[WikiEN-l] Breaking this up for size, part 1

[Durova]

Durova wrote:
> Alec, I appreciate that you're giving me some credit for stepping forward
to
> take the heat for my own mistake.
Well, I appreciate your kind words.  I'm a little confused by your
statement of "You're wrong, but I'm not going to tell you how".
Obviously, you must know that I can't actually take that on faith, but
I will keep looking.
******
Fair enough.  I hope you also suppose it's also fair that the drubbing I've
gotten is a very strong disincentive against anyone else stepping forward,
or against me saying more than I already have.  There is already enough
information on the table to disprove your hypothesis.
> Now if you want to know why I'm on that cyberstalking list, there are
> several reasons.  Have the decency to suppose that it is what it is, and
> leave the good people alone.
The cyberstalking list, problematic though it is, isn't as enigmatic
as the investigations list.  The investigations list was clearly
formed just for the purpose of gathering evidence to support bans.
The cyberstalking list might have a claim to being
"support-group-esque", but the investigations list, by its name,
summary, and the content of its messages, certainly appears to be a
place designed to influence on-wiki actions.
******
The investigations list didn't even exist yet when I sent out the e-mail.
And remember that no community standard existed, except general agreement
that certain things shouldn't be discussed onsite.  Even though certain
methods of parsing information look obvious and trivial once they become
generally known, one thing an investigator counts on is finding that kind of
mistake.

So on a really basic level - something every sysop deals with - there's the
newish user with a particular interest in one article who gets a 3RR block
and thinks he's very clever to just register a new account.  He's never
heard of WP:SOCK and thinks we never have either.  So he goes right back to
the same article and reverts again.  Sock gets blocked too.  Most people
come around if we talk to them at that point, but a few would rather
outsmart us again.  So that fellow decides to evade 3RR by doing some of his
edits logged in and some of them unlogged on his underlying IP address.
Yeah, we catch that too.  If he continues down that path he's eventually
going to get to tricks that take real effort to address.  And the handful
who become long term vandals are dedicated people.

-Durova