Photo illustration by Slate. Photos via NASA, Creative Commons.

Last week, the Internet finally ate itself: A Wikipedia article misreported that a Wikipedia disciplinary case centered around Gamergate had concluded with the scandalous banning of feminist editors, even though the case hadn’t finished and nobody had been banned. Yet by the rules of Wikipedia, the page was correct. Scandal usually travels faster than truth, but this time it fully lapped the facts. How did this temporal paradox come to pass?

David Auerbach David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer based in New York. His website is http://davidauerba.ch.

It began with a Friday, Jan. 23, article in the Guardian: “Wikipedia Bans Five Editors From Gender-Related Articles Amid Gamergate Controversy.” According to the piece, Wikipedia had concluded a massive arbitration case, intended to settle months of chaos, misconduct, and tendentiousness on Gamergate-related pages, by barring feminist editors from editing those pages. Except it hadn’t. The 14 arbitrators were still in the process of publicly amending and voting on a proposal, arguing over its specifics, and changing remedies and votes in an attempt to compromise. Nobody had been banned. But according to the Guardian article, the sky was falling: Five editors who were “attempting to prevent the article from being rewritten with a pro-Gamergate slant” had been banned in a feminist purge, signaling doom for women on Wikipedia.

The article’s hyperbole and defeatism frustrated me. Viral outrage stories don’t just travel quickly through the Internet, but they also reproduce themselves, fanning out into a swath of pointless anger. This happens whether the story is true or false, since truth has little friction on a story’s spread. I saw the first flames on Twitter, as people expressed their disappointment and said they were cutting off their donations to Wikipedia. I sent a correction to the Guardian and badgered it on Twitter. I even resorted to catchy visuals, to no avail.




The identities of the feminist editors weren’t specified in the article, and with good cause: They didn’t exist. At no time in the entire case were there “five feminist editors” up for a ban. But understandable outrage at the supposed misogynist move blew up on the Internet. And more stories followed—in Gawker, Raw Story, the Mary Sue, Inquisitr, and ThinkProgress—all sourcing the Guardian, spreading the myth of the fabled five feminist editors who were the only thing holding off Gamergate’s takeover of Wikipedia.

The case had yet to conclude when any of these articles were published. (I was tangentially involved in the Wikipedia case as the target of some of the sanctioned editors’ misconduct.) Some even implied that Wikipedia was banning “feminist” editors in general, not just a handful. The story caught the fast train to outrage junction. Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales, already besieged by Gamergaters, now faced attacks from anti-Gamergaters, anti-anti-Gamergaters, anti-Wikipedians, feminists, anti-feminists, and who knows who else. The Arbitration Committee issued a dry, bureaucratic statement that did little to halt the bile flowing in their direction.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The rule of Wikipedia is that authority trumps accuracy. Editors are not allowed to contradict what established “reliable” sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian say, lest editors be accused of dreaded “original research” (a big no-no on Wikipedia). Philip Roth found this out when he tried to correct an error about one of his own books, only to be told by a Wikipedia administrator, “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.” Wikipedia has a policy of “Verifiability, not truth,” which means that citations, even wrong citations, trump all else.