Talk:Gaylor conspiracy theory

On article title

Are we sure that "(theory)" alone is sufficient in the title? To me, at least, moving to "Gaylor (conspiracy theory)" would be more appropriate, given that is exactly how RSs describe this topic (as can be seen in the article's citations). JavaHurricane 18:54, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Even if RS refers to it as such it is objectively not a conspiracy theory, it is a fringe theory. Either way I think "theory" is more than sufficient to differentiate this article from other articles with Gaylor in the title, all of which either refer to a person by the name Gaylor or a place. Tekrmn (talk) 04:54, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Why was the page revised back to prior era?

Ronherry’s edits yesterday was uncalled for, and should be reverted.

Here and Here

The reasoning given for the edits were not specific to lines of information being changed, and appears instead that it was done to retake control of a page that had multiple editors on it since Ronherry last visited:

“Restored last version free of unreliable unverifiable factoids” (while deleting many paragraphs of well-cited information), and “Wow, a Gaylor fan has totally taken over this article and completed devastated the MOS.” (an ad hominem that forgets the “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” advice on Wikipedia Wikipedia:Editing controversial subjects).

Someone citing information about a conspiracy from credible sources does not necessarily believe in the aforementioned conspiracy. They are explaining, via documentation, why the phenomenon exists.

The existence of a phenomenon, and recording moments of a phenomenon is also not proof that the phenomenon is true in its underlying assumptions, like documenting “reports of people seeing ghosts” does not mean that one holds a personal editorial belief that “ghosts are true and real.” You can cite a hundred ghost stories in recorded folklore history, and still walk away with a stance that “ghosts aren’t real.” It’s possible - now, as Wikipedia puts it, don’t shoot the messenger!

Then Ronherry did a third editing note “Scholarly Content: restored the only content worth adding back.”, while deleting academic sources from published journals, in the same section, such as Eadon 2024. Here

Why is Ronherry acting as a sole arbiter on the page, to decide what information that was written and edited by multiple editors over the course of weeks, that such progress in understanding completed over time all gets deleted? Citing an ad hominem toward me as the reason? The revision should be reverted, as it was not the least intrusive method for making changes to the page.

@danielcase in a note on the Page Protection page mentioned “hostile summary edits” took place, citing Ronherry’s edit summaries.

To use that wording, these were hostile edits that took place, on top of the hostile edit summaries.

The page now has multiple locations where biphobic, odd structuring of sexualities exists, in a way that was fixed via multiple editors the past few weeks.

“At least sapphic” and “not-heterosexual” are not appropriate ways to address the existence of bisexuality, nor to discuss held beliefs that someone may be bisexual, just as much as they may be straight or lesbian. Those three beliefs should be presented with equal editorial respect to language.

Ronherry possibly did not read the history of past edits regarding bisexuality language choices when doing the revert and change of the page, because the language around sexualities and how they kept getting written hierarchical was addressed in a past edit summary.

Sexualities here on Wikipedia cannot be written in the format of (‘gay/lesbian - ew!, or half-gay’) but that twice is how the summaries on the page were addressed. This was fixed, and yet is now how the page sits currently.

(Conspiracy and closeted were adjectives used to deliver the “ew”, and “non-heterosexual” and “at least sapphic” were used to deliver the message that bisexuality is some sort of half measure, or inferior concept, defined not by itself but by it’s non-heterosexuality, or defined as less than lesbian with wording such as “at least sapphic”).

Note: Closeted and conspiracy are descriptors that can also be written in a neutral tone, and so there is no issue with those words being on the page, but they are being leaned on in those sentences mentioned to provide a lean-pejorative tone.

Looking on the page as a whole, additional wording choices have been made, like “malicious and disrespectful” (without any citation given for these emotion words), that demonstrate a pejorative stance is being taken editorially toward any/all queer sexualities.

This is demonstrated on this Wikipedia page’s current wording choices regarding mentions of sexuality, and should not be the case.

There is a visible “ew” happening, toward gay thought, queer community, and queer scholarship being shown on a page that is tasked with documenting these very communities of thought, within society, because of their size and role in culture.

The list of orientation labels that had existed in the intro paragraph, until Ronherry’s hostile edit, gave the complete list of labels that various journalists and academics have used on Swift: gay, lesbian, bisexual, sapphic, and queer.

Citations could be provided for each of these labels. None of these sexuality labels is less valuable than the others (the “at least” language, used on sapphic, on the current edit of this Wikipedia page could heed this lesson).

Wording of “at least” is Wikipedia outwardly pushing a hierarchy of orientation labels. Let’s not have biphobic language on this Wikipedia page, please!

Information that had citations, and were citing academic research articles, such as Eadon 2024, got deleted under the edit summary of “unreputable and unverified sources”.

