[WikiEN-l] Is Slate an attack site?

[fredbaud at waterwiki.info]

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony [mailto:wikimail at inbox.org]

Actually I think the depiction of Brandt as "a complete nutter" is
more a symptom of someone who gets too much of their information from
Wikipedia (and Wikipedia-related resources like this mailing list).
If you actually read what he himself has written or (God forbid)
actually have a conversation with him I think you'll get a totally
different view.  For instance, he doesn't push the MI-5 thing, and he
expressly is against using the term "spy".

So in that sense the efforts of Fred and company are working, Brandt
has been painted as "a complete nutter" to Wikipedians.

_______________________________________________

Actually, I, together with Jimbo, am one of the few people who has talked to him, although it is not my habit to pore over his writings. His concerns are privacy and anonymous editing. Combined together, he objects to articles which invade his privacy written by anonymous editors. His response has been to investigate the identity of our editors and expose that identity in a public forum.

Much of the dispute with him has been over us having an article about him and his maintenance of his "hivemind" page. He is quite active on Wikipedia Review in a hostile way. This includes collecting information which cast administrators in a bad light.

The problem with this is that we depend on our administrators to maintain the project. Anonymity is valued by many of them and we support them in that. We do what can reasonably be done to protect them from external harassment.

So what should our reaction be to someone who intends harm to our project and our volunteers? And has made an avocation of it.

We have negotiated, but to little purpose.

Fred