On a list of "people who already believe in bigfoot"-- seems to fly
afoul of CANVASSing.
******
That's a distinctly uncivil way of expressing multiple flawed assumptions.
If it's not too uncivil to respond in the same vein, you're also insisting
the Loch Ness monster exists.
Occam's razor: I am the Loch Ness monster. Now excuse me while I climb out
of this cold lake in Scotland, take off my wet suit, and go play a round of
golf.
-Durova
One of the things that isn't included in this thread is hte email
Durova sent to the list. If you haven't seen it, go read it, and
you'll see why we're all so stressed out by this. There isn't a
person on the encyclopedia who couldn't be banned by this sort of
kangaroo court, if someone had an ax to grind. And if the discussions
are secret, they'll never even know they were being suspected--
they'll just wake up banned one day, just like !!.
Durova DID post the "evidence" to the list, and members of that list
DID reply back to her "enthusiastically endorsing" the block. (or so
she says, and I believe her).
Even if she didn't explicitly propose banning, she did explicitly
accuse !! of being a sockpuppet of a WR user. And what do we do with
Sockpuppets of WR users? Just because she didn't say the magic word
"I'm gonna ban them", it was obvious where it was going. Anyone who
read hte email and responded with anything other than "Are you crazy,
this is NOT sufficient evidence to prove he's a sockpuppet" needs
looking at, because I think the community wouldn't trust their
judgment anymore than it trusts Durova's.
Alec
******
Alec, although you may not realize it, you continue to articulate the same
logical errors I spoke about before. Really, this kind of hyperbole is
unhelpful. If my block created a chilling environment, then the collective
effect of loose cannon speculation such as this is at least as bad.
Especially when raised so persistently.
I'm tired now, and just finished a long post that had to get sent to this
list in several segments. I have other things to do. Please do me the
courtesy of supposing that I'm not misleading you. The list is a red
herring. I've said so enough times. I have other things to do with my life
than continue to repeat that.
-Durova
Point well taken about you not trying to ban anybody. As for the rest, as
I've said before, these were individuals who were missing the same piece of
evidence I was missing. I'm sure any of them would have discarded the
hypothesis immediately if any of them had it. Also bear in mind that I was
the investigator, and that I was attempting to build upon a part of some
work that had been very successful in the Burntsauce and Dannycali
investigations. The Burntsauce investigation was far more extensive than
this one and had numerous smoking guns. Dannycali was also a much clearer
instance, although someone else acted while my evidence was at earlier
stages. And no, that person isn't someone who saw the bad report I later
wrote. There could very well have been a general respect for my successful
report on Alkivar (which had many smoking guns) and Eyrian's own reaction
when I blocked his sock spoke more than any evidence I could have mustered.
And I want to emphasize, this really was a much weaker report than the kind
of thing I usually do.
The onsite discussion got too heated to hold any real discussion of "Durova,
what were you thinking?" Well I'd been pretty successful at what I had been
doing and wanted to systematize it. The long term sockpuppets I'd
successfully found had been working in concert with other editors who were
either banned or gaming the system very seriously. And remember I had tried
to ban Burntsauce half a year before, and I had been absolutely right, and
he had done a lot of damage since then. When I returned in the fall and
really looked into it closely, I regretted having waited so long because so
much damage had occurred. In fact, I'll give a barnstar to anyone who
restores the damage to ten articles he harmed.
I really wanted to find a way that would address the problem more
proactively. And remember, JB196 has driven people to frustration until
they quit the project. Curse of Fenric was a good editor, and others had
come to me for advice when they were on the fence about leaving too.
SirFozzie knew the JB196 case even better than I, but he had distanced
himself from it. It was just too cumbersome. So I was the person who had
by far the most experience in this particular area. So I tried to distill
the common points between Burntsauce and Dannycali and some other accounts
I'd been watching quite closely but not acted upon, and I selected a test
case that raised my antenna a little and I hadn't examined before. I
thought I was being impartial and objective, and I was surprised to see that
the correlations lined up. Eureka! The moment of hubris.
