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I made my name and my information publically viewable because I don't believe that these people can actually hurt me in any concrete way. Maybe that was naive but I still can't think of how. They can be annoying and harassing, but if I don't let it get to me, it won't. Part of administrative responsibility is having the force of will to brush aside the people who don't deserve the recognition that giving a damn about them or what they do gives them.
Ryan
Ryan,
Harassment and stalking are crimes for a reason. Though you probably don't mean to be dismissive of victims of these crimes, you come across that way when you say that you "don't let it get to you". The psychological trauma from harassment and stalking is real. Wikipedia needs to do a better job identifying the people that have harmed by this abuse and supporting them through the experience. This is a wise course of action for many reasons.
Sydney
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poore5@adelphia.net stated for the record:
Harassment and stalking are crimes for a reason. Though you probably don't mean to be dismissive of victims of these crimes, you come across that way when you say that you "don't let it get to you". The psychological trauma from harassment and stalking is real. Wikipedia needs to do a better job identifying the people that have harmed by this abuse and supporting them through the experience. This is a wise course of action for many reasons.
Sydney
Who is this "Wikipedia" who needs to do these things? How does he or she go about "identifying the people that have harmed"? What qualifications does he or she have to "support them through the experience"?
If my family or I were the victim of a crime, I would not welcome a miscellaneous bunch of inexperienced and ill-informed volunteers from all over the world trying to "identify" and "support" me. The weight of "IANAL" disclaimers alone would crash my server.
Amateurs writing an encyclopedia is one thing. Amateurs trying to fix the lives of strangers is quite another.
- -- Sean Barrett | Portions of this message were sean@epoptic.com | composed using a computer.
FWIW (and I agree with Sean that, were I involved in a situation à la Phil's, I'd not want my fellow Wikipedians to attempt to insinuate themselves into my life; I imagine that most are similarly disposed), there is a profound difference, at least in the United States, between that which inflicts emotional distress and that which is criminally prosecutable as stalking/harassment (as well, for reasons of, you know, free speech, there ought to be). The psychological trauma of certain forms of harassment may be real, but not all of those forms of harassment are criminally proscribed (or even civilly actionable), and there is nothing at all wrong, IMHO, with our telling contributors who are disinclined to endure "harassment" that perhaps they ought to edit elsewhere; even as the project might lose certain valuable users, the loss of the disruption concomitant to those users and their expressions of woe over harassment would likely outweigh the former (pace Phil, Wikipedia isn't obligating users to endure harassment; at worst, we are saying that one may edit Wikipedia and open himself to harassment or elect not to edit and forgo harassment; I'm not at all uncomfortable with that). In any event, as to the meta-question, I can't abide the suggestion that Brandt has done anything morally wrong; if he is able to coerce Wikipedians into arguing for the deletion of his article, he ought to essay such coercion. In Phil's case, his quarrel ought to be with law enforcement, who may have violated his civil rights (or who, in any event, surely acted untowardly and ought to be reprimanded, even as there may be no legal means by which to compel such reprimanding), not with Brandt, et al., who acted simply to disseminate quasi-public information. The question, of course, is whether the project ought to subjugate encyclopedic concerns to (at best) tangentially encyclopedic concerns. We must weigh, I think, the potential loss of editors/sysops to the potential loss of encyclopedic content, and I think we must err on the side of preserving encyclopedic content. As I noted at [[Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 May 10#Template:HurricaneWarning]], the loss of a few readers--or even excellent contributors--is likely to have only a de minimis deleterious effect on the project. I am eminently confident that, even as longtime editors might be intimated off-wiki, other users will arrive to fill the vacated roles. Many, in other contexts (e.g., userbox debates), often note that the community aspect of our project exists only to further encyclopedic goals; we ought not to forget that. Just as we're not (or shouldn't be) concerned with the external consequences of our editing (we are, after all, disinterested encyclopedists, not harm-limiting journalists), so too ought not we to be concerned for the extra-Wiki harms that befall individual contributors, until the loss of contributors becomes so great that the project cannot survive; I do not believe our loss will ever reach that level.
Cordially,
Joe Hiegel [[User:Jahiegel]]
poore5@adelphia.net wrote:
I made my name and my information publically viewable because I don't believe that these people can actually hurt me in any concrete way. Maybe that was naive but I still can't think of how. They can be annoying and harassing, but if I don't let it get to me, it won't. Part of administrative responsibility is having the force of will to brush aside the people who don't deserve the recognition that giving a damn about them or what they do gives them.
Ryan
Ryan,
Harassment and stalking are crimes for a reason. Though you probably don't mean to be dismissive of victims of these crimes, you come across that way when you say that you "don't let it get to you". The psychological trauma from harassment and stalking is real. Wikipedia needs to do a better job identifying the people that have harmed by this abuse and supporting them through the experience. This is a wise course of action for many reasons.
Sydney
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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