[WikiEN-l] Oh shit, Slashdot is an attack site!

[Durova]

Re: "BTW, I think there's a slight inaccuracy in your recollection. I don't
think the common argument was that she was hurting the project by
getting outed, I think it was that the project was being hurt by the
attempts to continue covering her identity up afterward. SlimVirgin
herself wasn't actually involved with that as far as I'm aware."

I did a bit of refactoring myself on that, and for the record SV didn't ask
me to.  That was based purely upon my reading of policy and arbitration
precedents, in which only self-disclosures of an editor's identity may be
repeated by others onsite.  It really doesn't matter whether an attempted
outing is accurate or not, nor how well known the information may be
elsewhere on the Internet.  Some of the trolls tried to use this example as
a wedge issue: if we accept their claims then we allow them to override
policy and arbitration and we create a loophole of unknown size in which
Internet harassment becomes a basis for attempted identifications onsite.
The double bind they tried to force us into is basically a claim that the
sysop community would undermine Wikipedia's credibility and lend credence to
the conspiracy story if we followed normal procedure and continued deleting
those attempted disclosures.  In my view, I just followed normal procedure.
SlimVirgin didn't become a public figure because one indivdual tried to
astroturf a single story in three very minor venues.  The comparisons they
tried to make to the Essjay incident don't bear up to any level of scrutiny.

-Durova