On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:00:50 -0500, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Ah Guy...nowhere have I said that victims of harassment should be ostracized and prevented from discussing their situation in any forum they wish. If they find value in that listserve, more power to them.
Good, I agree with that.
But you are now implying that !! was being perceived on that list as the sockpuppet of a banned user, and I have a bit of trouble with that.
So do I. If we had any clue that !! was being perceived as such we might well have averted this whole farrago.
I am assuming good faith on the part of the majority of participants on that list, in that I do believe them when they say they either didn't read the memo or only gave it a cursory once-over. As SlimVirgin has said on-wiki, most of the members have more experience detecting sockpuppets than Durova does, so even a cursory glance would have told them there was nothing much in the message. And as it turns out, !! wasn't even a sockpuppet, he was just an experienced user who essentially changed his name and didn't tell everyone on Wikipedia about it. Perhaps he was trying to avoid harassment, who knows?
It was an experienced user apparently aiming for a sysop bit. Durova took that way beyond this simple fact.
Guy (JzG)