Jimmy Wales on #GamerGate Wikipedia Article Message 1

Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 10:32:56 -0400
From: The Leader of GamerGate <GamerGateLeader@gmail.com>
To: Jimmy Wales <REDACTED>
Subject: #GamerGate Article Issues (I'm bubblesort1 on twitter)

Here is the link to the pastebin I tweeted at you:  http://pastebin.com/LfMMcCr5

Here are the contents of that pastebin:

    In response to https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/516078717232504832

    Jimmy,

    Last night we spoke on Twitter about #GamerGate.  You were defending yourself against some misattribution.  I agreed with you that people were accusing you of some things that you did not do, but I urged you to take the gamergate issues seriously.  The conversation went in a few different directions, and I mentioned that I was scared to edit Wikipedia #gamergate articles because I didn't want to loose my account, which is what I've heard others say can happen.  You said that Wikipedia is a safe and welcoming place and that I should feel free to edit it.  To be honest, I am not just scared of loosing my account.  I am afraid of being doxxed and threatened in real life.  That is what SJWs did to a transgendered teen wikipedia editor just weeks ago.  The following link is redacted for obvious reasons.  The article on Wikipediocracy still exists, but it has been edited since this screen shot has been taken.

    https://i.imgur.com/He7UCVW.jpg

    Zoe Quinn linked to this article on her twitter, to spread the doxxing information in order to put this transgendered teen in as much physical danger as possible.

    Here are more details on this, with more links:  http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2fvt9n/zoe_links_a_doxx_to_wikipedia_editors_who_tried/

    That is what we are dealing with.  We get doxxed and physically threatened constantly, especially the transgendered among us.  I could ask what Wikipedia does about these kinds of issues, but I'm not sure what you can do.  Wikipediocracy is not part of Wikipedia.

    So I am scared for my safety but I'm going to try to make things better anyway, because I believe in you, Jimmy.  You are the greatest educator of our generation.  The world would be much more stupid without your work, so when you tell me that Wikipedia is safe and that I should help fix things I'm going to listen to you.  If I get doxxed then I'm out.  I won't risk my health and well being for Wikipedia.  If it comes to that then the Wikipedia Foundation will have to do something about the toxic environment before I'll come back.  Unless I get doxxed and/or threateaned, though, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, because you deserve it.

    If any of my #gamergate friends are reading this:  I urge you to also give Jimmy Wales the benefit of the doubt and get involved as well.  We can't go on attacking everybody who gets their news about the world from the New York Post and Gamasutra.  It's not their fault they don't know any better.  We have to give more people the chance to learn the truth.  We need more voices and more compassion, even when SJWs and the press attack us from every side with violence and smear campaigns, dehumanizing us to deny us compassion, we need to stand proud and tell the truth.  Don't let them take our compassion from us.  Wikipedia is all about holding a neutral, fact based point of view but at the same time it is about boldness.  Be bold with the truth, but remember that the truth must be neutral and verifiable.  Keep your Wikipedian bearing.  The experience of editing Wikipedia can build our character and make us stronger.

    Anyway, Jimmy, you asked me what problems I see with your analysis.  In the chaos of multiple subjects and conversation threads, I'm not sure if you were talking about the problems I have with your opinion of the GamerGate article or the assertion that the accusations of an appearance of impropriety against Zoe are false.  I'll start with the Zoe situation, because that is much more simple than the #GamerGate article.

    Zoe Quinn and Joshua Boggs had sex on March 16, the first day of the GDC.  Boggs later hired her to work for him at Love Shack.  We know this from reading Eron Gjoni's The Zoe Post, Act 1, where Eron writes, "I got to GDC just the day after she did. Which means they had sex the night before I arrived."  I have not seen anybody claim that this allegation is false.  Infidelity was confirmed when Zoe had an exchange with a woman who was involved with one of the men Zoe was sleeping with named Chloe.  Joshua Boggs later hired her to work for him on a game called Framed at a company called Love Shack on April 28, according to Zoe's Tumblr.

