[WikiEN-l] Are there really articles on Wikipedia that need fixing, or just gossip that needs hashed?

[Armed Blowfish]

On 04/08/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/3/07, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Erm, hi, banned user here.
>
> If I'm not misremembering, you are not banned.

I filed three unblock-auto requests.  (The first, a simple template on
my talk page, asking to be added to the ipblock-exempt group.  It
failed because apparently there was no such group, separate from
adminship.  The second, some code to create such a group, which the
Wikimedia developers didn't want to commit.)  The third (my RfA) was
rejected by the community... which makes it a community ban.

> It's simply that you
> have made the personal choice to only be able to edit through TOR, and
> TOR exit nodes are by policy to be blocked on sight.  You are at any
> time free to edit without using TOR.

You may as well say, 'If you were someone other than who you are, then
you would be welcome to edit.'  The same could be said of any banned
user.

P.S. It's Tor not TOR.

> This is not to state that I think your reasons for only being willing
> to edit using TOR are invalid.  In fact, I don't know enough about
> your circumstances to be able to comment on that; certainly I can
> envisage good reason for doing so.

I actually answered that question on the mailing list just recently.
In case you missed that, the quick summary is that I have a past which
involves being the victim of long term sexual abuse.

And please don't judge that reason... as either bad or good.  If you
did say it was a bad reason, I'd have to overdose on painkillers even
more than I am already overdosing, which would hurt my liver.

> It's simply that Wikipedia sees so
> many disadvantages to TOR in terms of ease of sockpuppetry and
> untraceability.
>
> -Matt

The security concerns are all addressable.  The value of IP addresses
in identifying people has been going down ever since commercial
services, rather than just universities, started offering access to
the internet.  Biologists could have told you ages ago that there are
better ways of telling apart honesty and deception.  Judith Donath of
MIT Media labs wrote about the topic about a decade ago.  The good
people of Tor wrote patches for Wikipaedia a couple years ago, but
none of them were committed.  And even if Wikipaedia really wants to
block Tor, the good people of Tor also provided better ways to do that
- so you can have less false positives (which are bad for Tor) and
less false negatives (which are bad for Wikipaedia).  If Wikipaedia
doesn't want to use that code, it isn't the fault of the good people
of Tor.

In any case, I've really given up on all that.  I'd just like
Wikipaedia to be nice to me... not very nice, just enough to be in
compliance with the 'Basic human dignity' principle of the
Badlydrawnjeff RfAr, where it states, 'Wikipedia editors must not act,
intentionally or otherwise, in a way that amounts to participating in
or prolonging the victimization.'

All of the questions and speculation about why people are using Tor,
the continued insistence on asking that question even after myself and
others made it clear we didn't want to answer the question has brought
a lot of my worst memories to the surface.  The criticism of my
reasons for using Tor, and of my paranoia, feels like people saying it
is my fault I got molested.  First I started crying at the drop of a
hat.  When it all continued even after I withdrew my RfA, I started
misusing painkillers - propoxyphene (which is spiked with
acetomenophin, which is bad for my liver) and various over-the-counter
meds.  At some point, I started throwing up at the drop of a hat.
When I couldn't fall asleep until after dawn, they gave me zolpidem.
Then the phone wouldn't stop ringing - because it's not actually
ringing, I'm just hallucinating.  During my effort to help SlimVirgin,
I've been overdosing on the meds.

In any case, the reason I am sending to you privately is that now
seems like the absolute worst time to risk making SlimVirgin and Jayjg
feel bad about all that.

Armed Blowfish