---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Durova Date: Mon, May 19, 2008 at 2:12 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Durova's real name To: Anthony wikimail@inbox.org
Thank you for the heads up. Please post this to Wiki-en-I where I no longer subscribe:
This is the second time it's been brought to my attention that Wjhonson has approached third parties regarding this matter. He has never asked me, and if he had I'd have given him a straightforward answer. Now that he's brought the matter to a public forum I'll reply in the same manner.
The reason my name is known elsewhere on the Internet is because people who had an axe to grind outed my identity. I stood up to it. The coercion clause of Wikipedia's banning policy is a direct result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BAN#Coercion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Banning_policy/Archive_2#Coercio... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive...
Now Wjhonson complains that an editor named Eleemosynary was indeffed for posting my name. Well, Eleemosynary wasn't exactly a model Wiki-citizen. Here's the block log:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=User:Eleemosy...
Significant parts of the talk page history itself have been deleted and/or oversighted. The basic chain of events is this:
*Eleemosynary was involved in a bitter onsite dispute about a BLP article. One editor was community banned over the dispute and later another editor was banned at arbitration.
*The editor who was banned during arbitration remained in good standing at another Wikimedia project and I was mentoring him there.
*I noticed that this banned editor had trolled Eleemosynary's user space, so I confronted the banned editor about it and then made Eleemosynary aware that I took the problem seriously.
*Eleemosynary insulted me and posted my real name.
*FT2 oversighted the real name and indeffed Eleemosynary.
*If Eleemosynary had promised not to repeat the mistake, then he or she would have been unblocked quite swiftly. Instead this editor followed up with more insults. Two more administrators stepped in to try to quell the issue (it isn't often that JzG and Swatjester agree on anything, but they did here). Eleemosynary continued to escalate until Swatjester protected the talk page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=&... Not surprisingly, Wjhonson has also been active in the underlying dispute. I'm impartial in that dispute: I endorsed the Wikipedia siteban of the same editor I'm mentoring on Commons, for instance. But I did object to the obvious BLP violations that were occurring on that page. Namely, editors had been attempting to cite non-notable blogs, open edit forums, and copyvio YouTube videos as sources for highly damaging information about the subject. In every instance where I brought these issues to noticeboards for independent review, the responses were solidly in my favor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Sanchez
Per Foundation privacy policy and arbitration precedent, I have never disclosed my real name onsite. The fact that my name is known offsite is irrelevant: plenty of people have been indeffed for revealing names that were known elsewhere on the Internet.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Privacy_policy
Whjonson's recent actions have the appearance forum shopping in attempt to rally political support and to damage my reputation. If he wishes to dispel this appearance he may follow up with a post to that effect and communicate directly with me in the future. Otherwise, if a third instance occurs, his actions will compel me to seek formal remedy. I bear no grudges; just raise your concerns directly.
-Durova
As I suspected, the normal rule to follow when someone won't give specifics about a situation applies here too - the specifics hurt the writer's case and by leaving them out they hope to be more persuasive.
WJhonson, you don't do your argument any favors by doing this. All it does is make people suspect that there's more to the story - which in fact turned out to be the case.
-Matt