So yeah, the people who read that report all knew I had been on a roll and
had some background on why I thought this kind of thing was worth
attempting. Don't lay it on their shoulders. It was a bad report, not up
to the level of my usual work, and it was attempting a new kind of approach
I hadn't tried before. With no disrespect for the real human being who
didn't deserve the hassle my mistake caused, I'm like the pitcher who threw
a wild curveball and got a drubbing in the sports pages. You don't fire the
catcher and the first baseman for that.
-Durova
> you're failing to recognize the
> possibility of alternative explanations that place the whole thing in a
much
> different light. That was a key mistake I made. You're making it too.
Well, that's a very valid possibilty. I would like to point out two
critical differences though:
1. I'm not accusing you or anyone else of bad faith-- merely poor
judgement. !! was suspected of actually trying to subvert it. The
wpinvestigations-l sleuths are merely suspected of exhibiting poor
judgment. Nobody is suspecting you of subversion, we're just
suspecting you guys of inadvertantly causing more harm than good.
******
Remember, that list didn't exist yet. See above.
2. I'm not trying to ban anybody. I'm just saying-- administrators
of this project obviously rendered judgments on your evidence-- we
should be able to see those judgments, so we can better assess how to
help those individuals better contribute to the project. Worst case
scenario, they have to return to the community and ask if they are
still trusted.
> you're failing to recognize the
> possibility of alternative explanations that place the whole thing in a
much
> different light. That was a key mistake I made. You're making it too.
Well, that's a very valid possibilty. I would like to point out two
critical differences though:
1. I'm not accusing you or anyone else of bad faith-- merely poor
judgement. !! was suspected of actually trying to subvert it. The
wpinvestigations-l sleuths are merely suspected of exhibiting poor
judgment. Nobody is suspecting you of subversion, we're just
suspecting you guys of inadvertantly causing more harm than good.
******
Remember, that list didn't exist yet. See above.
2. I'm not trying to ban anybody. I'm just saying-- administrators
of this project obviously rendered judgments on your evidence-- we
should be able to see those judgments, so we can better assess how to
help those individuals better contribute to the project. Worst case
scenario, they have to return to the community and ask if they are
still trusted.
******
Point well taken about you not trying to ban anybody. As for the rest, as
I've said before, these were individuals who were missing the same piece of
evidence I was missing. I'm sure any of them would have discarded the
hypothesis immediately if any of them had it. Also bear in mind that I was
the investigator, and that I was attempting to build upon a part of some
work that had been very successful in the Burntsauce and Dannycali
investigations. The Burntsauce investigation was far more extensive than
this one and had numerous smoking guns. Dannycali was also a much clearer
instance, although someone else acted while my evidence was at earlier
stages. And no, that person isn't someone who saw the bad report I later
wrote. There could very well have been a general respect for my successful
report on Alkivar (which had many smoking guns) and Eyrian's own reaction
when I blocked his sock spoke more than any evidence I could have mustered.
And I want to emphasize, this really was a much weaker report than the kind
of thing I usually do.
The onsite discussion got too heated to hold any real discussion of "Durova,
what were you thinking?" Well I'd been pretty successful at what I had been
doing and wanted to systematize it. The long term sockpuppets I'd
successfully found had been working in concert with other editors who were
either banned or gaming the system very seriously. And remember I had tried
to ban Burntsauce half a year before, and I had been absolutely right, and
he had done a lot of damage since then. When I returned in the fall and
really looked into it closely, I regretted having waited so long because so
much damage had occurred. In fact, I'll give a barnstar to anyone who
restores the damage to ten articles he harmed.
I really wanted to find a way that would address the problem more
proactively. And remember, JB196 has driven people to frustration until
they quit the project. Curse of Fenric was a good editor, and others had
come to me for advice when they were on the fence about leaving too.
SirFozzie knew the JB196 case even better than I, but he had distanced
himself from it. It was just too cumbersome. So I was the person who had
by far the most experience in this particular area. So I tried to distill
the common points between Burntsauce and Dannycali and some other accounts
I'd been watching quite closely but not acted upon, and I selected a test
case that raised my antenna a little and I hadn't examined before. I
thought I was being impartial and objective, and I was surprised to see that
the correlations lined up. Eureka! The moment of hubris.
