FiveOhThree

I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.

Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.

I'm sure that the journalists involved would never admit that people putting a spotlight on their bad behaviour made them clean up their act.

That Kotaku piece was a full year after GamerGate, if anything people might question whether it'd have happened if GamerGate hasn't drawn attention to these problems.

That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.

Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.

To my view it looks more like an attempt to inflate a minor controversy by excessively documenting it. If this much effort were being put into writing about government policy I'd totally agree with you, but this level of detail is uncharacteristic even for Wikipedia.

> That being said, there should be absolutely no regard for "sensitivity" or the fact that Musk is a living person

Wikipedia always had particularly strong rules about how living persons are supposed to be covered. I wouldn't agree with making exceptions just because I dislike a powerful individual.

In terms of leaving the page up: I don't expect Wikipedia to be censored, but looking at this page the content unavoidably comes across as something that'd only merit a couple of lines on the main article. Instead you have a literal essay just to record "those aligned with the left believe that Musk made a Nazi salute, those aligned with the right say that he didn't".

I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:

Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?

It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.

Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.

I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.

It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.

Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.

> One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix.

This is where I would disagree, the model really doesn't work for politics and current events. In those topics Wikipedia may be better described as "The world according to a handful of (mostly US-based) news outlets". There's been a prolonged effort to deprecate sources, particularly those which lean to the right, so it's increasingly difficult to portray a neutral perspective reflecting multiple interpretations of the same topic. Instead excessive weight is given to what a majority of a select group of online sources say, and that's not necessarily trustworthy.

Most obviously it's a model which will fall flat when trying to document criticism of the press.

> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture

Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.

To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.

It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.

That's the thing though, expecting users to have a discussion over even minor changes is extremely off-putting for most potential editors.

I've also noticed that a few of these editors seem to be deliberately abrasive towards new users, perhaps with the hope that they'll break a rule by posting insults in frustration. The moment that happens those editors quickly run to the site administration and try to get said user banned. Wikipedia's policies are increasingly treated as a weapon to beat down dissent rather than a guide on how to contribute positively.

Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?

Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"

The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.

Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.

That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.

Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.

Unfortunately the store's primary revenue source seems to be from advertisers bidding on sponsored search result slots instead of the actual product sales.

My mistake, there may have been more than two modes in the older builds. Perhaps it was called "Regular" or something, whatever the default was.

It's a good way to further push away a chunk of your userbase. They're moving towards a touch-friendly UI, but a lot of us just want a compact desktop app that doesn't waste screen space with excessive padding.

The proper solution to this would be to have different modes if this is so critical. To their credit they did put in a "compact" mode after beta, but this is explicitly "unsupported" and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.

True, but if you're running a beta test and the feedback is negative, you can't be surprised that people don't feel "respected" when you decide to push the change anyway.

The new "chunky" layout and UI elements are not really an improvement, and a lot of users have been unhappy with this. Despite plentiful feedback about this during beta testing Mozilla have basically opted to force it through anyway.

UI changes in general are something to expect, but if you're just going to disregard user feedback then you can't claim to respect users.