On 6/11/06, Joe Anderson computerjoe.mailinglist@googlemail.com wrote:

Surely is Brandt comitting a criminal offense?

Like what? Most of the information was publicaly availible any way.

I think the article should be deleted, as articles are often deleted after the request of the subject.

I don't.

On 6/12/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

In some places he could be charged with obstructing justice for filing false police reports.

Ec

I doubt it was him who filed the report.

On 6/11/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:

Of course, you have to get the police to tell you (or your attorney) the details of the filed report to know which case it was...

Florida has some pretty generous Sunshine Laws covering what's available to the general public. The police report is a public record, so that should be easy enough to get. I got the university cops to fax me one once. IIRC, the incident began as a result of an email, and that email, since it was (presumably) sent to a state employee at a work email address, is a public record too.

Joe Anderson wrote:

Surely is Brandt comitting a criminal offense?

I think the article should be deleted, as articles are often deleted after the request of the subject.

I think deleting the article would be bad. Firstly, I believe we only delete articles on request of the subject when that request causes us to take a hard look at it and realize that it should be deleted _anyway._ An awful lot of stuff on Wikipedia needs to get done but doesn't until someone draws attention to it. But secondly and more importantly, I'm sure a lot of the loonie trolls on Wikipedia know of Brandt's site and can easily get a hold of copies of it before it goes down. They'd know afterwards that all they have to do to win their own personal wars would be to put up a mirror and make the same deal.

If the problem is that admins didn't know the risks they took by becoming admins, how about updating the pages about adminship to discuss this particular possibility? Any admins who became admins before this incident can always request de-adminship if they don't think the risk is worth it any more.

On 6/11/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:

On Jun 11, 2006, at 1:38 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

...

See also Terrorists#negotiating with

I agree. And I made that decision for myself when I switched to using my real name on Wikipedia.

But that's not a decision Wikipedia has the right to make for me. It is not a government, and I am not its citizen.

But it will only make things worse, though. Brandt is neither particularly well-connected nor particularly unique in his talents, such as they are; and I have little doubt that secondary copies of the Hivemind pages exist. What you're proposing is open season on blackmailing Wikipedia -- whether to obtain deletion or (even worse!) actual changes to articles -- by anyone who can threaten to put up admins' personal information.

On 6/11/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:

On Jun 11, 2006, at 1:38 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

...

See also Terrorists#negotiating with

I agree. And I made that decision for myself when I switched to using my real name on Wikipedia.

But that's not a decision Wikipedia has the right to make for me. It is not a government, and I am not its citizen.

No admin was forced to sign up, either. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation aren't responsible for the actions of crackpots like Brandt. He's responsible. If you want the Hivemind page taken down, he's the guy you should be going after.

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

I respectfully disagree. What happened to Phil shouldn't come with the territory of being an admin on a website.

I sympathize with Phil, I really do, but the thing is that the reason governments never negotiate with terrorists isn't of some abstract philosophical reason, it's because it doesn't work.

Suppose Brandt took down his Hive Mind page in return for us deleting the article. Do you think that he would stop posting stuff at wikipedia review? Do you think he would stop investigating admins and inciting other people to harass them? I doubt it.

Even if we could somehow stop Brandt (which I think is HIGHLY doubtful, he won't change his mind and he won't change the subject, if you know what I mean), pulling down his page will only serve as an invite for the next guy. And the next guy. And the next guy.

This would simply not work.

--Oskar

On 6/11/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

No good, compared to the real enemies of free expression, Daniel Brandt is just a nuisance. Some things just come with the territory.

Fred

On Jun 11, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Phil Sandifer wrote:

...

Daniel Brandt is a notable public figure. By all rights, he should have an article in Wikipedia. And the article we have on him is a good one.

We should also, after contacting Brandt, delete it.

I don't know if you all caught what Brandt and the folks at Wikipedia Review did to me last month. If you didn't, here: http:// www.boingboing.net/2006/05/22/u_florida_cops_ask_f.html Basically, someone on Wikipedia Review contacted my University to express concern that I was a murderer, and I got to deal with a week of being the subject of a police investigation that demanded my fingerprints.