So yeah, the people who read that report all knew I had been on a roll and
had some background on why I thought this kind of thing was worth
attempting. Don't lay it on their shoulders. It was a bad report, not up
to the level of my usual work, and it was attempting a new kind of approach
I hadn't tried before. With no disrespect for the real human being who
didn't deserve the hassle my mistake caused, I'm like the pitcher who threw
a wild curveball and got a drubbing in the sports pages. You don't fire the
catcher and the first baseman for that.
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
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.
> you're failing to recognize the
> possibility of alternative explanations that place the whole thing in a
much
> different light. That was a key mistake I made. You're making it too.
Well, that's a very valid possibilty. I would like to point out two
critical differences though:
1. I'm not accusing you or anyone else of bad faith-- merely poor
judgement. !! was suspected of actually trying to subvert it. The
wpinvestigations-l sleuths are merely suspected of exhibiting poor
judgment. Nobody is suspecting you of subversion, we're just
suspecting you guys of inadvertantly causing more harm than good.
******
Remember, that list didn't exist yet. See above.
2. I'm not trying to ban anybody. I'm just saying-- administrators
of this project obviously rendered judgments on your evidence-- we
should be able to see those judgments, so we can better assess how to
help those individuals better contribute to the project. Worst case
scenario, they have to return to the community and ask if they are
still trusted.
******
Point well taken about you not trying to ban anybody. As for the rest, as
I've said before, these were individuals who were missing the same piece of
evidence I was missing. I'm sure any of them would have discarded the
hypothesis immediately if any of them had it. Also bear in mind that I was
the investigator, and that I was attempting to build upon a part of some
work that had been very successful in the Burntsauce and Dannycali
investigations. The Burntsauce investigation was far more extensive than
this one and had numerous smoking guns. Dannycali was also a much clearer
instance, although someone else acted while my evidence was at earlier
stages. And no, that person isn't someone who saw the bad report I later
wrote. There could very well have been a general respect for my successful
report on Alkivar (which had many smoking guns) and Eyrian's own reaction
when I blocked his sock spoke more than any evidence I could have mustered.
And I want to emphasize, this really was a much weaker report than the kind
of thing I usually do.
The onsite discussion got too heated to hold any real discussion of "Durova,
what were you thinking?" Well I'd been pretty successful at what I had been
doing and wanted to systematize it. The long term sockpuppets I'd
successfully found had been working in concert with other editors who were
either banned or gaming the system very seriously. And remember I had tried
to ban Burntsauce half a year before, and I had been absolutely right, and
he had done a lot of damage since then. When I returned in the fall and
really looked into it closely, I regretted having waited so long because so
much damage had occurred. In fact, I'll give a barnstar to anyone who
restores the damage to ten articles he harmed.
I really wanted to find a way that would address the problem more
proactively. And remember, JB196 has driven people to frustration until
they quit the project. Curse of Fenric was a good editor, and others had
come to me for advice when they were on the fence about leaving too.
SirFozzie knew the JB196 case even better than I, but he had distanced
himself from it. It was just too cumbersome. So I was the person who had
by far the most experience in this particular area. So I tried to distill
the common points between Burntsauce and Dannycali and some other accounts
I'd been watching quite closely but not acted upon, and I selected a test
case that raised my antenna a little and I hadn't examined before. I
thought I was being impartial and objective, and I was surprised to see that
the correlations lined up. Eureka! The moment of hubris.
So yeah, the people who read that report all knew I had been on a roll and
had some background on why I thought this kind of thing was worth
attempting. Don't lay it on their shoulders. It was a bad report, not up
to the level of my usual work, and it was attempting a new kind of approach
I hadn't tried before. With no disrespect for the real human being who
didn't deserve the hassle my mistake caused, I'm like the pitcher who threw
a wild curveball and got a drubbing in the sports pages. You don't fire the
catcher and the first baseman for that.
There were in-depth deliberations about [[User:!!]] that led to his
blocking. Since that block was in error, we want to be able to look
at the conversations that led up to his blocking, so we can see who
all was at fault, where the system broke down, and how we can fix it.
