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If you wish to submit evidence, please do so in a new section (or in your own section, if you have already created one). Do not edit anyone else's section. Please keep your evidence concise, and within the prescribed limits. If you wish to exceed the prescribed limits on evidence length, you must obtain the written consent of an arbitrator before doing so; you may ask for this on the Evidence talk page. Evidence that exceeds the prescribed limits without permission, or that contains inappropriate material or diffs, may be refactored, redacted or removed by a clerk or arbitrator without warning.

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Evidence presented by Retartist

Tarc Ignores the WP:CIVIL pillar

1 2 3 4 5

The above links are tarc removing warnings (which he is allowed to do) of people warning him for uncivil behaviour

The following diff is of tarc claiming that WP:CIVIL can be ignored. 6

Evidence presented by Tstormcandy

To preface, I would like to point the Committee to precedent set at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern European mailing list which states that ArbCom can and will consider certain off-Wiki activity as part of final decision principles and findings of fact. Disclaimer: I will be linking to less traditional or trusted external sources, but only because there is no other way to display the evidence.

Involved editors have been targets of deliberate harassment

Some of the users listed as involved parties in this case have been specifically targeted by external forces for additional scrutiny and potential harassment. Though this does not excuse user actions it may help explain some of the stresses and behaviors displayed in other evidence and should be taken into account as state of mind of the editors. One very recent example is seen here. This is a thread on a forum sympathetic to the goals of other parties listed as involved in this case. There are others but I do not wish to waste space.

Found as another extension of an off-Wiki forum is this Pastebin file, detailing how persons should complete an "operation" to "dig through" post histories and summaries of particular users for the sake of gathering obstructionist evidence for collection and reproduction, with User Talk:Jimbo Wales mentioned specifically which was later done. In this one case, users Ryulong, NorthBySouthBraanof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom and TaraInDC are singled out as "The five horsemen of Misplaced Pages".

Off-wiki collaborating is disrupting the Encyclopedia

This direct quote states some named parties specifically. It discusses a matter that should be occurring within this case. "Best result includes NorthBySouthBaranof desysopped, FuturePerfectAtSunrise desysopped, Ryulong banned from wikipedia and general sanctions against WP:Feminism for brigading articles to promote their viewpoint." Users MarkBernstein and Ryulong are singled out frequently, with screen captures of some of their discussion edits posted.

The task of collaboration and research resulted in many edits at incident boards and even on the talk page of User:Jimbo Wales (as the text file instructs) many times; among others. A short list of AN, ANI and other incident reports can be found in the case examples of previous resolution methods attempted.

By extension of the suggested collaboration and cases of users following through with it we get a large amount of meatpuppetry happening in these matters. Once again, there is an abundance of these external examples. Such bullying must not be permitted on Misplaced Pages and editors should feel safe in the process of following standard Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines without being threatened. I implore the committee to not "let the bullies win" in this case via their collaborations off-site disrupting normal activities. ♪ Tstorm(talk) 23:32, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Masem

Ownership and no attempt for consensus development

(I will be proving diffs to support this in next few days) There is no question that Gamergate is a troubling situation for WP, due to the fact that the "proGG" side have been trying to significantly influence the article, administration, and this case, though not always in a malicious manner, just clumsy and/or unworkable. It should be clear that the coverage of GG is predominately against proGG (there are few RSes that give a leaderless anonymous online effort any time of day particularly as the proGG efforts include criticizing and attacking those RSes, in addition to the fact that there is the harassment/threats of female figures attached to the situation - no one really is ready to give them any positive coverage). There's little we can do while staying within reliable sourcing policy like WP:UNDUE and WP:FRINGE and WP:BLP, so there is no way that the GG article can be (at the current time) very favorable of the proGG position, and hence the need to enforce some decorum on the behavior of WP:SPAs and unsigned editors who can't contribute towards that.

That said, these same facts have been used by a number of editors who have refused to engage in efforts to build consensus as mitigate the tone of the article and engaged in ownership-type behavior to maintain their version; these include (but not limited to) Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. I believe they have very strong feelings against the proGG side of the story (aka sympathy for those who were harassed), which itself is not a problem until it gets in the way of constructive editing, as their edits and behavior to the article have clearly tainted the approach of the article and has made it difficult or impossible to work with. They early on established a persona non grata approach to the proGG SPAs trying to influence the article, and continue to claim that all that the article needs are methods to deal with SPAs (see associated case statements). This has been their excuse to refuse to participate in other dispute resolution methods, including formal mediation .

There's probably many other problems with the article from other contributions, but this group of editors have been the largest contributors to the article (outside myself), and while they are adding material w/ sources and the like that meets the base WP polices for V, NOR, and NPOV, they have used a structure and language that I and other editors believe is far from the impartial nature that WP:NPOV demands for an encyclopedia article. While this starts getting into content-related issues which I know ArbCom generally does not comment on, understanding what issues that I and others have seen is part of the behavior problems:

• Part of the issue is the nature of the press's role in Gamergate, in that they are involved parties, moreso at the video game and tech sources since proGG are trying to directly impact their ad funding. As such, the press has every reason to be negative of the movement, and many have flat out called the movement as a whole "misogynistic" due to the nature of the harassment. I want to stress this doesn't invalid these as sources, but we have to understand the difference between facts and opinions expressed in these These editors want to have WP's article call the movement out as misogynistic in WP's voice instead of stating it as the widestream press's opinion. This has been argued through many times, pointing that other articles for strongly-disliked groups by the public, like Westboro Baptist Church and Scientology put all such criticism in the approach non-WP statement instead of in WP's voice, but they shut down and refuse to accept this distinction, claiming that what the RSes state is absolute.
• There are some neutral statements about the proGG's stance on their desire to change ethics from good reliable sources, as well as the nature of this being a "movement". But these editors focus too much on the press's stance that because of the harassment issues, that there can be no "movement" or their "ethics" cries are false fronts; as such they reject attempts to write sections of the article in a different structure or a more impartial manner to present these points without ridicule.

A key part is, 90% of the article, in my opinion, is fine in light of what the sources give - there's good proper sourcing, and telling the story per WP:WEIGHT; it does need trimming, some smoothing of what are now minor points (it does suffer from WP:RECENTISM), some WP:QUOTEFARM edits, which most agree to, and could use a re-organization in light of these. But the impartialness, also a requirement of WP:NPOV can be fixed, in my opinion, simply by reworking some language order, word choices, and general article structure without loosing any of the key points or verving away from the net impression that the GG side has been broadly condemned by the VG industry and public at large, but I and other editors cannot convince this small group to go in this direction, because they seem unable to separate their strong feelings against proGG from editing the article, and reject these changes or refuse to accept that the article is written as an attack article towards the proGG side in WP's voice. This has led to long-standard conflict over the article that needs arbitration, as to assure that we actually have processes to get better consensus, and if possible (as that is more content related) on what WP's stance should be on writing impartial articles in light of the issues Gamergate presents. --MASEM (t) 01:53, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Evidence presented by NorthBySouthBaranof

Gamergate supporters have attempted to use Misplaced Pages as a platform to attack living people

There has been a long-term campaign by GamerGate supporters to use Misplaced Pages's articles related to the controversy as a platform to further their movement's harassment and smear campaign against, among others, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu — in defiance of reliable sources, the Biographies of living persons policy and human decency. This has involved the insertion of unfounded, illegitimate and false allegations about those people, vulgar and vile slurs, etc. and has required a major response from previously-uninvolved editors to prevent unsourced and poorly-sourced claims about living people from appearing in the encyclopedia.

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