Maher's email, and the official Wikipedia statements on Gamergate, are careful to point out that the arbitration committee has the authority to govern disputes about the conduct of Wikipedia's editors, but not about the content of the site. For that reason, Maher wrote, the committee's decision shouldn't be understood as a "referendum on Gamergate itself." In other words, the decision isn't about whose ideas are right; it's about who is best behaved.

Leaving aside the long history of punishable behavior by Gamergate supporters, that defense highlights one of Wikipedia's most fundamental flaws: aside from the purely democratic groupthink of its editors, no mechanism exists for governing the site's content. If enough web-savvy pseudoscientists decided tomorrow to use Wikipedia to espouse the merits of phrenology, or a racist campaign in support of eugenics flooded the site, there's not much Wikipedia could do about it. Good editors would work against the crazies, of course, and if ArbCom found evidence of conduct violations it could punish the interlopers that way, but there's no system in place for Wikipedia's administrators to say, Your ideas are wrong, and they're not welcome here.

Don't believe me? That's exactly what happened to the Croatian version of Wikipedia when a group of far-right reactionaries seized it in a coup in 2013. The Daily Dot reported at the time [...]