On 8/5/07, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
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
I agree 100%, and would like to commend Durova for the calmness and sensitivity she has shown.
Elinor