I respectfully disagree. What happened to Phil shouldn't come with the territory of being an admin on a website.
I sympathize with Phil, I really do, but the thing is that the reason governments never negotiate with terrorists isn't of some abstract philosophical reason, it's because it doesn't work.
Suppose Brandt took down his Hive Mind page in return for us deleting the article. Do you think that he would stop posting stuff at wikipedia review? Do you think he would stop investigating admins and inciting other people to harass them? I doubt it.
Even if we could somehow stop Brandt (which I think is HIGHLY doubtful, he won't change his mind and he won't change the subject, if you know what I mean), pulling down his page will only serve as an invite for the next guy. And the next guy. And the next guy.
This would simply not work.
--Oskar
On 6/11/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
No good, compared to the real enemies of free expression, Daniel Brandt is just a nuisance. Some things just come with the territory.
Fred
On Jun 11, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Phil Sandifer wrote:
Daniel Brandt is a notable public figure. By all rights, he should have an article in Wikipedia. And the article we have on him is a good one.
We should also, after contacting Brandt, delete it.
I don't know if you all caught what Brandt and the folks at Wikipedia Review did to me last month. If you didn't, here: http:// www.boingboing.net/2006/05/22/u_florida_cops_ask_f.html Basically, someone on Wikipedia Review contacted my University to express concern that I was a murderer, and I got to deal with a week of being the subject of a police investigation that demanded my fingerprints.
In my case, who I am is public knowledge, and I decided to make it that way. But that's not the case for everyone on Brandt's Hive Mind site. A lot of them are people who didn't accept their RFA expecting that they'd have their names, cities of residence, and photos released. Nobody on Wikipedia, I don't think, realized that accepting adminship meant painting a target on yourself, and, frankly, on your family and friends.
The Foundation doesn't and can't provide admins with protection here. And we need protection. The other admins on this site should not get to go through what I did, or any of the far worse things that can and will eventually happen to us.
But, after thinking about it, its my belief that the Foundation owes its editors and admins the protections it can give. And one of those is offering to delete Brandt's article in exchange for the removal of the Hive Mind site. It's an awful trade. It's a horrible, awful trade. We should hate making it, and we should hate Brandt for forcing us to make it.
But we should make it. Because the consequences of not making it are just too dangerous.
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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