From: Ben Emmel <bratsche1@gmail.com http://us.f319.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=bratsche1@gmail.com&YY=65890&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b>:

Has anyone tried simply communicating with him civilly? One would think that we could work out some compromise with his HiveMind website and also our content. I find it hard to believe that a man who works hard to prevent "privacy violations" would commit such a large one as posting the private details of all 650+ admins online.

Do you want to try? I don't mean that in a snarky way, but a number of people would be thankful if someone could get through to him. I believe a number of previous attempts have been made. Linuxbreak talked to him on the phone at length, and Jimbo even offered to fly out to him and talk to him in person.

The problem is that his demands change depending on when you talk to him and involve a lot of things that we really can't compromise on. They've included deleting the article altogehter, prior notification if an article is posted about him, removing criticism and links to criticism of him, and locking the article to prevent further edits. Perhaps we can get a compromise if someone can just nail him down to something that would be acceptable to our principles and policies.

While LB reports that he seemed a reasonable fellow on the phone, I don't think a reasonable guy compiles a hit list of his enemies and uses it to attempt blackmail them into doing what he wants, a bold new experiment in Wiki vandalism which we don't seem to be terribly concerned about. I'd just say delete the thing altogether and save the fuss, but he seems to made himself all the more notable by getting a tremendous amount of press for various things since the article was created.