On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
As some of you know by now, Daniel Brandt recently published a list of all my friends on Facebook. The timing strongly implies he did so in response to my decision to step forward about having been the target of violent threats.
Wouldn't be the first time he's enabled stalking or harassment, whether intentionally or not.
On a more practical and serious level, one thing that could have helped in
David Shankbone's situation is if there were a global block feature, and perhaps a global protect for user pages. David's stalker followed him across dozens of projects. One thing that often happens with such people is that they test boundaries and become aggressive when they discover that boundaries are weak or absent. By erecting better boundaries onsite we improve the chances that a problem will end swiftly.
I rather appreciate that suggestion -- it's both an immediate problem and something we can hopefully fix within our current means. The global sysop proposal on meta might be relevant, here. I'll also mention that IRC has proven very useful to me in dealing with cross-wiki problems in real time, before.
Off-site and especially real world harassment and stalking are nothing short of heinous. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for most of us to help, once things go outside the WMF-sphere or offline altogether. That's a key topic: what can we do, as individual users and as a community?
As a cultural matter, we can and should encourage people to be very careful about what they reveal online. We should be supportive when someone is victimized. Beyond that, I hate to admit that I feel somewhat helpless.