    The Zoe Post:  http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

    Zoe's Tumblr post:  http://ohdeargodbees.tumblr.com/post/84115718894/announcement-i-am-now-narrative-designer-on-framed

    Zoe and Chloe's twitter interaction:  http://imgur.com/a/yFtZV

    This is undeniably an appearance of impropriety.  It changed the conditions of employment for everybody working under Boggs, IMHO.  Even if the conditions of employment weren't changed, this is still an undeniable appearance of impropriety.

    Another appearance of impropriety happened at Kotaku.  Nathan Grayson reported on Zoe Quinn's involvement in the Polaris Game Jam within hours of going to her house to spend a week having sex with her.  The article was published on March 31 and he moved in with her hours after the article published, on April 1.  We know this because Eron says the following in The Zoe Post, Act 1:  "she goes on to admit that she also cheated on me with Nathan way before we broke up [Apr 1st - 6th], and that right at the end of things with us [May 4th - 10th]"

    Kotaku Article:  http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284

    Zoe Post:  http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

    Now, it is true that Kotaku performed an internal investigation and determined that they did nothing wrong, but internal investigations are meaningless.  That's just Kotaku's way of saying "we did nothing wrong".  I'm sure the Regan administration claimed the same thing during Iran Contra.

    These appearances of impropriety exist.  No neutral person can claim otherwise.

    Now, the gamergate article is a completely different can of worms.  When I see an article this bad I just want to throw my hands up in despair and move on because it's too much work to fix, but you went to the trouble to promise my safety.  Least I can do in return is try to contribute, right?  So lets start with the problems... this is going to be a general overview of a few issues, but I'll get into more specifics on Wikipedia talk pages (but not the #GamerGate talk page, directly, I'll explain why shortly).

    First of all, the title of the article is misleading.  Gamergate is not a controversy.  To be perfectly objective, GamerGate is a hashtag.  The #GamerGate movement has actually undergone a few different names, informally.  Before #GamerGate it was Burgers and Fries.  Before that it was some operation to save TFYC (the specific name of which slips my mind at the moment).  Before that it was something involving WizardChan or CYChan or Tumblr, the details of which are difficult to source.  You could accurately refer to GamerGate as a movement, or one name for a movement, but it is absolutely not a controversy.

    Second of all, the article says that GamerGate is about, "a controversy in video game culture concerning ingrained[1] issues of sexism and misogyny in the gamer community and journalistic ethics in the online gaming press, particularly conflicts of interest between video game journalists and developers."

    That is incorrect and oversimplifying things a lot.  It deliberately skews towards the SJW perspective.  GamerGate is a movement that relates directly to a dozen different things, and the situations we are addressing change constantly.  As more problems pop up we do our best to handle them.  We are concerned about sexism and about censorship.  I don't have numbers on this, but it is my impression that most of us have been censored for trying to discuss things like Feminist Frequency honestly.  On most forums, SJWs won't allow us to disagree with Sarkeesian's assertions, no matter how outlandish they might be.  For example, she says that female corpses are sexy but male corpses are not.  She says that games shape our reality and spread misogyny (the statistical correlation for that goes in the opposite direction Sarkeesian claims).  We can not deviate from that message on forums such as reddit or 4chan or the something awful forums without risking a ban (or worse if we aren't anonymous).

    That's not all we are concerned about.  We are concerned about our journalists and the managers of game development companies sexually exploiting young ladies like Zoe Quinn.  We are concerned about game development contests like the IGF being rigged.  We are concerned about being disenfranchised through smear campaigns and censorship and old boy networks controlling our media.  Why do you think we are all on a hash tag?  You really think twitter was our first choice to discuss such complicated issues?  No.  We were driven to twitter because we can not have rational, honest conversations elsewhere, and the media won't discuss any of these issues with us honestly.  That's why we are stuck on this hash tag trying to convey complex ideas 140 characters at a time.

