Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-21/Special report

Last month marked the first anniversary of Wikipedia's involvement with the GamerGate (GG) controversy and its seething throngs of partisans. For those who remain as yet unaware of this confusingly -gate-suffixed brouhaha, it can be summarized thus: a social-media-based slug-fest between two groups:

• The GamerGaters/Pro-GamerGaters, who described themselves as an ethics-oriented consumer movement of video game enthusiasts.
• The anti-GamerGaters, who characterized the GamerGaters as a monolithic gang of misogynists.

The depiction of GamerGate in the mainstream media has generally aligned with the anti-side's assessment, which the pro-side has taken as confirmation of their suspicions regarding the unethical bias of the mainstream media. The disagreement has been raging for more than a year and seems intractable. Surprisingly, Wikipedia's article on the topic sees little if any involvement from editors affiliated with Wikipedia's Video Game WikiProject (WP:VG). Instead, the bulk of the edits have come from a small cadre of prolific editors and a long tail cavalcade of fly-by-night accounts that pop up and vanish—or even re-animate, golem-like, after years of inactivity—to support one side or the other.

In this special report, we look back at the development of the GamerGate controversy article from its earliest appearance to the present. The emphasis is on the difficulties of editing in controversial and topically overlapping areas, and on the ways that editors with strongly divergent perspectives can work together or at least alongside one another effectively, despite their differences. No Wikipedia article is ever considered to be in its final form, and this particular work in progress remains an object of considerable attention as new and related events in the larger (non-Wikipedia) world fan the flames of partisanship and prompt new edits. This retrospective should in no way be understood as an endorsement of the current form of the article.