In my case, who I am is public knowledge, and I decided to make it that way. But that's not the case for everyone on Brandt's Hive Mind site. A lot of them are people who didn't accept their RFA expecting that they'd have their names, cities of residence, and photos released. Nobody on Wikipedia, I don't think, realized that accepting adminship meant painting a target on yourself, and, frankly, on your family and friends.

The Foundation doesn't and can't provide admins with protection here. And we need protection. The other admins on this site should not get to go through what I did, or any of the far worse things that can and will eventually happen to us.

But, after thinking about it, its my belief that the Foundation owes its editors and admins the protections it can give. And one of those is offering to delete Brandt's article in exchange for the removal of the Hive Mind site. It's an awful trade. It's a horrible, awful trade. We should hate making it, and we should hate Brandt for forcing us to make it.

But we should make it. Because the consequences of not making it are just too dangerous.

-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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On 6/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:

I sympathize with Phil, I really do, but the thing is that the reason governments never negotiate with terrorists isn't of some abstract philosophical reason, it's because it doesn't work.

Governments negotiate with terrorists all the time, and it often does work, which is why some terrorist campaigns come to an end.

I agree with Phil and I thank him for raising the issue. I deleted Brandt's article back in October, when it was just Brandt and myself who were writing it and he asked for it to be taken down. It would likely have stayed deleted if he hadn't talked about it, but he posted about it on a blog and so of course the blog owner recreated it.

Even after the Siegenthaler affair, Brandt is still only borderline notable. I created the stub on him only because he'd been used as a source in an article, and his name came up as a red link, so rather than delete the red link, I created a stub. There are very few reliable third-party sources on him. In such a borderline case, if the subject doesn't want the page to exist, there's no harm in taking it down.

Wikipedia is just a website, as important as it is to the people who read and write it. It isn't worth a single human life. My fear is that someone is going to lose their livelihood, or be physically hurt or worse, and where any of these things is a real possibility, we have to be responsible. The publish-and-be-damned attitude is inappropriate.

We have admins who are teenagers, single women living alone, admins in sensitive professional positions, admins with young children. Some of the people who have already been harassed have been contacted at home and at their work place, and their employers and parents have been harassed too. We shouldn't wait until someone is physically stalked or assaulted.

In my view, we should ask Brandt to delete the hive mind pages, and undertake not to recreate them or assist anyone else in doing so, and then we should delete his article and keep it that way.

Sarah

On 6/11/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:

I know.

Better that than someone dead. At least, someone who didn't know the risk when they did it, and didn't sign up for this.

-Phil

Ok so we take down the article on Brandt. Amorrow decides to use the same tactic in order to try to get himself unblocked. Doesn't change the risk of people getting hurt. In fact it ups it becuase more people will use the tactic the information will become more widly spread and some of those useing it will decide to cut out the middle man. The tactic must be seen to fail.

I think his point is that even if we shut down this page, there will come a new one, and that new one will contain just as damaging information, and what happened to you will happen to someone else. Wikipedia is too famous and too contentious, this stuff will never stop no matter how many people we make deals with and how many sites are shut down.

Yes. We also need to come up with longer term solutions to protect our users. I just started a thread on that too. :)

-Phil

On 6/11/06, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com wrote:

Do you ever draw the line anywhere? Would you tell us to comply with the demand "I will publish the home addresses of a handful of your administrators unless you take down all of Wikipedia and swear never to attempt to build a free encyclopedia ever again"?

Yes, we would draw the line somewhere, but we don't have to be slaves to slippery slope arguments. The current situation is that we're discussing the deletion of a page about a borderline-notable figure who has requested the deletion. We don't have to turn everything into a matter of principle. Rather, we should do what's good in a practical sense for Wikipedia and its editors and admins.

We've deleted or blanked other pages that subjects haven't wanted. It's getting to the point where we're digging our heels in with Brandt because we don't want to be the victims of extortion, and while that's an admirable principle, it leaves the two sides with locked horns and no solution.

