[Foundation-l] School shooting threats

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
There is not much that we can do that is credible. There are things closer
to home that we do not deal with which is a more credible threat. Problems
with harassment, people leaving our projects because they feel unsafe.
People who take pleasure in outing Wikimedians with name and address. People
who find pleasure in maligning the people of our organisation and do
whatever they can to  make their life miserable.

These nasty activities are happening, they are observable, they are even
punishable under the law. They do not only damage to the people directly
involved, they make some of our best and brightest turn away from their Wiki
activities in fear of being next. These are not theoretical dangers, some of
them are arbcom cases, Some are outside what the arbcom wants to consider.

When you consider the risk of someone actually emptying a magazine of
bullets in a frenzy of despair, it is small, there are few people who can
adequately deal with such cases. This does not mean that we should not pay
attention, We should but we should pay more attention to what is happening
right in front of our face. We should not tolerate the nastiness of certain
people with the argument that they have done some good as well. These two
faced are deliberately maintaining a positive side in order to get away with
their dark side.

If you ask my motivation for this rant, it is seeing people I cherish as the
best and brightest of us  telling me why they are moving away. They often
tell only the people they trust why they are moving away. When I see them
suffer under this barrage of evil it makes me really angry. It is this anger
that makes me speak out.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Threads like the school are playing for the audience. When doing a risk
analysis you will find that

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Voice of All <jschulz_4587 at msn.com> wrote:

>
> Another problem is that once a policy is made to say "Take ALL of them
> seriously, always", it further encourages trolls to disrupt schools by
> making threats resulting in cancellations, delays, lockdowns, weapons
> checks
> and general panic.
>
>
> Delirium wrote:
> >
> > George Herbert wrote:
> >> 1. Most people aren't nearly as good at detecting credible threats as
> >> they (or you) think.  Police and other authorities are - there are
> >> specific training and analysis methods involved, including psych
> >> consults if there are certain warning flags, etc.  Ask any
> >> crisis-trained psychiatrist, law enforcement officer who investigates
> >> these, etc.
> > Police and other authorities are actually quite poor at it as well. The
> > fundamental problem is that there are not credible "warning signs" that
> > don't have extremely high rates of false positives, to the point where
> > around 100% of individuals distinguished by the criteria are false
> > positives. That's to be expected, of course, since school shootings are
> > extremely rare, so in statistical terms, the number of future school
> > shooters in any population you care to distinguish is effectively
> > 0---you'd have to track down not 100 false positives, but hundreds of
> > thousands, and still might not find any legitimate positives (the number
> > of actual school shooters in the history of schooling is below 200). In
> > fact there is not a single documented case in which a report from the
> > public averted a school shooting. I could think of some cases where it
> > might at least have a nonzero chance, such as gun-shop owners reporting
> > suspicious attempts to purchase weapons, but Wikipedia posts aren't
> > among them.
> >
> > -Mark, who probably fulfills a bunch of the "warning signs" himself but
> > discourages harrassment-via-cop, please
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> >
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/School-shooting-threats-tp17379956p17454005.html
> Sent from the WikiMedia Foundation mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
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