Recently, an anonymous user only writing on talk pages has started attacking me heavily on the Persian Wikipedia (and also a little on the English one). He has also threatened me on the Persian Wikipedia with "I will start a war, both here and on the English Wikipedia. I will also get you kicked out of the Persian Academy" and things like that, and has ridiculed us by saying that blocking his IP address won't stop him, as he is using dynamic addresses. This is some of his more polite wording (in English), where he is calling me a "wild dog":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Roozbeh&diff=519429...
Unfortunately, there is only one other admin on the Persian Wikipedia besides me, I will not have access to the Internet for some time starting this Wednesday, and the process for electing a few new admin won't end until at least two weeks (and there are not so many eligible candidates either).
Any recommendations?
roozbeh
This doesn't seem to be the first time this anon has come up in a dispute - see some of the text at [[Talk:Azerbaijan]], [[Talk:South Azerbaijan]], etc. for details. I'm currently in the process of talking with this user about his apparent dispute and asking him to provide evidence for his claims. In the meantime I suggest you attempt not to, shall we say, "fuel his argument". Hopefully this will not escalate any further than it already has...
~Grunt
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
Recently, an anonymous user only writing on talk pages has started attacking me heavily on the Persian Wikipedia (and also a little on the English one). He has also threatened me on the Persian Wikipedia with "I will start a war, both here and on the English Wikipedia. I will also get you kicked out of the Persian Academy" and things like that, and has ridiculed us by saying that blocking his IP address won't stop him, as he is using dynamic addresses. This is some of his more polite wording (in English), where he is calling me a "wild dog":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Roozbeh&diff=519429...
Unfortunately, there is only one other admin on the Persian Wikipedia besides me, I will not have access to the Internet for some time starting this Wednesday, and the process for electing a few new admin won't end until at least two weeks (and there are not so many eligible candidates either).
Any recommendations?
roozbeh _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 03:28:23 +0000, Steven Melenchuk crazyr2@shaw.ca wrote:
This doesn't seem to be the first time this anon has come up in a dispute - see some of the text at [[Talk:Azerbaijan]], [[Talk:South Azerbaijan]], etc. for details.
This is not the same user. This guys seems to be pro-Persia.
I'm currently in the process of talking with this user about his apparent dispute and asking him to provide evidence for his claims.
In the meantime I suggest you attempt not to, shall we say, "fuel his argument".
I only remove his personal attacks and threats. Will that be considered "fueling"?
Hopefully this will not escalate any further than it already has...
I can only hope.
roozbeh
Blocking is just that, a possibly ineffective remedy should he use a wide range of dynamic addresses. Following dispute resolution you can certainly see him banned and blocked as much as possible, indeed under our personal attacks policy he can be blocked immediately. I gather you don't want to do it yourself, but a new administrator will be elected and all that can be done on that front will probably be done.
Blocking does not address the underlying issue that he can in the policially and religiously charged athmoshere in Iran potentially make good on his threats. This is an issue that needs to be handled through institutions such as the Persian Academy (if indeed you belong to such an organization). Absurd denunciations need to be recognized as such, not taken seriously by those in authority. This attitude takes a while to develop and requires exposure of this sort of thing in public forums.
If indeed you have made edits and expressed opinions which are vulnerable to successful attack by political and religious authorities themselves outsiders such as ourselves can do some good by publicizing the matter and exposing it. This can be small comfort in practical terms.
Fred
From: Roozbeh Pournader roozbeh@gmail.com Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 06:45:01 +0430 To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] personal threats again
Recently, an anonymous user only writing on talk pages has started attacking me heavily on the Persian Wikipedia (and also a little on the English one). He has also threatened me on the Persian Wikipedia with "I will start a war, both here and on the English Wikipedia. I will also get you kicked out of the Persian Academy" and things like that, and has ridiculed us by saying that blocking his IP address won't stop him, as he is using dynamic addresses. This is some of his more polite wording (in English), where he is calling me a "wild dog":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Roozbeh&diff=519429... d=5194027
Unfortunately, there is only one other admin on the Persian Wikipedia besides me, I will not have access to the Internet for some time starting this Wednesday, and the process for electing a few new admin won't end until at least two weeks (and there are not so many eligible candidates either).
Any recommendations?
roozbeh _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 23:37:37 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Blocking is just that, a possibly ineffective remedy should he use a wide range of dynamic addresses. Following dispute resolution you can certainly see him banned and blocked as much as possible, indeed under our personal attacks policy he can be blocked immediately. I gather you don't want to do it yourself, but a new administrator will be elected and all that can be done on that front will probably be done.
I have sometimes done it myself a few times, and the other admin has also done it a few times. But we seem to be in shortage of human time if he continues.
One other question would be "is the personal attacks policy limited to the English Wikipedia?"
Blocking does not address the underlying issue that he can in the policially and religiously charged athmoshere in Iran potentially make good on his threats. This is an issue that needs to be handled through institutions such as the Persian Academy (if indeed you belong to such an organization). Absurd denunciations need to be recognized as such, not taken seriously by those in authority. This attitude takes a while to develop and requires exposure of this sort of thing in public forums.
I don't think he can do much with the Academy, but his threats simply hurt me and possibly also others, they have just resulted in one good contributor saying bye-bye because of "the dirty atmosphere".
(BTW, I'm not a "member" of the Persian Academy. That requires one to be a real expert in the language, which I'm not, but I'm a member of the its Language and Computers council.)
If indeed you have made edits and expressed opinions which are vulnerable to successful attack by political and religious authorities themselves outsiders such as ourselves can do some good by publicizing the matter and exposing it. This can be small comfort in practical terms.
