to use a satirical performance as a cornerstone for framing contentious topics on Wikipedia. If it is aligned with the other 253 sources, it should be possible to find an example that can be used to follow WP:YESPOV. I'm not so sure that can be done, though. Colbert seems to be used here precisely because it allows the article to insinuate more than it could assert. Rhoark (talk) 21:11, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject per Guy. 2600:1005:B169:195A:8D65:EFAC:3C3A:82F7 (talk) 20:57, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
• The draft has better structure. I don't think this is a RfC that can be answered with a "yes" or "no" answer. Since the article and the draft are quite different, there will be aspects that are better in one over the other, and vice-versa. In the case of the draft, the titles of sections creates a much more distinct partition of the topic space, where the focus of each section is clearly indicated by the title, and each section covers a subtopic sufficiently different from the other sections; meanwhile, it's hard to say the same about the topics in the article, which include significant overlap.

As for matching the tone in the sources, I'd say the draft would greatly benefit from including quotations within the references themselves, referencing the particular paragraph or sentence in the article that best represents the part of the article it supports; this way, it would be crystal clear how well or badly does each part of the draft corresponds to a point made by one or several reliable sources. Diego (talk) 22:02, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

That's an excellent suggestion. Several people have gotten the impression that the draft is somehow trying to contest the reliable sources rather than reflect them. Quoting everything would be a massive undertaking, but in the live revision I've added quotes to the citations on the first two sentences of "Responsibility for harassment". These seem to particularly give pause to JzG and Fyddlestix. I suspect some changes are in order to the wording of that passage, but as a starting point we should all be able to agree that it is supported by very mainstream sources. Rhoark (talk) 23:47, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

• Accept: (I gave comments on the draft in an earlier version). The reasons are as follows:
  • Better written:
    • Overall readable prose size is 12% smaller. Current article: 57 kb. Draft: 50 kb.
    • Prose is better. This is subjectively clear when reading the article. Quantitative measures are available here. To pick one measure, the Flesch–Kincaid_readability_tests readability score (higher is easier) and grade level (lower is easier): Current article - Score: 38.5, Grade level: 13. Draft - Score:43.2, Grade level: 11.
    • Lead is much more concise and easier to understand for the uninitiated, while covering the major topics in the article. (my subjective view)
    • Topically and chronologically, draft is much better arranged. The current article jumps too much over the place chronologically for my taste. For instance, the "responses to harassment" section is much better written in the draft. The current article jumps all over the place on the issue. The law enforcement portion comes very early. Gaming industry response is separated from the earlier portion.
  • Sourcing:
    • There are roughly the same number of sources in both articles.
    • The references for both versions seem roughly of the same quality to me. High quality sources like the Washington Post are mixed with specialist sources (games press, for instance) or journalism sources like the Columbia Journalism Review, together with scholarly sources. Eyeballing the references: diversity of sources is slightly higher in the draft, but not much different.
  • POV issues.
    • As a crude test, I created word clouds for both the current article and the draft. I couldn't discern much difference. The major themes were the same. Among the biggest words in the cloud in both versions were: "Gamergate", "harassment", "supporters", "women", "threats", "controversy", "journalism/media", "game/gaming/video", "ethics", "online", "Quinn", "Sarkeesian", "Law" and "Twitter". There are some differences: for instance, the current has entries for "industry" and "sexism", while the latter has entries for "bullying", "movement", and "political". People can see both the word clouds here: current, draft.
    • As for subjective issues, I feel the focus in the draft, as in the current article, is on harassment (properly). There are three sections in the draft dealing with harassment (initial phase, continued harassment, law enforcement response) and another section (Events disrupted) is basically about harassment.
    • The draft has a much better section on the political and cultural influence. The current article does a much more muddled job of this. The topic should be discussed in a thorough way. (See recent speech by Clinton on the alt-right for one indication of importance).
    • The draft is a bit more nuanced on the different viewpoints expressed. This is partly through sourcing and partly through organization and emphasis. This is just my subjective opinion: people can differ on this, of course. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 22:17, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, those are useful tools. I find it quite illustrative to compare the "Longest Sentences by Word Count" provided for both versions:

