On Saturday 15 February 2003 01:34 pm, wikien-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:

I agree with Daniel on this one. We should have acted faster. As for me, when I saw it, it was already a few hours old and I assumed that something had been done, or it was too late. In retrospect, I would have acted differently.

So, what's the proper course of action in a case like this? I mean, who should one call? The police in that town?

--Jimbo

Well in this case we did exactly the right thing but about two hours later than we should have. Like I said before, when we see something that looks like a suicide letter it is our moral obligation to track down the IP and inform the local authorities - we shouldn't waste much time at all debating whether or not the thing is legit (finding that out is the job of the cops).

Everying crystallized once I asked if somebody had called the cops. So asking this question on the relevant talk page and then having a volunteer call the correct authorities is probably the best route. I made the mistake of emailing the school's webmaster (of all people) as my first action - which was dumb since it was 2 AM in Connecticut at the time.

Hm. This might be one reason to forget my complex "hide the IP from sysops but allow them to block logged-in users" idea. It might be best to simply make this information readily available to sysops for cases like this (mouse-over text with the IP address is all that would be needed).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) WikiKarma Added a bunch of events to [[February 8]]; updated all the year pages and many of the other articles linked from that page.