On 11/21/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Well, yeah: the only thing that makes it controversial, obviously, is the controversy, for which it takes two to tango. Please accept 50% of the blame. As for why *I* didn't put the text or link in (since after all I was the one who put in the timeline that was the context for all this): It' because I felt-- and still feel-- that you cannot be trusted. By "you" I mean all the admins on the side of erasing these links. Based upon threats I received in earlier rounds, I assumed that if I provided citations for the timeline, one of them would take advantage of the lapse and block/ban me. I gave enough information to find the referenced material, in case someone wanted to check up on it or read the material for themselves, so the lack of actual links wasn't an issue for me anyway, though the irony of not being able to provide them was not lost on me at all. If someone wanted to link to them, that was fine by me; without sufficient references, accusations about what is on websites are hearsay and of no real merit, and I had no problem with the links being there. So if one of the targets/victims of administrative wrath wanted to take up a new account and put the links in, I didn't (and still do not) care. The other side of the coin is that your faction was blatantly trying to keep people from evaluating the matter for themselves, to the point where the WR "trolls" could hardly err in accusing you of a cover-up! And the flip side is that Will Beback was approximately as guilty of trolling in that specific case. I mean, hell, if you can attribute motives, so can I: I can concoct a theory of how dredging up a deeply buried 3 week old blog comment was really s scheme to rile up the BADSITES opponents and discredit them. Upon turning down the paranoia to a more realistic level, I contend that he was absolutely guilty of dragging an off-Wiki spat with TNH back into WIkipedia. One of the things you seem to miss, Guy, is that I (and I'm pretty sure that Dan holds the same opinion) don't really care about the running vendetta between Wikipedia Review and and The Cabal. At least, not as to the issues behind it. The thing that's annoying us is that The Vendetta keeps causing collateral damage in other parts of Wikipedia that don't have anything to do with the topics that started the whole rucus. It is the basis of the tactic of avoiding confronting the abstract principles of the matter by stirring up controversy about the "trolls" whenever one of those principles comes to the fore of the discussion. The various detractors keep getting hit with personal attacks (in this case, the insinuation that Dan is too thick to catch on the Real Motives) which keep shifting around when previous versions (e.g. the more forthright but equally dubious claim that Dan and I are partisans specifically acting as defenders of WR itself) become to obviously implausible. To my mind, this business of "having" to know the history of the conflict is the root of the problem. If the history has to be known, then the whole thing is about institutionalizing the conflict even to the point of collateral damage. I think the issue would go away entirely if the history were compeltely forgotten.

On 11/23/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: All of those are more or less noble goals, but it can be argued as to how they interact with the ultimate intent of the project. The point that Dan T. and I have made over and over is that the zeal in pursuing these people is itself disruptive and has resulted in a string of incidents where the admins have acted contrary to the interests of the *encyclopedia* in their deference to (some, maybe most) of its contributors. What you call a misconception, I call a failure on your part to see some parts of the picture. Indeed, a great deal of the heat produced whenever someone tries to reintroduce BADSITES comes from two inevitable responses from the adminstrator/Cabal faction. Inevitably ED and WR are brought up, and inevitably someone in The Cabal insinuates if not states that one of the opponents is working for those sites. For those of us who came in after the original MONGO case, it seems absurdly disproportionate. Stomping out Jon Aubrey's accounts is one thing. A quick tour through some of them leads me to the conclusion that one needs to rule against multiple identities to justify banning them. What is more striking is what appears to me to be an inability or refusal to distinguish between "erroneous" positions and the way they are presented. Anyone who appears and argues against BADSITES is presumed by The Cabal of having a *political* relationship to the WR/ED people and is thus attacked for who they are presumed to be. My feeling is that if the WR people appear in disguise and present reasonable arguments, I don't care who they are; and if the admins make dubious arguments, I don't care that they are admins. Heck, if Joe Freshman makes a good argument on his first edit in Wikipedia, that's fine with me too. But instead, the perniciousness with which the assumption of association with Certain Bad Guys leads me to conclude that there is a vendetta, even if those pursuing it don't believe it. Well, and nobody put a gun to WIll Beback's head and made him vandalize every article using TNH as a reference either. Either way, the phrase "put a gun to his head" is excessive; and besides, as long as it's phrased in these "us vs. the lawless them", every kind of excess or for that matter self-serving abuse by admins is authorized. There are a lot of "thin blue line" dramas, and there are a lot of "cop gone bad" dramas too. If we can bring this back to earth and accept the possibility that Admins are tempted to be overzealous, and that groups of admins are tempted to informally form into a faction tempted into valuing self-defense over proportionality, I think the drama could be brought to an end. Part of my perspective on this is that in being active on the internet back before it even existed as such, I've been put through a lot of invective. I accept that posting in public makes one a target, and I don't accept guarantees to anonymity to the degree that BADSITES proposed because they are promises that cannot be kept. It's already annoying enough to have POV-pushers and random jerks damaging the articles, that I also have to ride herd on the policy-cops damaging articles and discussions too.

JzG wrote: Um: yes, no, yes.