Sarah

On 6/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:

The thing is it's not just a matter of principle. We do this because if we give in more and more people will do exactly the same thing. And, as I've said, Daniel Brandt is a fanatic, he won't ever stop, even if he wins this battle. We have to be utalitarian here, we have to take the route where we get the least amount of trouble. We do that by not giving in.

Being utilitarian is notoriously difficult, because how many of the foreseeable consequences do you factor in? If you want to be rigorously consequentialist, factor in the serious physical assault (or worse) of an admin, or an admin's kids.

We have already deleted or blanked pages that the subjects haven't wanted, so tell me: what is so different about Daniel Brandt that we absolutely refuse to do it for him, despite the chaos it has caused? (And if you say it's in part because of the chaos it has caused, that confirms that we're simply digging our heels in, which is understandable but irrational.)

Sarah

On 6/11/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:

We have already deleted or blanked pages that the subjects haven't wanted,

Which cases are you thinking about? I'm aware of the [[Brian Peppers]] case, which was a Jimbo Wales decision and which concerned basic matters of human dignity. Other cases of actual articles being deleted because of the subject's complaints would be interesting to document, so we can try to establish reasonable and consistent policy in those matters.

I think in cases of borderline notability, the subject's desire not to be included should indeed be factored into a decision. But I already found Brandt pretty clearly notable before this whole mess (I have been aware of his websites, NameBase and Google Watch, and some of his other online activities for some time), and even more so now that his latest crusade has received international press coverage. IMHO his case is not borderline, and deleting the article now would establish the wrong principle.

Erik

On 11/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/11/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:

...

We have already deleted or blanked pages that the subjects haven't wanted,

Which cases are you thinking about? I'm aware of the [[Brian Peppers]] case, which was a Jimbo Wales decision and which concerned basic matters of human dignity. Other cases of actual articles being deleted because of the subject's complaints would be interesting to document, so we can try to establish reasonable and consistent policy in those matters.

I will not name names (mainly since I can't remember any), but a number of "articles" have been deleted after the subject wrote to us and asked - I've done a couple. But they weren't deleted just because they asked - they were deleted because our policies said we probably ought to.

Pages created solely to disparage the subject are common - and, remember, there's no notability test there; if [[George W. Bush]] was created with one revision saying "he's a fascist!" we could speedy it. Articles which aren't disparaging but are about someone who themself freely claims to be insignificant - they're not important, they're not a public figure, why argue the toss just to keep an article no-one will ever read?

It's just a lot easier to do this when someone's been so kind as to point the article out for us, when it slipped past new-pages patrollers, rather than wait for someone else to stumble across it and suggest deletion. The community does have - not in this case, particularly, but generally speaking - an overly "censorship! no!" reaction to "could you please get rid of this trivial article?", even in cases where the request is honest, well-meant, and polite. We should really work on that.

Andrew Gray wrote:

It's just a lot easier to do this when someone's been so kind as to point the article out for us, when it slipped past new-pages patrollers, rather than wait for someone else to stumble across it and suggest deletion. The community does have - not in this case, particularly, but generally speaking - an overly "censorship! no!" reaction to "could you please get rid of this trivial article?", even in cases where the request is honest, well-meant, and polite. We should really work on that.

Wouldn't it be easier to mark it for speedy-deletion and see what happens instead of outright deleting upon request? If indeed the case is as obvious as you say, then it should be taken care of by the speedy-deletion category cleanup crew in relatively short order, which will in some sense ratify the decision to delete it by at least one other person. That's normally what I do in all but the most obvious cases.

-Mark

On 6/11/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:

...

The thing is it's not just a matter of principle. We do this because if we give in more and more people will do exactly the same thing. And, as I've said, Daniel Brandt is a fanatic, he won't ever stop, even if he wins this battle. We have to be utalitarian here, we have to take the route where we get the least amount of trouble. We do that by not giving in.

