Really this stuff is getting old, and it’s so commonplace I hesitate to even write about it. But since Sashi gave me a shout-out over on Proboards, I will give it a shot.
Here is the usual situation. Someone starts an article about some woman at an editathon, and some patrollers, usually some kids who don’t know anything about writing articles, decide that women can’t possibly do anything “notable” and proceed to try to delete the article.
I wrote about one such situation here, where a group of amateur patrollers decided to target a March 8 International Women’s Day editing event just because it was for women. One typical deletion discussion was at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Risa Horowitz, which pretty much sums up the arguments.
A typical sentiment:
“I would like to point out how demoralizing nominations like there are to new editors and projects like Art+Feminism, and I wonder if deleting is really the best we can do. Is it really not possible to improve articles like these?”
Several articles were deleted several times, mostly without discussion. But the end result was that out of some 26 articles created, 25 are still blue links.
Now, to Sashi’s link. Just for reference, the article is philoSOPHIA, and the issue has now been brought to the arbitration committee for clarification.
In this particular case, I would say that first, SV is a very experienced editor, and that I would hate to find myself on the opposite side from her on anything, no matter how trivial. Second, if she has had to invoke discretionary sanctions for this, she has already lost. Many women will not edit at all except at editathons, and in particular they see Wikipedia “governance” as being rigged against them and want nothing to do with it. That there is now a “clarification request” at WP:AE is not a good sign. It is also not a good sign that Manchester regular RexxS has shown up, as well as hardcore gamergator Masim, and perennial arbcom candidate Salvidrim, also associated with gamergate-friendly sites. If this was just some random inexperienced patrollers, it could have been handled on the talk page or at AfD, but the entry of these individuals raises the stakes, as it also raises questions.
The previous tactic was to try to delete as many articles about women as possible, and if they could not be deleted, at least attach some templates to the top of them, to make them look bogus, and discredit the subject. But there have been some new patroller tools come down the pike as part of the anti-harassment grants, so does this represent a change in tactics against the GLAM crowd? Are the usual harassers turning back to arbcom as their traditional power base, and testing its strength and loyalty?
The situation itself is clear cut. Two individuals are edit warring. They should be stopped, but as usual, no one will stop them, because gender. They have invented a policy out of whole cloth, and should be told to start an RfC if they want this as a policy, not to try to shortcut the consensus process through arbcom, but instead they being treated like royalty, like this is already a real policy. Because there are women involved, as well as academics (a newbie with a PhD in philosophy), this has become a culture war, and the haters will be given an opportunity to drive them off.
The actual RfD policy is at WP:BEFORE:
“If there are verifiability, notability or other sourcing concerns, take reasonable steps to search for reliable sources.
“The minimum search expected is a normal Google search, a Google Books search, a Google News search, and a Google News archive search; Google Scholar is suggested for academic subjects.”
A search of Google books for “philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism” turns up a good 10 pages of references. These dudes could have added some sources. Instead, they chose to disrupt the article.
Note: still waiting for the creation of Julkaisufoorumi or rather the translation from the Finnish, which Headbomb rather petulantly insisted remain a red link. The source was quietly removed by his editwar buddy Randykitty in this mass edit.
Gender Desk 
I looked at it more closely after posting and the whole disruption seems to be over a technical detail that really isn’t that important (whether the current editorial board gets listed or not). It just seems like a litigious excuse for generating conflict. (I think I remember the Headbomberz saying it was puffery to include editorial board members unless they’re actually doing stuff and aren’t just there to add titular star power). I don’t think that a journal’s reputation gets made on Wikipedia… and the links you provide above show the star power works where it needs to. I suppose circulating this to the Daily Nous might mobilize ant-armies of mud-slinging all over the place. (I’ve read of some crazy behavior there too). But that could be seen as canvassing meat-puppets, or stirring the soup, which I gather is frowned upon. ^^
The original tactic was deletion (see the deletion discussion), but when that didn’t work, he shifted tactics to removing the names of notable women from where they might be discoverable by Google, even though, as SV pointed out, he had previously opposed the removal of the names of board members on other articles. One of the arguments against women editing that you see is that after women get done writing all the articles about women they will go back and delete all the articles about men. But in this case, when it is pointed out that two other articles about journals list board members, it is the dudes who go back and remove the names from those articles. You can see they have been all over Contemporary Pragmatism and Philosophia Reformata.
It’s not about the board names, obviously, it’s the hostile language “special snowflake journal”, “utter fucking horseshit”, “toxic feminism”, “I simply gives zero fucks”, “women-hating cavemen”. People go to a lot of trouble to recruit knowledgeable scholars and convince them to edit Wikipedia, and maybe later bring in more editors from their institutions, only to see them subjected to something like that.
