[WikiEN-l] A modest proposal

[Anthony]

On 8/13/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have a right to use extra privacy technology if you want, but...
>
> Why?
>
There are a lot of reasons, some of which I'm not going to reveal.
But I've seen some really bad behavior from people who held their
allegiance to Wikipedia, when I was running a fork of the site.  On
that fork site, when it was editable, I had people reveal what they
thought to be my address and birthdate, I was called a spammer (which
stems from an incident many years ago when a spammer decided to use
the domain name inbox.org as the fake From: address, a problem which I
still have to this day but nowadays people know how easy it is to fake
From: addresses), and I even received death threats (just silly stuff
related to the spammer accusations, which I never really took
seriously, but it's still disturbing).  I have no reason to believe
Wikipedia *admins* were involved in the death threats, but I do have
reason to believe the release of what they thought to be my address
and birthdate were from Wikipedia admins (and the address was actually
correct, except for the fact that it was an old address of an
apartment where I no longer lived).  And I also have reason to believe
that a lot of just plain old vandalism to that site was performed by
Wikipedia admins.

> And in 20 years on the Internet, I've only had one incident where I
> was bothered in real life from something that started online.
>
I can think of only one incident which might qualify under that
description, but might not, and I'm not comfortable revealing the
details publicly.  Like I said, the death threats were in all
likelihood not at all serious, and I wouldn't call them being
"bothered in real life".

Oh yeah, and I once had my wife ask me if I was a Wikipedia Troll,
after doing a google search on my name.  But I wouldn't count that,
frankly the question didn't bother me (gave me a chance to explain
myself), and it really has nothing to do with my IP address.

> Everyone has their own comfort levels for privacy, but ...
> seriously... why so much effort for Wikipedia usage?
>
Answered above, to the extent I'm currently dumb enough to reveal an answer :)

Anthony