>It was inappropriate of the guy to stalk you and inappropriate of the church to confirm your number without your consent. It's not inappropriate to be visible as a woman!

 

I should add that such stalking is not limited to women. I don’t deny it’s more likely, but I have been stalked as well. The acolytes of a notable banned user, a film producer who had at that point long been trying through a variety of ways, mostly disruptive, to get the article on himself deleted, tried to come after me when not only did I block one of his socks, I traced the IP to a prominent production company and referred his misuse of their network to security there, which apparently took it seriously (at the time, it would never have occurred to me that someone would constantly add material to an article about themselves accusing themselves of child molestation as a way (they thought) of getting the article deleted) ... I really thought I was being helpful).

 

Needless to say, he took umbrage at my going above and beyond our usual procedures (not usual for me, however ... I believe any egregious misuse of an entity’s computer systems to maliciously edit Wikipedia, use that usually violates terms of service, should be reported to the responsible personnel at those entities, and there are students at school districts throughout the US and Canada who’ve been disciplined as a result of reports I’ve made to the appropriate administrators). He complained about this on a forum thread at his website, and one of his acolytes apparently took it on himself to post a version of my home address (easily findable online since I use my real name and the region I live in on my userpage, and in any event a close examination of my edits would probably narrow down the community I live in, since I have heavily edited and expanded the article, and it remains on my watchlist)  that was just incorrect enough to not be findable on Google. That person, or another, created a username with that address and, using it, inserted themselves into a talk-page discussion I was participating in. I later blocked the account and redacted the edits from the page. I can’t say I wasn’t a little unnerved by all this.

 

Daniel Case

 

P.S. I do think the real failure here was the church. They just gave out your phone number to some stranger who called? Without any apparent need for said stranger to use any [[social engineering]] skills? I would bring this up with the board of trustees or elders or whatever ... especially with this incident already having occurred, the church has serious liability exposure if it doesn’t make any policy changes before, say, this happens in the case of a stalker with much more malevolent intentions.