On 4/7/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Uh, someone want to fill me in? What happened? Was this on-wiki? Steve in the dark

It's infuriating that people who want nothing more than to build a free-content encyclopedia in relative peace and quiet have to chase their tails in this farcical manner just because some trolling jackass in Chicago announces he's going to top himself. On the other hand, what else can we do? The headlines of "Guy kills himself while eminent Wikipedians did zilch" hardly sound promising. It just infuriates me that Wikipedia can so easily be hijacked for attention-seeking like this.

OK, sure, but when you have community for the sake of community that's the sort of stuff you can expect to put up with. Wikipedia has an encyclopedic purpose distinct from that: we are not supposed to be collection of self-help services, suicide prevention, and social services all rolled into one.

Moreschi wrote: the encyclopedic And for the most part, we're not. But turns out that *you can't escape the community stuff*. Any time you get a bunch of people working together on something, the community aspects are going to surface, whether you want them to or not. You can try to mitigate them, but you can't eliminate them, and if you try too hard, you'll royally piss people off, to everyone's detriment. If you haven't read "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy", do so: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html . _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Not so much. Information is power. Power includes the power to kill. Words and images can result in deaths. See [[Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy]]. So can almost any form of information If wikipedia continues at it's current level of popularity it is likely that something in it will eventually indirectly result in deaths (if it hasn't already). At best we can hope that any deaths will be the result of truths rather than lies.

As the song says, "Always look on the bright side of life." A death in the pursuit of this jihad of truth will earn you the endless ministrations of 100 perpetual virgins. ;-) Ec

As the song says, "Always look on the bright side of life." A death in the pursuit of this jihad of truth will earn you the endless ministrations of 100 perpetual virgins. ;-)

I am still waiting for an administrator to archive the discussion. It is sad that a certain wikipedian can be so messed up and that we let their dirty laundry blow in the wind. Whether or not there was a genuine suicide attempt, it is still apparent that this person has many issues which will not be solved by having us gossip and joke about it.

On 4/7/07, Yonatan Horan <yonatanh(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not so much. Information is power. Power includes the power to kill. Words and images can result in deaths. See [[Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy]]. So can almost any form of information If wikipedia continues at it's current level of popularity it is likely that something in it will eventually indirectly result in deaths (if it hasn't already). At best we can hope that any deaths will be the result of truths rather than lies. -- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

If wikipedia continues at it's current level of popularity it is likely that something in it will eventually indirectly result in deaths (if it hasn't already). At best we can hope that any deaths will be the result of truths rather than lies.

This kind of thing is not specific to Wikipedia. Communities exist on the internet and all such communities can be faced with this. It is the price of having a community at all.