Being utilitarian is notoriously difficult, because how many of the foreseeable consequences do you factor in? If you want to be rigorously consequentialist, factor in the serious physical assault (or worse) of an admin, or an admin's kids.

I see your point, I really do. However, you are being as just as hypothetical as I am, since there has been (so far, knock wood) no serious physical assaults on an admin or (the horror!) their kids. And even assuming that we do remove the article and Daniel Brandt climbes back into the lair he came from, there is nothing that says that it wouldn't happen in the future. Infact I'd say that it would become more likely that something like what you describe happends in the future, because if we give in to Brandt, people will see it works, and they will emulate him, I guarantee it.

We have already deleted or blanked pages that the subjects haven't wanted, so tell me: what is so different about Daniel Brandt that we absolutely refuse to do it for him, despite the chaos it has caused? (And if you say it's in part because of the chaos it has caused, that confirms that we're simply digging our heels in, which is understandable but irrational.)

Sarah

I haven't been party too any other decision about removing an article based on the users wishes, and so I can't comment on any other case (unless you are talking about WP:OFFICE, which is another thing altogether). Theoretically I suppose that if an article on a person is barely notable (ie. an AFD could go either way), we can allow some leeway. However, when it comes to people who clearly should be in the encyclopedia (and Daniel Brandt should, as proven by a number of AFDs and even admitted to by Phil himself) we should absolutly not give in to them.

Thought experiment: Imagine if Brad Pitt started piling on hate on wikipedia. I mean, he trashes it in interviews, he targets specific admins, he generally behaves much like Daniel Brandt. He says he will stop if we delete his article. This is 1000x more destructive to wikipedia and it's users than anything Daniel Brandt could muster. Should we delete it? I think all of us agrees that we shouldn't. It would be insane for a modern encyclopedia not to have an article on Brad Pitt.

I realise this is kind of a silly example but you get my point. Also, you mention that Daniel Brandt might be "special", and that the reason we don't nuke it is because we are irrationally stubborn (forgive me for putting words in your mouth, I assume that was what you meant?) Well, you're right about one thing, this is a special case. We can't ever delete [[Daniel Brandt]] because he says so because it would mean enourmous trouble for the encyclopedia, much more so than almost any other article. It's something we simply CANNOT do.

In summary, this is my argument. There are two ways to go here:

1)We delete the article. 2)We keep the article.

Pros of 1) * Daniel Brandt might stop being an ass.

Cons of 1) * In all likelyhood, this won't even slow Brandt down. * Other people see that what Brandt is doing is working, and they will emulate him. Many more "Hive mind" sites will spring up, and offsite harrasment will in the long term probably increase, thus putting our admins in even more peril.

Pros of 2) * People will not start to emulate Daniel Brandt * We don't compromise our principles. * We have a more complete encyclopedia (atmittedly a pretty bad argument, but still)

Cons of 2) * Daniel Brandt will certainly continue.

In summary, 1 brings only Very, Very Bad Things, and nothing good. 2 doesn't bring anything bad either, but atleast it doesn't cause as much harm.

--Oskar

On Jun 11, 2006, at 4:44 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

1)We delete the article. 2)We keep the article.

Pros of 1)

• Daniel Brandt might stop being an ass.

Well, I was suggesting we confirm that he'd stop before we did it, to clarify.

-Phil

Phil Sandifer wrote:

On Jun 11, 2006, at 4:44 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

...

1)We delete the article. Pros of 1)

• Daniel Brandt might stop being an ass.

Well, I was suggesting we confirm that he'd stop before we did it, to clarify.

I for one would love to see the magic peanut which would guarantee that his promises would stick.

Given his current _modus operandi_, why ever would you believe him if he said that he would stop?

How ever would you confirm likewise that nobody would seek to emulate him? How would you check that he was not passing on his information, sources and methods to some other nut-job who would turn out ten times as pernicious? Can you imagine an organisation with already-proven willingness to kill, like some of those anti-abortion activists you have in the USA? Would you like them to get the idea that they could "control the content of Wikipedia"?