The point, by the way, goes to SV, who did not lose her PhD philosopher newbie, and managed to introduce a DS template on the talk pages of both harassers. If they continue to pull stunts like that, this will make it easier to move against them later, since it proves they have been informed of discretionary sanctions, and there is a record of the objections made about their conduct. The community definitely will not move against harassers, but no one ever knows what arbcom might do. SV plays the long game.
Oh, in case you missed it, a link to GorillaWarfare’s comic with slithering feminists: http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341
Finally, an RFC started on the talk page. And it’s looking more and more like this Headbomb guy has some kind of an ax to grind. It looks like the articles for Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, German Medical Journal, Social Science Japan Journal and Journal of International Affairs all have their boards listed, but Headbomb isn’t interested in that, he only wants to take out the women.
And now I see the original discussion at AN. This is brutal.
The guy makes no secret of who he is. Here is his (accepted) submission for Wikimania 2017, a lecture for “Journals Cited by Wikipedia: Evaluating the Impact of Journals on Wikipedia” under the name Gaëtan Landry (Headbomb). So in theory at least you can go and ask him whatever was he thinking. On enwiki he uses the same name, “Hi, I’m Headbomb (Gaëtan Landry if you need to have a name). I coordinate the physics projects…” So, not an expert in philosophy, much less contemporary issues in feminist philosophy, and not exactly a librarian. His rationale for demanding the professional women follow his invented essay seems to be “because penis”.
He has posted some pics of himself at a 2005 physics meeting, and we find out there were only 3 women at the meeting. Also, his blog, his private Twitter, quoting Ayn Rand, and an anti-religion straw man rant.
Not sure what this (here) is supposed to be:
IMO he seems excessively hairy, but what do I know.
Yes, it was that foaming-at-the-mouth opening paragraph at ANI that caught my attention. Since Salvidrim! made a bad decision regarding my humble request to archive my talk page after a BS block, his assuming bad faith on SV’s part also made me curious.
Only after you posted this did I realize just how disingenuous he was being (using the interaction tool shows that Salvidrim! never had any doubt about Headbomb’s sex or identity, having celebrated their potential common ancestry about 6 months ago (again), after first noting it back in Sept. 2011.
On en.wiki, we would have to assume Alzheimer’s, I suppose.
Salvidrim is now over on Reddit crying to his fellow gamergaters at WikiInAction about how sad these disagreements make him. And magically, like mushrooms sprouting overnight, a bunch of poorly articulated “no” votes appear on the RFC.
The name thing came up somewhere with SlimVirgin as well, “oh, SV I am soooo surprised to see you are female since I just now noticed you added ‘Sarah’ to your sig”. Yeah right, cause dudes always want people to know when they’re a virgin. This is all meant as FUD to make it sound like the issue is the gender of the participants, and not a content dispute over having names of female scholars appear online, as the male names do in other journal articles, and probably to keep the ideas of this branch of philosophy from being articulated publicly. If Headbomb is presenting at Wikimania on the effects of academic journals appearing in Wikipedia, you can be sure that he is well aware of the issue.
But now, having prevented SV from finishing the article by insisting she cannot use the names of the scholars she was going to quote in the article, to fill out the content, Headbomb has now turned to the content of the article itself. In the very beginning SV pointed out that he had taken over the article and asked if he was familiar with feminists philosophy scholarship, and this was deemed unreasonable. Now he wants stuff removed because he doesn’t understand it. Imagine if someone tried to remove stuff from physics articles on that basis, what would he say to that? If he would just let them write the article, he might learn something. This happens so many times, that people with credentials in one field are totally incompetent in something else that is not in their specialty. He really ought to stick with physics.
And now he has jumped on his anti-religious hobby horse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PhiloSOPHIA#What.27s_God_like.3F insisting that the Greek goddess/ saint Sophia be referred to as “[Sophia] according to [insert religion here].”
*headdesk*
Given the impossibility of keeping actual knowledge on Wikipedia up-to-date and accurate against the entropic forces of vandalism and stupidity, anyone who still thinks Wikipedia might at some point in the future turn into an encyclopaedia would be well-advised to minimise the amount of information that needs constant curation. The board of editors of a journal is a good example. The editors of a current publication will almost certainly be available in up-to-date form at its website. Copying that list to Wikipedia creates work for people to do, and gain points in the MMORPG, and creates battlegrounds such as the current one for people to fight fights over. They are of essentially zero value to the reader, that mythical being for whose benefit all this work is allegedly being done. The only real question is why does any article on any journal try to maintain this sort of list. Indeed, why does Wikipedia try to be a compendium of current fast-changing information when it cannot even manage to be an encyclopaedia of knowledge that is stable in the long-term?
That train already left the station, but I predict there is another shoe left to drop.
Good write-up, genderdesk.