• "The Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Atlantic, and other reports described the campaign as a backlash against the increasing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in science fiction, while members of the bloc gave a variety of reasons for their actions, saying that they sought to counteract what they saw as a focus on giving awards based on the race, ethnicity, or gender of the author or characters rather than quality and bemoaning the increasing prominence of 'message' fiction with fewer traditional "zap gun" sci-fi trappings."

vs:

• "Gjoni's blog drew attention from people with a variety of pre-existing grievances about Quinn or the industry, including: what some considered undue media praise for Depression Quest, Quinn's prior conflicts with Wizardchan and The Fine Young Capitalists, and perceived bias in video game journalism."

As a sample of the differences in style, the former represent the product of a difficult time, where the process to write the article was akin to an attrition war, and where each stable sentence was the result of a back-and-forth between highly disputed positions. Diego (talk) 22:38, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject. The draft certainly has the advantage of greater readability, but I expect that's because it's the sole labour of a single hard-working editor. In regards to the content itself, I have some concerns - for example, in the "Responsibility for Harassment" Section, there is a claim that assigning responsibility for the harassment is "difficult", but the rest of the section clearly argues for the position that it's certainly due to the efforts of anonymous unaffiliated trolls - and then, bizarrely, spends a paragraph finding fault with the media's coverage of Gamergate. Are we to gather that the media should bear some responsibility for the harassment? There is another section regarding media coverage that simply quotes David Auerbach's opinion that the media has a vested interest in not covering Gamergate properly - I'm not certain that his opinion has weight as an authority in this regard. Now, to be clear, I can easily find similar faults in the existing article - I took a moment to click around the original in the same manner when I discovered this request for comment - so I cannot say that the original article is strictly better, but I'm fairly confident this draft is not superior. I would suggest that certain well-written passages be picked out and integrated with the original article, instead of a wholesale replacement. Since Rhoark has already done significant amounts of work here, perhaps other editors would be willing to take his draft and pull out the very best pieces and try them on for size in the original? Heterodidact (talk) 00:08, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

@Heterodidact: If, as some say, the draft's greatest strength is in high-level organization, it might do better to import text with a stronger consensus into that structure. I'm more confident the text can be incrementally improved than the structure can. The "Responsibility for Harassment" section is clearly a lightning rod that will require further iteration. Can you elaborate on the transition you find "bizarre"? I'm not sure I follow what the difficulty is. (Auerbach's quote has CJR's imprimatur, without which I certainly would not have included it.) Rhoark (talk) 02:00, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

@Rhoark: I would disagree that the organization is the draft's greatest strength; what I meant to indicate is that it has a far more coherent style and fewer awkward compromises-of-sentences. That is to say, I think certain strongly-written passages can replace their equivalent (if they have one) in the original article. In regards to the transition, I apologize if the word choice was harsh, but I don't see how his opinion should be used in that manner. He was quoted for his own opinion by David Uberti in a larger piece on "why" Mr. Auerbach (and others) are doing what he's doing, and that piece was published in CJR; that's not the same as CJR endorsing his opinion on the media's coverage; on my read of your paragraph, it was presented as a scholarly, authoritative last word on why the media is not conforming to its critic's expectations. Now, I appreciate that citing two specific examples is likely to invite a lot of litigating over those examples, and I'm willing to engage for as long as you wish, but I would like to be clear that my concerns are not limited to those two examples alone, and focusing on them is not likely to change my opinion of Reject for this specific draft. I reserve the right to change my opinion for later ones. Heterodidact (talk) 02:25, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Okay, no sense in belaboring points you don't consider crucial. If you can identify something that is more at the crux of the matter that would be helpful, but if you'd rather wait it out for a revision or two, nothing says you can't. Rhoark (talk) 02:42, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

