On 29 Nov 2007 at 11:14:18 -0500, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
Your summary of the discussion regarding this seems reasonable, but unfortunately doesn't jibe with the facts. For days now several individuals have been insisting that the cyberstalking list was used to discuss and co-ordinate a block of !!, along with various other wild accusations (e.g. "stealth canvassing", whatever that means).
The idea that something along the lines of canvassing occurs on that list is far from being farfetched. In fact, even if the people on that list are careful to avoid overt canvassing (blatantly telling people to vote a certain way in a certain place), there's a certain amount of almost inevitable, even if not necessarily intentional, vote stacking that is likely to result from the activity on the list. Given that the list is composed of like-minded individuals (at least on certain topics relating to their conception of "cyberstalking" and "harassment"), the mere mention on the list (even in a totally neutral way) of things like "A discussion just started on AN/I about the block of User:SomeDumbTroll", or "A straw poll is in progress over a new policy on attack-site links" is likely to bring a number of people all on the same side of the issue. Given that, in fact, there have been a number of instances of seeming gangups of this nature, and that the infamous Durova message actually referred to the "enemy" not knowing about the list in the context of linking to a comment by a user expressing concern that one such gangup might have been organized off-wiki, this is not an empty concern.
When other sites and forums do very similar things -- mention the existence of a Wikipedia discussion / vote / etc. to an audience of like-minded individuals, such as talking about an AFD on a webcomic article on a forum of fans of webcomics -- this brings about accusations of canvassing. The same seems to be true of that list.
If a bunch of people who feel they are being harassed and stalked online want to have an online group therapy session about it, that's their right. But if they start acting as a pressure group to get Wikipedia policy in their direction, one can expect that those of differing viewpoints will have some objection to their activity.