[WikiEN-l] London calling, etc.

[Ian Woollard]

On 02/10/2007, Avi <avi.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
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> Hash: RIPEMD160
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> Agreed. I cannot access IRC from behind my corporate firewall in
> the US, and the London Metro police does not allow urgent crime
> reports to be sent via e-mail, so the next best thing was to hit
> this list, which, based on the near-constant drama feeds (As the
> Wiki turns, the Young and the Adminless, General Arbcom, etc. 8-
> ) ) demonstrates that it's monitored rather well.


No, the next best thing would probably have been to ring the police direct
and point them to the information in the wikipedia, rather than spamming it
across a list in the *hope* that somebody was in a position to action it.

I understand that it may have generated more "drama" than
> necessary, but, even if one person is reached in time over the
> next 50 years and 6000 hoaxes, it will still be worth it.


I fundamentally disagree that this list should be misused for real-time
actions such as this.

If nothing else, email is subject to various kinds of failures and delays,
and this isn't something you would want to risk it on.

As a matter of experience and principle, historically it always seems to be
a bad idea to encourage things that are off-topic to be included on a list,
no matter how well meaning it might seen. I have never seen it end well, and
this one didn't either; no matter how glad we are that everyone is OK, we
still got punked.

- --Avi
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.