Talk:Gamergate (harassment campaign)

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This article has previously been nominated to be moved. Discussions: Not moved, 14 February 2014, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate movement, see discussion . Not moved, 12 November 2014, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate, see discussion. Not moved, 15 May 2015, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate harassment campaign, see discussion . Withdrawn, 30 August 2015, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate, see discussion. POINT close, 19 September 2015, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate (sexist terrorism), see discussion. Moved, 12 August 2021, from Gamergate controversy to Gamergate (harassment campaign), see discussion. Not moved, 20 August 2021, from Gamergate (harassment campaign), see discussion. Draft:Gamergate controversy was nominated for deletion on 23 June 2017. The result of the discussion was redirect. This article was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination: speedy keep, 23 November 2015, see discussion. Keep, 6 September 2014, see discussion. Text has been copied to or from this article; see the list below. The source pages now serve to provide attribution for the content in the destination pages and must not be deleted as long as the copies exist. For attribution and to access older versions of the copied text, please see the history links below. Copied Draft:Gamergate controversy (oldid, history) → Gamergate controversy (diff ) Copied Draft:Gamergate controversy (oldid, history) → Gamergate controversy (diff ) This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Alex Hern (January 23, 2015). "Wikipedia votes to ban some editors from gender-related articles". The Guardian. Sarah Jeong (December 14, 2016). "If we took 'Gamergate' harassment seriously, 'Pizzagate' might never have happened". The Washington Post. David Auerbach (February 5, 2015). "The Wikipedia Ouroboros". Slate. Dabitch (February 5, 2015). "Wikipedia: the perpetual motion native ad machine". Adland. Lauren C. Williams (January 26, 2015). "Wikipedia Wants To Ban Feminists From Editing GamerGate Articles (Updated)". ThinkProgress. Archived from the original on September 29, 2018. Daniel Greenfield (August 20, 2016). "Gawker Editor: Gamergate Was Our Most Effective Enemy". FrontPage Magazine. Archived from the original on 21 August 2016. This article has been viewed enough times in a single week to appear in the Top 25 Report. The week in which this happened: October 19 to 25, 2014 (19th)

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Section sizes Section size for Gamergate (harassment campaign) (29 sections) Section name Byte count Section total (Top) 7,518 7,518 History 12 24,281 Zoë Quinn and Depression Quest 8,678 8,678 Anita Sarkeesian and Tropes vs. Women in Video Games 4,118 4,118 Brianna Wu 2,215 2,215 Other targets of harassment 4,785 4,785 Coordination of harassment 4,473 4,473 Demographics 1,742 1,742 Organization 6,272 14,948 Harassment and Twitter 2,598 2,598 Efforts to affect public perceptions 3,442 3,442 Targeting advertisers 1,100 1,100 Sad Puppies 1,536 1,536 Purpose and goals 8,967 8,967 Social, cultural, and political impact 3,100 20,722 Gamer identity 6,372 6,372 Misogyny and sexism 6,362 6,362 Law enforcement 4,888 4,888 Gaming industry response 6,868 6,868 Representation in media 3,227 3,227 Reducing online harassment 2,438 2,438 Legacy 11,071 34,467 2015–2018 5,223 5,223 2019 4,618 4,618 2020–2021 4,176 4,176 2022–present 9,379 9,379 See also 180 180 Notes 24 24 References 112,401 112,401 Total 237,783 237,783

Reference ideas for Gamergate (harassment campaign) The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future: Beyer, Jessica L. (2021). "Trolls and Hacktivists: Political Mobilization from Online Communities". In Rohlinger, Deana A.; Sobieraj, Sarah (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology. Oxford University Press. pp. 417–442. ISBN 978-0-19-751063-6 . Condis, Megan (2018). "From #GamerGate to Donald Trump: Toxic Masculinity and the Politics of the Alt-Right". Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture. University of Iowa Press. pp. 95–106. JSTOR j.ctv3dnq9f.12 . Dewey, Caitlin (2016-02-17). "In the battle of Internet mobs vs. the law, the Internet mobs have won". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2023-07-10. Retrieved 2024-01-22. Donovan, Joan; Dreyfuss, Emily; Friedberg, Brian (2022). Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-63-557864-5 . Jones, Bethan (2018). "#AskELJames, Ghostbusters, and #Gamergate". In Booth, Paul (ed.). A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 415–429. ISBN 978-1-1192-3716-7 . Kidd, Dustin (2018). "GamerGate: Gender Perspectives on Social Media". Social Media Freaks: Digital Identity in the Network Society. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4299-7691-9 . O'Donnell, Jessica (2022). Gamergate and Anti-Feminism in the Digital Age. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-14057-0 . Reyman, Jessica; Sparby, Erika, eds. (2020). Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression. Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. S2CID 189982687 . Ruffino, Paolo (2018). "GamerGate: Becoming Parasites to Gaming". Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture. London: Goldsmiths Press. pp. 104–119. ISBN 978-1-90-689755-0 . Salter, Michael (2018). "From Geek Masculinity to Gamergate: The Technological Rationality of Online Abuse". Crime, Media, Culture. 14 (2): 247–264. ISSN 1741-6604 . Veale, Kevin (2020). "Introduction: The Breadth of Harassment Culture and Contextualising Gamergate". Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–33. ISBN 978-3-030-60410-3 . Zuckerberg, Donna (2018). Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-6749-8982-5 .