HTH HAND

On 6/11/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:

... I didn't follow the matter closely but the most recent issue seems to have been a matter of misleading the police into questioning someone in an effort to cause trouble with that person's employer. That's bad, of course, but a far cry from threats of violence.

Bryan, the point is that there are a lot of nutters out there, and admins have already been tracked down and had their parents and employers contacted, and I believe, violence has been hinted at, if not actually threatened. It's as well to think about solutions now, and not wait until the situation deteriorates.

Sarah

On Jun 11, 2006, at 11:34 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

There certainly are a lot of nutters out there. Letting them know that threatening us will get them anything they want will place our admins in far more frightening danger than anything they face today. All you have to do is look up someone's address to get Wikipedia to roll over and beg? They'll be on us in swarms.

The "don't negotiate with terrorists" policy makes sense. But it assumes some things. Specifically, it assumes a general means and policy of defense. "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" makes sense because of the millions for defense. Yes, the US doesn't negotiate with terrorists. It also invades their countries and murders them.

Wikipedia offers no defense, and no protection. And users who have had nothing to do with Daniel Brandt are put in danger. I had never edited his article and had never spoken with him when he began contemplating making me leave my PhD program. But I became a target. I was and am powerless to stop being a target. So are about 200 other people. Including, let's note, a bunch of teenagers. And do you really think most of us, when we made our first edit or accepted our RFA, thought we were getting into this?

If Wikipedia is adopting a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, fine. But if it won't protect us that way, it has moral obligation to protect us some other way. A negative answer doesn't cut it here. If we're not negotiating with Brandt to get rid of Hive Mind, what are we doing? Because "nothing" isn't an acceptable answer.

-Phil

Phil Sandifer wrote:

Wikipedia offers no defense, and no protection. And users who have had nothing to do with Daniel Brandt are put in danger. I had never edited his article and had never spoken with him when he began contemplating making me leave my PhD program. But I became a target. I was and am powerless to stop being a target. So are about 200 other people. Including, let's note, a bunch of teenagers. And do you really think most of us, when we made our first edit or accepted our RFA, thought we were getting into this?

So how is working on WP fundamentally different from selling items on eBay, getting into arguments on Usenet, or sending patches to a Linux mailing list? You play around on the net, you're going to be visible to the whole world, for better or worse. The archives still record various stupid things I wrote in public over two decades ago, they are never going away.

We've got all these editors who get all kinds of egoboo from the credit for working on a top-20 website, and who apparently don't reflect that it means they're being scrutinized by that many millions of eyeballs, not all of them friendly. WP is a serious endeavour, not a toy - for each WP edit, I consider whether I would be willing to show it to a family member, discuss it in a job interview, etc. If editors aren't thinking about all this, perhaps the login creation page needs to explain it better.

(I thought teenagers couldn't edit without parental approval anyway, since they don't have legal standing to agree to GFDL.)

Stan

Phil Sandifer wrote:

On Jun 12, 2006, at 12:40 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:

...

So how is working on WP fundamentally different from selling items on eBay, getting into arguments on Usenet, or sending patches to a Linux mailing list? You play around on the net, you're going to be visible to the whole world, for better or worse. The archives still record various stupid things I wrote in public over two decades ago, they are never going away.

Or for that matter, from posting on MySpace.

Which, of course, is working overtime to protect its members from getting killed. Similarly, eBay offers an extensive array of protections to its users.

And these are profitmaking ventures with budgets many orders of magnitude greater than WP. Scaling down to WP size will net you maybe 200USD/year for a protection fund, not much you can do with that.

...

We've got all these editors who get all kinds of egoboo from the credit for working on a top-20 website, and who apparently don't reflect that it means they're being scrutinized by that many millions of eyeballs, not all of them friendly. WP is a serious endeavour, not a toy - for each WP edit, I consider whether I would be willing to show it to a family member, discuss it in a job interview, etc. If editors aren't thinking about all this, perhaps the login creation page needs to explain it better.

