On 18/10/2007, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
Alec Conroy wrote:
How would your policy prevent incidents like MakingLights and the MichaelMoore from happening again in the future?
It's a good idea to check any proposals against real-world incidents. But you should enlarge your list to cover more severe cases of harassment. The MichaelMoore issue barely even counts.
I believe that is, er, his point. These proposals will inevitably be expanded to cover the edge cases; with the unambiguous ones, people really aren't going to complain if it gets done even with no policy.
DISCLAIMER:
Just to remind us all, I'll recap the Making Lights saga, but I won't name the person who was involved, and I sincerely would ask everyone else not to criticize someone today for something they did months ago. Seriously. We've all made mistakes, they're over and done with, and I _sincerely_ am not trying to relive this past saga-- I just don't want to relive it in the future either.
Ordinarily, I'd use a hypothetical example here, but I've found that in this debate, hypothetical examples are invariably dismissed when someone says "Oh, that could never really happen". So I actually do have to use a real-world example if we're going to talk about this.
You protest too much. An example with more severe harassment would perhaps be more useful. Also, if you don't include the whole story then it doesn't make a good example.
Not coincidentally, you've picked a story that involves me. The fact that I'm an administrator has nothing to do with what happened, except that administrators are more likely to be the subject of harassment arising out of the actions they take on-Wiki. In this instance, working to maintain Wikipedia policies made me the target of a blogger prominent in the SciFi community.
...you became a "target" of TNH. Uh-huh. My understanding is that the two of you pissed each other off thoroughly, and she considers herself just as "harrassed" by you.
It is, I think, appropriate for me to add the other side's description here:
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I think a more accurate description would be that I did something which displeased Will BeBack, and that his immediate response was not peaceable. I'm not keen to go on the warpath, but I've never responded well to being told "Hello, you're Belgium."
I would never have taken the slightest interest in Will BeBack if he hadn't been harassing me and Patrick on Wikipedia. When I looked into having that problem arbitrated, I discovered that WB's a high-ranking Wikipedian, so I concluded it was useless for me to protest his harassment. I also concluded that it was useless for me to try to have any substantial participation in the Wikipedia project.
I remained mildly curious about the identity of Will BeBack. A little while after I made the original post that started this thread, I casually googled on his pseudonym. It didn't take a lot of looking for me to find an old mention of his real name via Google cache. It had been discussed in Encyclopedia Dramatica: an irresponsible site, but the information itself sounded real enough. I linked to that page. Later in the thread I mentioned that the site had gone down, and a couple of commenters supplied the name.
That's all.
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http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008953.html#189979
I cannot say I particularly trust your interpretation over hers.
My questions for Will Beback, or anyone else in the future who proposes a new policy that forbids all links to "sites that contain attacks" are this:
#1. Do you agree that the Making Light case was an abuse of power (or at least, incorrect. .-- i.e. Do you agree Making lights should NOT have been purged)?
The blogger abused her power to harass Wikipedia editors.
No, the blogger made an entirely understandable vent, in reply to some comments - as she had been many times previously - about the bureaucratic insanity of Wikipedia. She mentioned one admin who had particularly irritated her by name (and not entirely without merit, as far as I can see); later that day, she idly googled the name, discovered ED mentioned that editor, and posted the link in a later comment, as a footnote. (The rest of the commenters fairly quickly pointed out that ED was nutbar, incidentally)
This was *in a personal blog*. The comment was not being forced upon Wikipedia editors, advertised to Wikipedia readers, or even positioned in such a way as to be easily visible to anyone following a link from Wikipedia; it was one person engaged in a free and frank discussion in the comment thread of one post on their personal blog. It was not even directed at the Wikipedia community, save that very small portion of it (me and Arwel Parry, I think, the only ones I can name) who overlap with TNH's regular audience.
I think "harassing" is a rather wide assumption here - are we so self-centred that we believe everyone who writes about us does so with us as the intended audience? Do *you* believe she was directing it at you personally, rather than as a footnote to her disgust with our project? "Harassment". Christ. If this sort of unconnected writing is "harassment", I harassed the Prime Minister three times this afternoon.
Should her self-published website have been removed as a result, or should she have been "rewarded" by adding more links to it?
Ah, yes, an entirely irrelevant nonsequitur.