This section is pinned and will not be automatically archived.

All articles related to the Gamergate controversy are subject to discretionary sanctions.

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— Preceding unsigned comment added by TheRedPenOfDoom (talk • contribs) 21:18, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Editors should take note of the warning at the top of this talk page indicating this is a

@Swatjester:, it appears the the talk page is not set up 500/30? Could you (or some other admin do that)? So that underqualified editors can't get into trouble by editing? i suppose some admin should clean up all the outdated admin stuff WRT gamergate - ForbiddenRocky (talk) 07:10, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

At the moment, this particular talk page seems to have cooled down a bit, so I'll leave it to some other admin to put that restriction on if they feel they need to. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 15:41, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Actually there seem to be several cases this month of very new editors with some knowledge of Wikipedia policy either starting new topics or being active in debates on this page - there was another yesterday, and another user with few edits supported the topic-starter in the discussion. If it’s possible to just restrict access that seems like a good idea to me. Lijil (talk) 07:14, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

https://christopherjferguson.com/GamerGate.pdf

Comparisons Between GamerGate and the U.S. Population on Social Values: According to the study, gamersgate population support action against Global warming Affirmative action, Marijuana legalization, Gay marriage, Abortion and Universal healthcare above the U.S. population mean

"Ultimately it appears that the common narrative associating GamerGate with right-wing, regressive White men (Braithwaite, 2016; Horgan, 2019; Romano, 2018) is not supportable, given the current data. Indeed, GamerGate supporters appear to be more left-wing than the general public and also diverse in terms of race, gender, and other demographic variables than is often assumed"

Quijote3000 (talk) 15:56, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You will find extensive citations supporting those descriptors in the body of the article.

MrOllie (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply

]

• In general, primary studies (especially one like this, that is just a single poll of people's self-described politics) are not great sources. The article does contain much higher-quality sources, eg.
  WP:FRINGE (even in the quote you presented, cites three others that it seeks to debunk, but only has a single poll of self-described opinions to do so.) If the conclusions they drew from their poll of how people involved in the topic described their own politics were borne out, you'd expect them to be confirmed by other studies, and they haven't been. Ultimately the fact that it's a poll of self-described politics means that it's just about how Gamergate supporters wished to be seen; and we already cover, in the article, the fact that Gamergate supporters made substantial efforts to influence the way they were perceived. But those efforts were (as the massive list of citations above shows) ultimately unsuccessful at convincing people that the sort of responses they gave to eg. the poll in question were actually representative. That sort of thing is why we rely on secondary coverage rather than initial polls - it's not unusual for an author to draw a sweeping conclusion from a poll that isn't borne out later. --Aquillion (talk) 17:30, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply
  ]

FWIW the paper is also only cited 26 times, with a large number of those cites being to unrelated portions of the paper and not the primary claim about the identities of gamergaters. The paper is also self-contradictory, given that it's single poll actually supports the conclusion quite dramatically that GamerGate is white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender; the paper's authors appear to be only quibbling over the political alignment, not the other demographics. Seems quite fringe to me. ⇒SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 16:40, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Hmmm, if gamergate supporters claim that the movement is not about that, shouldn't the article reflect that?, if all the "high quality sources" seem to describe the opposite of what the movement supporters are claiming they support, then maybe those sources are not reliable in the first place.

  ...at least as a rule of thumb I think people should have the right to define themselves rather than just being labeled by their counterparts (I don't claim information from the opposing view should be removed, but I think any movement should be described first by what the supporters claim they want and in second place the criticism rather than be defined by the criticism).

  I quote from reliable sources guideline:

  "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published sources, making sure that all majority and significant minority views that have appeared in those sources are covered (see Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it."

  So if there are really no reliable sources representing the point of view of the protesters. Maybe we should remove the article. Lobishomen (talk) 17:08, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  No. We go with what the reliable sources say, not self-descriptions. If we went by the standard you propose, every corporation would be full of righteous people working to better the world through commerce, and

  MrOllie (talk) 17:19, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  Hmmm, if gamergate supporters claim that the movement is not about that, shouldn't the article reflect that?

  WP:MANDY

  applies. Of course they're going to claim it's not a harassment campaign, because harassment is bad & they don't want people to think they're bad. But reliable sources agree that it is a harassment campaign. So there's no point in putting up any particular GGer's claim that it's not. There is no right to "define" yourself here, because most people are going to use the most self-serving description they can think of, which is why we prefer what secondary sources say.

  Twisting that around to say the reliable sources are in the wrong is just not going to fly here. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 20:47, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  "Reliable" means

  NotYourShield, etc. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 19:42, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply

  ]