    The #GamerGate article asserts that this is about our objections to casual gamers, which is complete bullshit.  First of all, we all enjoy casual games.  Casual game enthusiasts don't actually go to places like Gamasutra to learn about casual games, though, because places like Gamasutra do not report on casual games.  I wish they did, because I hate it when I buy a crappy android game.  Nobody reviews them, though (not well, at least).  The best we have are Google Play store customer reviews, which aren't that reliable.  Since the beginning of this, even today, the games press has not actually changed their focus to casual games.  They did declare that gamers are dead, which is not a way to talk about casual games more.  It is a way to spit in our faces when we expressed concern that their ethical standards are too lax.  That is why their traffic is down and why advertisers are pulling away from funding them.

    The #GamerGate article has a million other issues.  It does not explain the history of the #GamerGate tag, for example.  #GamerGate was coined by Adam Baldwin after he was moved to become involved in the movement when his friend Joss Whedon tweeted his support of the SJW message.  It also does not mention the constant attacks we are subjected to.  Abuse characterizes our movement, but not in the direction the press will report on, so we are forced to endure it in silence, only talking about it on twitter and the precious few forums who allow us to speak freely.  WizardChan was the target of DOS attacks and people called death threats in to their admins under the direction of Zoe Quinn (the admins are known to be suicidal).  She did the same thing to the Women in Gaming Project.  Women in Gaming has had dozens of DDoS attacks over the past month or two.  In the past couple of weeks, here is a quick list of some of the bigger doxxings and threats that happened:  Internet Aristocrat, Alexandra Wuori (who was Alexander before he was forced out of the closet by attacks), Milo (received two packages in the mail, including the syringe full of mystery fluid), j_millerworks, and I saw two friends delete their twitter accounts after saying they were harassed but would not go into details.  People have lost their jobs over this harassment.  The press will cover none of this, but you can't understand #gamergate without knowing that this abuse is happening.

    Let me know if you want me to cite any of this, because I have citations for everything I'm saying.  This post is getting kind of long, though, so for brevity and readability I'm skipping citations for now.

    The #GamerGate article also never mentions the numerous charities we have contributed to, to the Women in Gaming project and to fight cancer and to fight teen suicide.

    There are more problems and rules this article breaks.  It is advocacy, scandal mongering, it's not an encyclopedic subject because anything you say about #GamerGate today could easily be false in a week (Wikipedia is not a newspaper), the citations are almost all to editorial opinion pieces and... much more.  Citing Leigh Alexander's opinion as reliable on a #GamerGate article is like citing Hitler's opinion on an article about Jews.  She is a bigger enemy of #GamerGate than Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian.  Anyway, I'll get into all of those details on Wikipedia talk pages.

    I can't post to the #GamerGate talk page, though.  Here's why:

    The #GamerGate article is tagged as a biography of a living person.  I don't understand how a controversy can be a person (back to the misleading title issue).  Anyway, if it is about #GamerGate as a person then I can't edit it because it's about me.  I am a member of #GamerGate.  Now, I could disregard that and post to the talk page anyway, but that won't help anything.  It's just sleazy to edit your own article, especially when you don't disclose who you are.  That means that anybody editing this article is probably an opponent of #GamerGate, since we would not deface our own article by editing it.  We are not ignorant thugs.  That means that our voices so far have been muted and will continue to be muted unless the article is re-categorized.

    I want to fix this and follow the rules and be bold, like you encourage us to be.  That might seem like an unsolvable conflict, but it is not.  You promised my safety so I'll do my best to fix things.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, Jimmy, but it seems to me  that the right place to complain about articles about yourself is on the Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard, which is located here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard

    What I plan to do is to get my concerns all together and post them to this board some time tomorrow (it will take a while to write).  I will then start spreading the word to my #GamerGate friends to do the same, so that we can all be heard on the board.  One of us can't talk for everybody, so we can try to get as many voices involved as possible.  I will do my best to get every voice I can to post to this board.  I am sure the admins will fix the problems when they hear from us.

    Hopefully, they will just delete the article, because the subject is really not encyclopedic in nature.  I could understand moving it to WikiNews, but leaving it on the encyclopedia seems wrong to me.

    Anyway, thank you for reading this long message.  I will do my best to keep my Wikipedian bearing and be bold (but from behind an anonymous proxy if possible... bold doesn't mean stupid).