Nothing like this has ever been raised, since I usually stick to facts and try to follow NPOV, but even the writing also about other side's POV is sometimes very offensive to some of the people living or born in this part of the world. On Wikipedia, I've been called a Persian Chauvinist by Pan-Turkists, Anti-Islamic Republic and Anti-Khomeini by a carpet dealer who possibly did business with the Iranian government, pro-Khomeini by a person insisting of inserting some sexual rulings that Ayatollah Khomeini shares with other Shia clerics into the Khomeini article, and finally pro-Islamic Republic, anti-Persian, pro-Turkic, and pro-Arab by this late guy. It seems that they oppose neutrality. That may also be because I work openly on Wikipedia, and don't hide my identity, so they can have a real face to attack.
Anyway, on the English Wikipedia, I would really appreciate if more people can get active on Iran-related articles like [[Persian Gulf]], [[South Azerbaijan]], and [[Ruhollah Khomeini]], so I can take a little rest from being blamed.
roozbeh
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
One other question would be "is the personal attacks policy limited to the English Wikipedia?"
No, it is global. Personal attacks are not helpful in the creation of a high quality encyclopedia and a healthy, caring community.
I don't know if there has been a solution to the lack of sysops in the Persian wikipedia while I was hiding from the hurricane, but if that's a problem I recommend just making a few people sysops on a temporary emergency basis and then let the usual methods be used to ratify.
--Jimbo
On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 08:11:39 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I don't know if there has been a solution to the lack of sysops in the Persian wikipedia while I was hiding from the hurricane, but if that's a problem I recommend just making a few people sysops on a temporary emergency basis and then let the usual methods be used to ratify.
Well, I made one other person a systop, we reverted the attacker's edits many times and blocked random IPs he used for the standard 24 hour period, and the attacker seems to have stopped for almost a day now.
What is still very weird, is that he used IP addresses from many different places, from Thailand to the United States. My question is: how could he?
roozbeh
What is still very weird, is that he used IP addresses from many different places, from Thailand to the United States. My question is: how could he?
This is commonly accomplished by means of proxy servers -- programs running on host machines which allow Internet traffic to be piped through as if the request came from the proxy host, rather than the actual origin. An all-purpose redirect, if you will.
These days, most of the proxies used for this purpose are nothing more than backdoored Windows PCs; desktop computers which have, at some point or another, been compromised by a trojan horse. This is one of the many reasons the use of Microsoft Windows should be considered to be actively harmful -- but now I'm editorializing.
roozbeh
On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 03:08:58PM +0430, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
What is still very weird, is that he used IP addresses from many different places, from Thailand to the United States. My question is: how could he?
By the way this makes him probably a criminal in most civilised countries since breaking into others' machines and using unauthorised resources are crimes in most places. At least you can earn a good jail time doing it in Europe.
Not that it's useful unless he's identified, but maybe good to know.
my 2 cents.
Roozbeh Pournader a écrit:
Recently, an anonymous user only writing on talk pages has started attacking me heavily on the Persian Wikipedia (and also a little on the English one). He has also threatened me on the Persian Wikipedia with "I will start a war, both here and on the English Wikipedia. I will also get you kicked out of the Persian Academy" and things like that, and has ridiculed us by saying that blocking his IP address won't stop him, as he is using dynamic addresses. This is some of his more polite wording (in English), where he is calling me a "wild dog":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Roozbeh&diff=519429...
Unfortunately, there is only one other admin on the Persian Wikipedia besides me, I will not have access to the Internet for some time starting this Wednesday, and the process for electing a few new admin won't end until at least two weeks (and there are not so many eligible candidates either).
Any recommendations?
roozbeh
I am distressed to know that this user has started again. I think it is very important that we take such matters very seriously, and I suggest that you mail us again about that, so that we see what we can do that would be acceptable to you from a personal point of view. I am not sure what is the best way to do this toward the Academy for example.
As for the persian wikipedia itself, I recommand that you take it easy with the election process if there is an emergency. We can very well grant temporary sysophood to any person you think is okay (elections can proceed in parallel in the coming weeks). To have anyone named sysop, if you have no bureaucrat, ask any steward for emergency sysophood. I would recommand firm blocking and immediate deletions of threats. Even if the the ip is changing, perhaps a range block could do the deal.
However, I think your personal safety is more important than threats on the wiki itself.
ant
On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 09:22:35 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I am distressed to know that this user has started again. I think it is very important that we take such matters very seriously, and I suggest that you mail us again about that, so that we see what we can do that would be acceptable to you from a personal point of view.
The person looks to have got a username on the English Wikipedia (User:Amir1), and this is indeed very good news to me. Maybe we can instruct and recruit him after all.
As for the persian wikipedia itself, I recommand that you take it easy with the election process if there is an emergency. We can very well grant temporary sysophood to any person you think is okay (elections can proceed in parallel in the coming weeks). To have anyone named sysop, if you have no bureaucrat, ask any steward for emergency sysophood. I would recommand firm blocking and immediate deletions of threats.
Thank you very much for the recommendation. I am also a bureaucrat on the Persian Wikipedia, so I just turned the other sysop and another user who is still being voted on but has not received any negative vote into bureaucrats, and instructed them what to do.
Even if the the ip is changing, perhaps a range block could do the deal.
Unfortunately the range of IPs is too wide. He may be using different providers.
However, I think your personal safety is more important than threats on the wiki itself.
Well, I don't think he can do much. The threat itself is more scary and hurting than any probably consequences.
roozbeh
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