[WikiEN-l] Missed Opportunities to have avoided the Durova Case

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 29 Nov 2007 at 11:14:18 -0500, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your summary of the discussion regarding this seems reasonable, but
> unfortunately doesn't jibe with the facts. For days now several
> individuals have been insisting that the cyberstalking list was used
> to discuss and co-ordinate a block of !!, along with various other
> wild accusations (e.g. "stealth canvassing", whatever that means).

The idea that something along the lines of canvassing occurs on that 
list is far from being farfetched.  In fact, even if the people on 
that list are careful to avoid overt canvassing (blatantly telling 
people to vote a certain way in a certain place), there's a certain 
amount of almost inevitable, even if not necessarily intentional, 
vote stacking that is likely to result from the activity on the list. 
Given that the list is composed of like-minded individuals (at least 
on certain topics relating to their conception of "cyberstalking" and 
"harassment"), the mere mention on the list (even in a totally 
neutral way) of things like "A discussion just started on AN/I about 
the block of User:SomeDumbTroll", or "A straw poll is in progress 
over a new policy on attack-site links" is likely to bring a number 
of people all on the same side of the issue.  Given that, in fact, 
there have been a number of instances of seeming gangups of this 
nature, and that the infamous Durova message actually referred to the 
"enemy" not knowing about the list in the context of linking to a 
comment by a user expressing concern that one such gangup might have 
been organized off-wiki, this is not an empty concern.

When other sites and forums do very similar things -- mention the 
existence of a Wikipedia discussion / vote / etc. to an audience of 
like-minded individuals, such as talking about an AFD on a webcomic 
article on a forum of fans of webcomics -- this brings about 
accusations of canvassing.  The same seems to be true of that list.

If a bunch of people who feel they are being harassed and stalked 
online want to have an online group therapy session about it, that's 
their right.  But if they start acting as a pressure group to get 
Wikipedia policy in their direction, one can expect that those of 
differing viewpoints will have some objection to their activity.


-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/