Joseph Hiegel: It'd really help if your words weren't in one indigestible lump of a paragraph (and without linebreaks). Makes it hard to comprehend, and all that.
I'd agree that the last thing I'd want is a crowd of well-meaning Wikipedians trying to help me without waiting for my saying I needed help or telling them how. There are a lot of circumstances where unguided 'help' would harm. Wikipedians should refrain from knee-jerk complaining to anyone (e.g. an employer) seen to be giving a Wikipedian trouble - it might not be in that Wikipedian's best interests.
Also agreed that there are a lot of circumstances where someone's behaviour is distressing but not criminal (or even civilly actionable). I would, however, argue that we retain the right to consider behaviour morally reprehensible even if totally legal. The law is not designed to be a guide to moral behavior - this neither means that staying on the right side of the law makes you a moral person, nor that we should be persuaded to not criticise someone simply because their actions are legal.
Daniel Brandt's actions, I believe, have been reprehensible in this, as have some others'. It seems likely that most if not all of his actions have been wholly within the law. The one field in which they possibly have not is that he persisted in editing Wikipedia, through sockpuppet accounts, even after being told to leave.
It seems to me that because you see Brandt's actions as wholly legal (probably correctly), you enjoin us to consider them /moral/ - with which I disagree. I don't think we have to consider this a war in which any tactics are fine, so long as they breach no law.
I do agree with you that Wikipedia should not bow to any pressure to 'help' users who have been harrassed by changing content to appease their harassers. Better indeed that we lose contributors than bend in this way.
However, I don't see why the project or its contributors should be constrained from assisting those who are harassed in other ways.
And yes, Phil should be more annoyed at the University's law enforcement, who were quite willing to use a baseless complaint as grounds to harass him. Brandt and those who have worked with him are simply taking advantage of flaws in the way organisations like this handle complaints - that a baseless complaint may be taken seriously and cause someone trouble if the complaint arrives in the hands of someone placed highly enough in the organisation, and the wording of the complaint 'pushes buttons' in regards to issues that may be given undue emphasis.
That doesn't mean that the action of lodging that complaint was anything other than a malicious attempt to get Phil in trouble, and it disturbs me that you consider it moral to do so.
-Matt