And? I do that with everything I post on the Internet. Only problem is, it's tough to think "What is a psychopath going to think of this?"

Psychopaths have been on the net from the beginning, I've run into a few. You want to play on the bigtime websites, you're signing up for bigger risks.

...

(I thought teenagers couldn't edit without parental approval anyway, since they don't have legal standing to agree to GFDL.)

We have teenage admins who I'm pretty sure we did not get permission slips from.

We should be identifying and booting all underage editors (admin status is irrelevant, from legal pov) until their parents have been informed of the risks and give permission.

Stan

Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

On 6/12/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:

...

We should be identifying and booting all underage editors (admin status is irrelevant, from legal pov) until their parents have been informed of the risks and give permission.

Stan

You do realise that we currently have a great arbitrator who is 17, and we have a bureocrat who was elected when he was 13 (I think it was 13 at least).

Booting underage users is not an option, because frankly, some of them rule.

--Oskar

Yes, exactly. Nevertheless, Stan's point regarding legal standing *is* a good one...perhaps we make a warning during registration clear that minors must have parental approval before editing? (Although for anons, it gets tricky...)

As a 16-year-old, though, I probably wouldn't take kindly to editing if I had to run through tonnes of red tape just to make some changes, especially when I began editing anonymously at 13. (And just for the record, my parents are aware of my activities on Wikipedia, and not only approve but encourage them. :p)

John

On 6/12/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:

Such is life. IMHO, Wikipedia could still do a better job in helping its contributors protect their identities. Publishing "anonymous" contributors IP numbers should have been fixed a long time ago. Reminding users of the carelessness of putting personal information on Wikipedia pages is another no-brainer. Encouraging users *not* to reveal their real identity by using their real name as their Wikipedia account name. Actually punish contributors who, without permission, publishes personal details about another contributor. I don't know, people are responsible for their own actions. But things could still be improved.

I agree. I, for one, find it very frustrating when I accidentally make a contribution without being logged in (happens sometimes) and have my IP published, and just hope that no one can make the connection back to me.

Steve

On 6/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

...

I agree. I, for one, find it very frustrating when I accidentally make a contribution without being logged in (happens sometimes) and have my IP published, and just hope that no one can make the connection back to me.

Steve

Sop useing monobook. that way you will know when you are not loged in. Either that ore make some very clear change to monobook.

-- geni

If one were of the industrious sort, one could concievably program a simple Greasemonkey script that would not let one edit if one weren't logged in.

--Oskar

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but Brandt seems disinclined to acquiesce to our request:

"Your question is so hypothetical that it boggles my mind, and I cannot even think about an answer at this point. It is true that last December I took down Hivemind. I'd still be inclined to do that, because now I'm more interested in Hive2 and the IRC search engine. In another six months, who knows what I'll be doing on Wikipedia-Watch?" (http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=2010)

What exactly is the point of negotiating with him to take down the original Hivemind page if he plans to continue with his *other* activities?

On 6/12/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:

Such is life. IMHO, Wikipedia could still do a better job in helping its contributors protect their identities. Publishing "anonymous" contributors IP numbers should have been fixed a long time ago. Reminding users of the carelessness of putting personal information on Wikipedia pages is another no-brainer. Encouraging users *not* to reveal their real identity by using their real name as their Wikipedia account name. Actually punish contributors who, without permission, publishes personal details about another contributor. I don't know, people are responsible for their own actions. But things could still be improved.

I know that people being pseudonymous is currently the rage, but this set of ideas seems a bit insane.

My first active online postings are now old enough to drink in the US. During that entire time, I've had my real name up attached to my handles from the first discussions, and been using my real name as my handle for the last 18 years except in one chat program which has been running for 20 years and everyone knows everyone else in real life anyways. I have had exactly four significant negative encounters in that time; in none of those cases was my identity being public a significant problem.

Brandt has power over people because they're afraid of being "outed". If you're never "in the closet" as it were, that threat has no power.