Meanwhile, non-cited and non-attributed sentences of opinion claims, featuring emotion words like “malicious and disrespectful”, were reverted back onto the page.

This decisionmaking calls the “unreputable and unverified sources” edit summary reasoning into question, if Ronherry’s edit yesterday added unverified claims, while claiming to remove them.

Even sentences that had citations coming from Ronherry’s own added, approved sources got wiped (Jon Niccum, describing Brian Donovan’s Kansas University research is a such a source). That source was used in the Responses section, to portray an anti perspective, but if the same source got used to address that theories of her bisexuality exist just as much as theories of her lesbianism exist (sentences that cited [6][7], clarifying that some members of the conspiracy believe her to be bisexual, some believe her to be lesbian). Those became deleted, without valid edit summary as to why, as the sources were reputable, and the facts (facts about differences in people’s beliefs within the conspiracy, facts-of-belief) could be fully verified within the citations provided.

An ad hominem was also placed into the edit summary, an ad hominem which failed to understand Wikipedia’s policy of “Don’t Shoot The Message” principle of Wikipedia Wikipedia:Editing controversial subjects - it’s a page about a conspiracy, which means it is going to have the documented, cited beliefs of the conspiracy somewhere on the page. That’s what belongs on the page.

Documenting an existence of a conspiracy is not the same as believing the conspiracy being documented.

We must be able to cite sources we agree with, and sources we also disagree with, when the sources have significant relevance to the topic of the page.

Any such sources of opinion can have modifiers in front, like “This source says…” and “Some people believe…”, and then should have citations showing who said that belief, so the extent of the belief or source of the claim can be tracked.

But viewpoints of the conspiracy and what the conspiracy believes belong cited on the page about the existence of the conspiracy, or else you’re not documenting the conspiracy, you’re only documenting what you don’t like about the conspiracy.

Other people hold different views, like the neutral viewpoint, and those viewpoints should be documented too, without acts of censorship like calling for a Page Protection and undoing weeks of editing, with edit summaries that are inaccurate and engage ad hominems.

A conspiracy’s (or community’s) beliefs should be documented, without censorship of the statement of beliefs in the beliefs section, such to the point where it can only have its beliefs expressed via its most ardent detractors, not from its adherents or from people on the sidelines saying “it’s personal belief, play fair.”

(This would be editorially akin to having the beliefs of Islam recorded only from Christian sources, and more specifically only anti-Islam Christian sources as opposed to pro/neutral Christian sources, and no sources from Islam itself; or having the beliefs of Catholicism cited only from post-Reformation Protestants… the critical outsider sources probably do deserve getting heard, in the Responses section, but cannot be the only, singular lens from which an entire article is crafted, or else it’s a page on Gaylor Conspiracy Theory written only from a singular perspective, deciding that one’s own opinion must be everyone else’s opinion on the matter, when it’s a topic that’s more like “it depends” - each side has the right to self represent their arguments and not have their words come only from sources of people mocking them.)

The Engagement section still has this perspective issue - it’s written from an anti perspective, citing anti articles to quote alleged gaylors (but the Rolling Stone article admits it only saw a screenshot since the subreddit was locked, and can only attest this quote to “a Redditor said”).

Meanwhile, there exist several neutral pov source articles pointing out actions taken within the anti articles on this topic are tantamount to “bullying”. They are taking claims that are unverified comments, by single redditors, and turning them into negative commentary about an entire community at large, to the point that the community had to go private. Does every Swiftie’s worst comments on social media reflect the beliefs of Swifties as a whole? No! But that framing it being used to attack a group of people, whose views of sexuality in music differ from one’s own, and that’s got some issues. Especially where it’s already documented that doxxing and death threats occur to that community.

In that Engagement section, gaylors can only be cited via their detractors, and if the neutral viewpoint were cited, pointing out how the detractors are engaging in targeted homophobia, I don’t think at this time the neutral articles would be allowed to stand on the page, because they’d be seen as… well, to quote an edit summary, “a Gaylor fan”, even though they’re neutral viewpoint articles saying that hating on queer people and targeting them for ridicule shouldn’t be one’s first thought at news of a happy engagement.

As written and currently published, Wikipedia only holds the anti perspective on the engagement, not the neutral nor gaylor perspectives on it.

As editors, we have to be comfortable recognizing our personal beliefs are not going to match the Neutrality of the Page, which will have multiple viewpoints documented on the topic, creating a richer fabric than any one singular editor voice or political viewpoint alone could make.

This is not a page designed for only prioritizing one singular viewpoint, in this case the anti viewpoint, with categorical removal of any citations coming from neutral non-gaylor viewpoints and gaylor viewpoints, as happened yesterday.

