- Wikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles amid gamergate controversy Neutral MY ASS.
- Start your own b(r)and: Everything I know about starting collaborative, feminist publications This is a really great guide written by Amelia Greenhall. Good stuff here.
- Life in the Sickest Town in America Some good points in here but there’s fat-phobia and ableism, too.
- One Week of Harassment on Twitter All the trigger warnings for this. I couldn’t make it through the whole thing. I cannot even conceive of what it is like to live through this. This kind of abuse for making a video series about the portrayal of women in video games and daring to speak up about it in public.
- Gaming while black: Casual racism to cautious optimism “Isolation and exclusion are the biggest issues facing black players and developers…It’s a weird phenomenon. Women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, constitute a huge portion of consumers of video games. But the gaming industry doesn’t reflect that.” The headline is really quite misleading.
- Thoughts on Hiring Processes (aka Starting/Building a Team) Great post from Crystal Huff about things organizations can do to help ensure diversity in hiring–for paid or volunteer positions.
- The third part of Book Riot’s Reading Diversely FAQ is up!
- Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job True that. Corporations are interested in one thing: profit.
- Trauma is the Truth Worth Talking About I thought this was a really good analysis of Jonathan Chait’s essay-thing-screed.
- America’s Beautiful Weather Zones I live on the line between frozen moonscape and air made of hot soup.
Marilyn from Mean Fat Old Bat sent me this and I find it to be marvelous so I share it with you all. (Marilyn, incidentally, is not the least bit mean; I can’t speak to the other adjectives.)
The Guardian article is outdated now that Wikipedia Arbcom has finalized its list of sanctions. The list is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate#Case_information
Eudaimoniac Laughter describes the major players here: https://eudaimonaiaclaughter.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/247/ Several long-term Gamergate accounts were up for sanctions, so the Guardian’s argument that it was only disposable accounts from the Gamergate side at risk is not correct.
Taking the two together, it looks like what happened overall is:
* Of the six people (5 editors, 1 admin) that Gamergate was trying to push off Wikipedia for having a ‘feminist agenda’ or something, one (the admin) did not receive any sanctions at all. Two received scoldings. Two were topic-banned from editing any articles relating to gender or sexism controversies, including Gamergate. One was banned from the Wiki. (This one, Ryulong, was accused by Gamergate of taking bribes to edit Wikipedia, but it looks like Wikipedia did not find those accusations credible. Rather, according to another post by Eudaimoniac, it looks like Ryulong said that he would not be able to abide by the sanctions that he was likely to get, so he was just banned instead. See: https://eudaimonaiaclaughter.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/wikipedias-arbcom-busy-doing-nothing/ )
* Of the 3 long-term Gamergate accounts up for sanctions, all were topic-banned. One was additionally put under a bunch of administrative sanctions.
* The KotakuInAction (Gamergate Reddit) admin Logan Mac was also topic-banned.