I would be pleased to keep an eye on your successive drafts; thank you for the invitation. However, keeping with the spirit of my original suggestion, I think I would prefer to keep an eye out for particularly good examples of prose and flag those for you (or others) to incorporate into the existing article. I trust you won't be too put out by that. Heterodidact (talk) 02:47, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject per Guy, though with thanks to Rhoark for the effort. Dumuzid (talk) 00:35, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
• Strong Reject. The draft violates WP:FALSEBALANCE, especially in its overarching structure, which does not reflect the way the topic has been covered in most reliable sources. Devoting an entire section to "Gamergate as a movement" and weighting it equally to "Zoe Quinn controversies" is an unacceptable misuse of the sources, which devote vastly more text to the harassment of Quinn; it's also flawed in that most coverage devotes far more to other harassment, especially pf Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, which (by moving it to the near the end of the article) is sharply downplayed here in a way that distorts what most reliable sources have to say. Devoting a section of comparable size to "responsibility for harassment" is again clearly not reflective of how most sources have covered the topic - these are aspects that are present in some sources (and are touched on in the current article, with weight appropriate to the degree of coverage each has received); but they are not aspects that can legitimately be weighted equally with eg. the harassment covered by the preceding paragraph or further down. The problem is that this draft structure forces a false equivalence between aspects that generally get only bare mentions (at best) and the vast majority of remaining coverage, which has focused overwhelmingly on particular incidents of harassment and the timeline behind them. The vast majority of coverage has presented the topic in a manner much closer to the current article, especially the current article's excellent and comprehensive history section (which this rewrite inexplicably scatters over the article, with focus drastically distorted from the weight accorded to individual aspects of the timeline in reliable sources.) I take broad issue with this rewrite, but especially with its structure, which is its most clear flaw; an article's structure needs to reflect the weight accorded to aspects of the topic in reliable sources, per WP:BALASP. This structure does not and cannot do that. --Aquillion (talk) 03:32, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

If you take a look at the text of WP:FALSEBALANCE it is about balancing the validity of fringe views against scholarship. It's not really applicable to this case, because the draft is presenting only scholarship and mainstream journalism. I think your later link of WP:BALASP is probably what you had in mind. What I'm getting overall is that you would prefer a more chronological arrangement? Rhoark (talk) 04:28, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

• Reject. The draft fails WP:NPOV as it gives too much credence to the side of the conflict which caused so much harm. Primarily in-universe sources support that view; the wider literature does not. We should respect the wider literature. Binksternet (talk) 04:25, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

By "the side of the conflict which caused so much harm", which side are you referring to? We have it on the authority of the BBC, Washington Post, Le Monde, and Mortensen2016 that this describes both sides. And which provision of NPOV is it that discusses harm? Rhoark (talk) 04:32, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm not into pretense. The harassment campaign of Gamergate was catalyzed by Zoe Quinn's angry ex-boyfriend posting a hurtful essay about her. His supporters are given too much credence in your draft, which fails even to call it a harassment campaign. I can't imagine why you went to the trouble of placing this POV piece in front of community review. Binksternet (talk) 05:36, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

• Accept: Finally it looks like we are making some progress here. The current article suffers greatly from ownership and POV-pushing, this draft attempts to fix some of those issues. A lot has happened since the Gamergate movement had its genesis. The article is in need of updating, and it needs to actually follow what the reliable sources say. This RFC is a step in the right direction. Too many people have made a good-faith attempt to edit the article and been chased off - by both "sides". There are a great many of us out there who are neither pro nor anti GG, but view the current article as an embarrassment, as it comes across as wildly disorganized while at the same time doing a poor job of defining what GG is and what the whole controversy is a about. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 23.242.76.20 (talk • contribs)
• Comment: I have seen several people above (like JzG) argue for taking an "incremental" approach to the article rather than a complete rewrite. All I can say to that is: "you're welcome to try". Please realize that people might have hit upon this solution for a reason. I myself had suggested this approach almost half a year ago, but I never had the time, energy or motivation to follow through. As far as I know, Rhoark hit upon this approach independently. The reasons are the same: every talk page discussion about something not minor tends to devolve to WP:FORUMing and goes around in circles till everyone is exhausted. There are more than 50 talk page archives proving my point if anyone is interested. Here is a recent discussion, which can be indefinitely multiplied for anyone who cares to look. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 09:10, 13 September 2016 (UTC)