This shouldn't be a controversial request, it should be a commonplace
one. In every erroneous block, people go back over the discussions to
see what went wrong. The only thing that's different in this case is
that you guy took your deliberations off-wiki, and are not trying to
prevent the community from reviewing what precisely went wrong. I
realize that may feel like an invasion of privacy, since you guys
thought the deliberations would be secret when you held them-- but
sadly, that's your own fault for doing admin investigations in a
secret venue.
******
That's easy to blame after the fact when no clear standards existed. Even
though Alkivar overturned my block on Burntsauce in April, no one raised a
protest that I asked for off-wiki evidence review then. Most of the
community just didn't pay attention to this for a long time. In the
THF-David Shankbone case I asked the Committee to make a ruling on fair play
practices regarding use of onsite name disclosures, and nobody really picked
up on why I thought that was important. Since I couldn't even spark their
interest on one of the clearest examples of the subject and it had played
into more than one case they handled, it seemed well-nigh impossible for me
to start a community dialog.
Nobody gets angry with the pitcher as long as he keeps throwing strikes.
And, per the developing Privatemusings decision, you really ought to be
going easier on people who were acting in good conscience in an area where
policy was silent.
It's noble of you to try to assure us that, if we could see the
evidence, we would see that you are the only one at fault here. But
surely you must understand, given the recent history, why we aren't
going to be willing to take your word for what the evidence will and
will not show.
Alec
******
I've been thinking of posting my evidence from the Alkivar case.
Can't release everything because it includes private e-mails, but there's a
trusted user version I've shared. Do you think it would be a good idea for
me to put that in user space alongside my Joan of Arc vandal report?
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:36:33 +0000
From: Nick <heligolandwp(a)googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Happy birthday to me...
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>Well, that's probably going to generate a lot of "No" responses.
>
>I'm probably way to generous today for some reason, but would there be
>any
>objections to unprotecting Flameviper's talk page and letting him edit
>an
>article of his choice on his talk page ?
>
>I know his latest message is once again trolling and we're all getting
>pretty fed up of him, but the guy seems to have some interest in
>editing
>Wikipedia in addition to his love of trolling us all on a regular
> basis.
*sigh*
I'm not trying to troll...
I understand why everyone gets pissed off all the time, and it's because I constantly whinge about being banned. But it just sucks to be in this position, because I can't edit the encyclopedia, I can't go on a forum (which is admittedly not your fault), I can't go on IRC, all that's left for me to do is to go on the mailing list.
Pre-emptive counter to "go outside": I do, often, and it sucks.
But I suppose that I'm pissing everyone off, even though it's not my intent.
Just as well, I don't like this any more than you do. It's more painful to write this than it is to read it, trust me.
I'd just like to get this over with, so that I can go back to editing the encyclopedia. Then I could talk about things that actually mattered on the mailing list, instead of watching through the frosted glass of banishment.
Yes, I know that sounded cheesy as hell.
No, I'm not going to go back and erase it.
Seriously, though, I'd really like to just go back to Wikipedia, perhaps under my Two-Sixteen account.
Could you just give it a try?
---------------------------------
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[repost of ending part, since it got cut off in the online archive
due to the silly Unix/Linux misfeature of cutting off mail messages
with "From" at the start of a line]
== From then on, people looking in the atlas at the library couldn't
help notice that something had been censored from it, and this
actually increased the attention paid to MRV, including by people who
hadn't even heard of the place before this. Once their curiosity had
been piqued, it wasn't very hard for them to find it, since it was in
other sources such as Google Maps which were outside the control of
the town leaders. At any rate, many of the town's leading citizens,
including the ones most fervently opposed to MRV, spent much time
looking up at its hilltop with their own telescopes and binoculars in
order to keep an eye on what those evil trolls were up to. However,
they still didn't want anybody else finding the place; they could be
trusted to look at it themselves, for good motives of helping to
protect Maddenville from it, but if others find it they might be
manipulated by the evil trolls, which wouldn't be good.
While debate was breaking out over whether the blanking of the atlas
entry was justified, a citizen wrote an essay called "BADTOWNS" and
posted it to the bulletin board in the town square. It called for a
ban on referring, pointing, or giving directions to any town,
village, or hamlet that was engaged in personal attacks on any
citizen of Maddenville. It was originally designated as merely an
essay, but some people attempted to move it from the bulletin board
into the law books in the town courthouse so it could be enforced as
law, despite it not actually having been voted into effect by the
legislature or by a referendum of the citizens. Others tried to move
it to the historical archives along with other failed proposals.