Removal of irrefutably academic articles, like Eadon 2024, under the responses section, when it goes against Ronherry’s editorial viewpoint, such censorship is the clearest sign that the intent of yesterday’s revisions wasn’t done primarily for improvement of the page, in a balanced manner that includes all of society’s perspectives on a question that is unanswered, but instead was done (potentially, and in my opinion) restricting viewpoints that fall outside of Ronherry’s personal preferences on the topic.

Notably, the revision back to a far earlier save was also essentially a way to keep the page Ronherry’s writing, and Ronherry’s viewpoint only.

Ronherry left the page on September 22, 2025. It was an adjustment to realize that there are now multiple editors providing multiple perspectives (including Ronherry’s important views on the topic). Page version as Ronherry last left it in September

I want to make very clear that Ronherry has a lot of passion for this page, which that passion a good thing, and I genuinely admire it: passion created the page, passion built the page’s sections and paragraphs.

Passion will continue to inform Ronherry’s work in making sure the anti viewpoint is well-represented and documented into the future.

Passion led to the conflict yesterday/today, but it is still a net positive.

That passion also has to follow Wikipedia’s guidelines, as this page is not a personal opinion blog on “why the gaylor conspiracy is “malicious and disrespectful” - with no citation for these words given (a sentence saying these exact words was added back onto the Wikipedia page in the reversion/edit, done by Ronherry.)

The full sentence, for clarity, which did not include any citation for the claim, was: “Therefore, the majority of Swifties criticize Gaylor theories as far-fetched, malicious, and disrespectful to Swift.”

Here was Ronherry’s original adding in of this claim without citations on September 8, 2025. September 8 Version edit of “far-fetched, malicious, disrespectful”

This sentence seems probably incorrect on face value, with the Graphika study being a source that would greatly call such a claim into question, where 32% of Swifties in the study held a view akin to this viewpoint (not those exact words and no citation is given for those words chosen), and 35% of Swift’s measured fanbase did not hold that viewpoint but a more neutral pov that was neither gaylor nor anti gaylor (there were additional other demographics, outside of these, that explain why these factions do not add up to 100%).

Neutral Swifties deserve a voice on the page as much as Anti Swifties. Gaylor viewpoints deserve documented on a page that is defining gaylors. These should not be controversial ideas.

The page cannot be filtered entirely through anti perspective wording.

Passion can write paragraphs on Wikipedia, but it should be cited, and should not cross into censorship.

The views of those 32% of Swifties who find gaylor theory “malicious and disrespectful” should have space on this page, as well, when discussing a page about a conspiracy and societal views toward the conspiracy. But their views should be conducted with proper citations, and then reactions to those reactions to their views should also be allowed to be included just as much as their views are allowed included on the page.

Instead, today we have uncited claims of emotion, and then attribution of those emotions of “malicious and disrespectful” to “the majority of Swifties.”

The “malicious and disrespectful” (quoting the words) sentence didn’t exist yesterday, pre-Ronherry edits, and it’s now up on the page today, post-Ronherry edits.

Meanwhile, the edit summary cited for including those emotion words back onto the page was criticism of “unreliable unverified” claims, which is a dubious reason given if the edit done added “unreliable unverified” claims, while expressly claiming to remove them.

The reversion needs rolled back, for the reasons cited above.

This is a page on a conspiracy, it’s a sociological/societal phenomenon: the page describes who gaylors are, where they locate themselves online, what their belief systems are (this includes describing their belief systems - like describing any religion, you do not have to find what they believe universally true to you, in your pov, it just has to be show that they hold this sincere belief.)

Then sort out the wide variety of opinions held in the Responses/Criticism section as to what others say about the belief.

But do so with citations, like citing Oliver Darcy’s person source who said “invasive”, rather than uncited claims of “malicious and disrespectful”, attributed as being said by a majority, without evidence provided for how this claim came into existence.

Follow Wikipedia’s guidelines, while documenting perspectives held by people.

The page should document responses of all varieties to the phenomenon, not just responses you personally agree with. Academic sources may disagree with you, just as they may disagree with each other. (They do! They disagree internally with each other, and that’s fine. The multiple perspectives each add something to the understanding of the topic.)

I want to say that Ronherry has thus far played a significant role on the page documenting the anti viewpoint.

It is unfortunate that Ronherry has now edited out/reverted all language of the neutral and gaylor viewpoints on this phenomenon, and undone work that was built by multiple collaborators in a reversion of the page that was not checked for if others agreed with rolling back the weeks of edits.

(The Neutral viewpoint, in terms of gaylor beliefs, is summarized quickly here as: “who does it harm? We don’t know her, her life is not my life and thus it’s not my business to pick a side: not anti or gaylor. Give her privacy, but don’t hate on gaylor fans for homophobic sport, either.” Neutrals also say “Overstepping privacy limits is harmful, but queer thought about publicly published music that mentions explicit queer references like GLAAD and a song she has said is about gay marriage is not harmful to her, as she sung that, and said that on national tv”).