If your relationship with your workplace is negative enough that your hobby activities being disclosed might cause you grief, then that's a problem with your workplace. Though I don't discuss WP in detail with my employers, I have fought for PR and online community activities to be part of my job description, and won.

You may not all be in the same position, but you should be.

If you chose to remain behind a pseudonym, I won't think less of you for it. I think WP would benefit if more people used their real names, because I think it makes people think in a more personally accountable manner and helps reassure critics that WP's editors are responsible. And help render Brandt irrelevant.

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Phil Sandifer stated for the record:

If Wikipedia is adopting a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, fine. But if it won't protect us that way, it has moral obligation to protect us some other way. A negative answer doesn't cut it here. If we're not negotiating with Brandt to get rid of Hive Mind, what are we doing? Because "nothing" isn't an acceptable answer.

-Phil

"It has a moral obligation." How can an "it" have a moral obligation? Only people have morals. Who -- name a person, please -- has incurred this moral obligation? How did he or she incur this obligation? Did he or she volunteer for this obligation?

- -- Sean Barrett | Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the sean@epoptic.com | moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing | honor. It's been far too long. --Gene Cernan

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Sarah stated for the record:

On 6/11/06, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com wrote:

...

Do you ever draw the line anywhere? Would you tell us to comply with the demand "I will publish the home addresses of a handful of your administrators unless you take down all of Wikipedia and swear never to attempt to build a free encyclopedia ever again"?

Yes, we would draw the line somewhere, but we don't have to be slaves to slippery slope arguments. The current situation is that we're discussing the deletion of a page about a borderline-notable figure who has requested the deletion. We don't have to turn everything into a matter of principle. Rather, we should do what's good in a practical sense for Wikipedia and its editors and admins.

We've deleted or blanked other pages that subjects haven't wanted. It's getting to the point where we're digging our heels in with Brandt because we don't want to be the victims of extortion, and while that's an admirable principle, it leaves the two sides with locked horns and no solution.

Sarah

Oh, I know what you mean. I also find that principles can be extremely annoying. Life is so much easier if one ignores them when they get inconvenient.

- -- Sean Barrett | Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the sean@epoptic.com | moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing | honor. It's been far too long. --Gene Cernan

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Sarah stated for the record:

On 6/11/06, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com wrote:

...

Oh, I know what you mean. I also find that principles can be extremely annoying. Life is so much easier if one ignores them when they get inconvenient.

It's not that principles should be ignored. It's that they need to be formulated and prioritized carefully. If the British government had stuck to the principle "never negotiate with terrorists," the Provisional IRA would still be blowing people up, but it was decided instead that the principle of saving lives was more important, and the gamble paid off.

Sean, if someone points a gun at your head and asks for your wallet, you don't think: "If I give in, they'll just move on and do this to someone else." No, you hand over your wallet, because you value your life.

Sarah

Sarah, when someone pointed a gun at my head, what I thought was "if I give in, he'll just do it to my wife and daughter." No, I did not hand over my wallet, because I value their lives.

If we give in to Brandt's extortion, we are actively worsening the danger to everyone on this site, because we will have demonstrated what it takes to control us. The next guy (and there will be one and more than one) will do his own research and make his own demands. Why shouldn't he? It works! Then one of the many times that personal data are published, someone is going to act on that data. Brandt is not the only evil person in the world.

What you assumed was a "slippery slope" hypothetical was nothing of the kind. There are those who think Wikipedia should not exist. Delete Brandt's article, and within days we will receive the demand "shut down completely or I will publish your personal data."

- -- Sean Barrett | Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the sean@epoptic.com | moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing | honor. It's been far too long. --Gene Cernan

On 6/11/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:

I suspect that we would have received this already if someone were going to do that.

They might not have known what sort of personal data we were sensitive about before. Now, they would; rather than going out and gathering something on their own, they could simply threaten to re-publish Brandt's information.

On 6/12/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:

It's probably too late to help the people already harmed by Brandt. The point would be to persuade him not to collect information on anyone else.

It is not worth doing that persuading everyone else that it is worthwhile to collect that kind of information