Somebody even grabbed it and fed it into a paper shredder, but
another person painstakingly taped it back together so that it
remained on the bulletin board. Despite not being made into law,
some tried to enforce it nevertheless, including on people who were
trying to discuss the proposal itself and feeling the need to refer
to specific things about MRV and other towns that might be covered by
the proposal. Some people trying to make such mentions in their
speeches and bulletin board postings about the proposal were given
warnings, and one who persisted after such a warning was forced to
spend the night in the town jail. This tended to chill discussion
afterward.
Proponents of the BADTOWNS policy claimed that it was actually
already law, regardless of the status of the current proposal, due to
an earlier decision of the Maddenville Superior Court. This decision
was regarding another town called SportsDramaVille, which was settled
by comedians with a very tasteless sense of humor. Their main
product was a set of trading cards with grotesque caricatures of
various figures in sports including players, coaches, team and league
officials, and even some prominent fans. The cards also had
scurrilous gossip about the people on them, including false and
defamatory information, true and privacy-invading information, and
nasty personal attacks. Some prominent Maddenville citizens were
included, but some people from Maddenville Review Village also were,
as well as people from other places and other sports of little
interest here. The court decision ultimately banned those trading
cards, and anything else connected with SportsDramaVille. Some felt
this was an overreaching decision going beyond the proper
jurisdiction of the court, and was possibly unconstitutional, but few
wanted to object very strongly because of the overwhelming view that
SDV and its cards were vile things of no use to the serious pursuit
of football. Some thought that the actions of a Maddenville
constable soon after the decision, to go and rummage through the
drawers of the local sports card shop to find and destroy all of the
offending cards even in the dusty, musty backstock that was seldom
even looked at, were unnecessary, however. This decision was now
being used as a precedent to support larger bans on references to
BADTOWNS.
The next controversy came when a scandal broke out that some of the
football players in Maddenville were using illegal performance
enhancing substances, and were lying about it and cheating on their
drug tests. This got extensively written up in the national press,
and resulted in some players being suspended or expelled from their
teams. Embarrassingly, the scandal had been uncovered and publicized
by the people at Maddenville Review Village, as part of their ongoing
attempt to cast disrepute on Maddenville. When the local newspaper,
the Maddenville Goalpost, wrote about the scandal, they included a
line mentioning the involvement of MRV in it. This upset a town
leader so much that he went around town early in the morning
gathering up all the papers before anybody else woke up and read
them, burning those papers, and printing a new edition without the
offending mention. The paper's reporter and editor didn't much care
for this, just like the librarian earlier, but also didn't want to be
seen as MRV sympathizers.
[To be continued]
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
;_;
Well, it's that time of year again. On December 22, I'm one year older.
Looking back on last year, nothing much has changed.
My real-life affairs are still a heap of dung, there's no use even going further into that.
I'm banned from my favorite forum (RIO), I'm banned on every IRC channel on Freenode, I'm also banned from Wikipedia.
Every time I go to do something, I have to stop and take five minutes to get straight all the truth, the lies, the sockpuppets, formulating arguments, presenting my point, et cetera.
I don't really know why this is. I'm arguing like a lawyer every day to defend myself against accusations of trolling, disruption, and sockpuppetry, and I'm not getting paid. It was discussed earlier that bans for sockpuppeting were pointless. I agreed. I say that as Two-Sixteen, I was contributing fine, and that showed, if anything, that I was able to edit peacefully.
Why would someone simply refute evidence of my goodness and then say it was "bad" because I was banned before, and then ignore the fact that I could edit peaceably and ban me, removing a source of good content to satisfy ego?
I don't know. I'm not sure why this is even an issue.
I wish we could just get rid of all the blocks, the bans, the constructed bullshit, and just start fresh.
No bias, no prejudice against people for whatever stupid reasons. Just start with a clean slate, everyone forgives everyone else their trespasses. Perhaps a New Years tradition?
I wish I could just go back to editing.
Could someone just help me?
---------------------------------
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