Oh, wow this Salvidrim person is known. His Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/Salvidrim
First Headbomb now Salvidrim. Canada has a lot to answer for.
Oh too funny, Benoit Landry/Salvidrim claims he was collection agent at IQor Canada Ltd.
“Hundreds of complaints have been filed over the past few years about iQor Canada… knowingly contacted people who did not owe debt…repeated phone calls to people who don’t owe any money…we call them and we don’t bother with if it’s honest or not”, (Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/collection-agency-harassed-debt-free-canadians-1.1153123 )
Well then, he should fit right with adminning at WP, dragging newbie PhDs and scholars off to arbcom and the dramah boards, and targeting them with meatpuppets from the gamergate reddit.
FWIW, I was an anonymous source for the CBC article you linked to, which was produced after I had left iQor. It was my first real job and I did quit due to it being quite difficult to live with sometimes. 🙂
No longer anonymous then. The collections industry is out of control. I get collection calls for people I have never heard of, in spite of being on the national ‘no call’ list.
Hmm I wonder if this might be one of your meatpuppets: “Women’s purpose is to satisfy men. This journal does not satisfy me. They must stop. Get back to sandwiches and BJs. Delete article x 1000”. Charming.
I do hope you’re being facetious and you don’t seriously think I could spout the shit that 107.77.223.50 has posted. In any case, I’m obviously not a AT&T Mobile subscriber….
You may not have started the thread but you did comment twice, and they pinged you knowing you would participate. If this isn’t off-site canvassing, I don’t know what is. Surely you are not naive about the effects of unleashed gamergate brigades and that the IP is unlikely to have found an obscure talk page without some help. https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiInAction/comments/6g5239/do_squabbling_editors_make_an_article_subject_to/
At least the IP was straightforward about the endgame–suppressing information about the journal and the academics behind it. “A woman’s place” is pretty clearly delineated and I have no doubt the IP is speaking for many. This is why they go after articles about women artists–it does not fit their world view of what women ‘should’ do.
Okay, sorry if I misunderstood your earlier comment as implying the IP’s words were somehow mine. FWIW, I agree it’s possible he was prompted to spout this shit on-wiki by the Reddit thread where I responded to pings. Re-reading my Reddit comments, I actually stand by their content and believe I was being fairly reasonable. Of course your disagreement seems to stem not so much from their content as from the venue at which they’re happening, which I can certainly understand.
Yes, “meatpuppet” not sockpuppet, as in WP:MEAT. See also “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The IP has obliged, stalking one of the participants of the RfC back to their talk page, and posting harassing comments there.
I doubt if anyone would mistake the ip for you, looking at the edit history they have also penned such timeless prose as “There are only two genders/Two scoops two genders two terms/Addition: two amendments in his second term (2 in 2)/1: legalize rape/2: repeal the 13th/MAGA”, the “13th” being a reference to the 13th amendment to the constitution that abolished slavery after our American Civil War, and “MAGA” being a reference to the Trump campaign slogan he has printed on his baseball cap. Also note the edit summary “Ill say this for the moslems: they know how to handle gays”. I don’t know why you would consider this “shit”, it looks like a real political position that has a huge number of supporters, enough to elect an American president, and who would use a gamergate subreddit as their base. If someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I could talk your ear off about the collection process, but the “no call” list is only pertinent for telemarketing and not collections. 75%+ of the job of third party collections is skip tracing, aka trying to get in touch with the debtor by looking up and phoning relatives, people with the same name, previous addresses, workplace, etc. all of which is strictly regulated but collection agents often push well into the gray areas
The other shoe has dropped.
Headbomb’s 4th Request for Admin has just tanked. I have held off talking about this until the voting was closed, because I didn’t want to encourage any meatpuppetry that would influence the outcome, but this was really, really pitiful.
For starters, the person who nominated him withdrew the nomination, but Headbomb insisted on continuing to the bitter end, so that conversation got hidden on the talk page. Then Wikipediocracy regulars Carite and New York Brad voted “support” and were actually able to sway the next two or three votes. But the saddest part was all of Headbomb’s lies. He insisted that SV had misused the tools, even after all of the discussion at arbcom, but when asked for the proof, he was unable to produce any. He falsely claimed that someone called him an “anti-women sexist”, but no one even bothered to ask him who or where. I doubt it exists. And if SV thinks the article belongs under the gender sanctions, then maybe, just maybe Headbomb ought to take a long hard self-inventory, instead of mansplaining and going on the attack. This guy also actually linked to here in his RFA and called it “character assassination”. I stand by everything I wrote, and if HB wants to say where he thinks it is wrong, he is welcome to come here and point it out. And yes, he is still excessively hairy.
But let’s look again at all those RFAs.
And the last RFA he refused to withdraw, even though the outcome was obvious from the beginning.