Tarc, I felt your "lipstick on a pig" comment about a transexual was not just disgusting, but was a key example of why we needed a WM-LGBT user group to both highlight and gradually improve a hostile culture on Wikimedia projects that appeared to allow blatantly anti-LGBT attitudes and language on its projects under the guise of "being a joke" or "teasing".
I stopped following any of the crap related to your defamatory language, so if you apologised I missed it. If you did apologize, could you give a link to it, or if not then maybe a thread here or Wikimedia-l might be a good way of building some bridges with members of minority groups that you took part in driving away from Wikipedia through comments like this?
Thanks, Fae
On 26 January 2015 at 01:12, Tarc . tarc@hotmail.com wrote:
Suppose I should say a brief something since some of the posts here talk about me. I have been caustic and acerbic at the Wikipedia over the years, though in fits and starts I am trying to take it down a few notches. So, yea, I'm quite aware that I'm not the best poster-child for any sort of movement or change or whatnot. I dived into Gamergate after hearing about some of the really awful things that were being said about Zoe Quinn elsewhere, thinking (correctly) that her Wiki bio was going to be a harassment magnet. As far as I am concerned, there is no debate; if one identifies as a "pro-Gamergater", than that one stands side-by-side with the harassment that was done under the hashtag. I did not want to allow these people to direct the narrative of the Gamergate article.
So, yes, sometimes one loses one's cool when dealing with dirtbags from 8chan/reddit. However, it is a shame that we who kept the hordes at bay, while being harassed by 8chan/reddit and hell, harassed by Jimmy Wales himself for a time til his eyes belatedly opened, were not cut a little more slack. We were doing something right (with using some wrong words/tone at times) and got the same treatment as a bunch of throwaway accounts.
That is the narrative that the mainstream media seems to be running with, and while it isn't accurate for them to say "feminists and women were banned", they are still correctly portraying the WIkipedia's Arbcom as doing a pretty bad thing here.
-t