To quote Wikipedia in its editorial best at the moment: it’s “malicious and disrespectful”. That does not reflect the Neutral viewpoint, it only advances an Anti-specific viewpoint.

Also, on a smaller note, the summarization of quotes in the response section that was done in Ronherry’s edits also don’t match the tone of what is said by the people themselves, which would be fixed again, if yesterday’s reversion of the edits was undone.

Ronherry had reverted back to a very modified, shortened quote by Swift for Vogue 2019, three words as opposed to the complete sentence said by her in that interview, to push a viewpoint and word choice not contained directly inside the quote. Swift’s quote should be allowed to speak for herself.

Likewise, summaries of what Donovan and La Cretaz have said sound like they were modified into advancing an anti talking point, when Donovan takes an overall neutral viewpoint that is pro-gaylor community’s existence and simultaneously is pro-privacy for Swift as an individual. La Cretaz is a journalist with a pro-gaylor stance, but his stance as he wrote it becomes unrecognizable once summarized in Ronherry’s summarization. If other sources that are in the anti perspective got to say their sentences, without summarization/editorializarion, then it becomes interesting why pro and neutral sources got summarization with editorialization.

Academic source Eadon got deleted from the responses. The edit summary for that deletion was provided as “Restored last version free of unreliable unverifiable factoids”, that was the stated reason for deleting it, and then “restored the only content worth adding back” (for adding the content next to Eadon back, but not Eadon). That is about as unprofessional as can be in the decision making process for why academic responses published in an academic journal, about this conspiracy phenomenon, would get deleted.

So, how does a reversion get undone? It was far too disruptive an edit, which added back in harmful language that had been taken careful care of through prior collaborative edits by multiple editors.

The reversion amounted to censorship of opinions and sources that did not fit Ronherry’s view of the page staying critical ONLY, written in the anti perspective only,

Not sharing space with the three perspectives that exist (anti, gaylor, neutral), and this is made clear by the ad hominem about viewpoint, where the edit summary said “a Gaylor fan” “destroyed” the page when those were cited sentences with multiple citations, describing the phenomenon supposed to be described on the page.

Also, the request for page protection was another move done to keep the page with Ronherry’s-viewpoints-only allowed on the page. I don’t fault Ronherry for trying to promote only Ronherry’s views, but that action did not get approved and neither should the reversion of edits, with ad hominems as reasoning, that undid weeks of revisions, and reintroduced problematic language and pejorative treatment of queer sexualities.

The proposal set forth here, reverting the reversion, would again allow bisexuality to again be mentioned on par with lesbianism and other sexual orientations (instead of yesterday’s reversions of edits that moved the page back to “non-heterosexual” and “at least sapphic”, both unusual wordings that avoid the more straightforward “bisexual”)

I do wish every one of the editors well, and think we can all get along on the page. I think Ronherry had positive intent, and just needs to stop and take a moment and see the editorial perspectives outside of Ronherry’s own singular writing (which Ronherry indeed started to do by edit 3, placing back content into the page, after deleting out things wholesale and then realizing they had been added with intentionality, for good reason.)

Ronherry’s past contributions have been important to the page’s creation.

However, this overreaching edit was not done while thinking about the content. Line by line reviews weren’t done in the deletion of sections (hence things needed to be re-added, and fixed that were already fixed), and as such, the reversion should be undone.

If editing needs to be done of what has been written by myself and others, from the past few weeks, it can be done on more of a line by line or paragraph basis, explaining the thought process behind the words that get rewritten/edited/deleted, not by resetting the clock back weeks, unilaterally undoing edits that had been contributed by numerous editors, in order to censor information from two of the three viewpoints and also to revert to more queerphobic forms of language.

The ad hominems can also be set aside: “Wow, a Gaylor fan has totally taken over this article and completed devastated the MOS.”

Such an edit summary was not a reason to delete multiple cited sources, including information from neutral, anti, and gaylor perspectives, and to do deletions of Swift’s own words.

Can someone revert the page back to pre-Ronherry edits of yesterday. Thank you. LittleLemonSong (talk) 16:23, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Your contributions explicitly violate several points of WP:MOS, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:NPOV etc. It has now been restored to standards closer to WP:GA. Your edit history shows your account was exclusively created to inflame this article, and that won't be tolerated. Thanks. ℛonherry☘ 20:39, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Encyclopedic topic?

How is this an encyclopedic topic? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:39, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Because it meets WP:GNG through its coverage in reliable secondary sources. That's how. JeffSpaceman (talk) 15:50, 9 November 2025 (UTC)