[WikiEN-l] Query for all harassment-related proposals: How are you different from BADSITES?

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/10/2007, Will Beback <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alec Conroy wrote:
> > How would your policy prevent incidents like MakingLights  and the
> > MichaelMoore from happening again in the future?
> >
>
> It's a good idea to check any proposals against real-world incidents.
> But you should enlarge your list to cover more severe cases of
> harassment. The MichaelMoore issue barely even counts.

I believe that is, er, his point. These proposals will inevitably be
expanded to cover the edge cases; with the unambiguous ones, people
really aren't going to complain if it gets done even with no policy.

> > ----------------
> > DISCLAIMER:
> >
> > Just to remind us all, I'll recap the Making Lights saga, but I won't
> > name the person who was involved, and I sincerely would ask everyone
> > else not to criticize someone today for something they did months ago.
> >  Seriously.  We've all made mistakes, they're over and done with, and
> > I _sincerely_ am not trying to relive this past saga--  I just don't
> > want to relive it in the future either.
> >
> > Ordinarily, I'd use a hypothetical example here, but I've found that
> > in this debate, hypothetical examples are invariably dismissed when
> > someone says  "Oh, that could never really happen".  So I actually do
> > have to use a real-world example if we're going to talk about this.
> >
> >
> You protest too much. An example with more severe harassment would
> perhaps be more useful. Also, if you don't include the whole story then
> it doesn't make a good example.
>
> Not coincidentally, you've picked a story that involves me. The fact
> that I'm an administrator has nothing to do with what happened, except
> that administrators are more likely to be the subject of harassment
> arising out of the actions they take on-Wiki. In this instance, working
> to maintain Wikipedia policies made me the target of a blogger prominent
> in the SciFi community.

...you became a "target" of TNH. Uh-huh. My understanding is that the
two of you pissed each other off thoroughly, and she considers herself
just as "harrassed" by you.

It is, I think, appropriate for me to add the other side's description here:

----

I think a more accurate description would be that I did something
which displeased Will BeBack, and that his immediate response was not
peaceable. I'm not keen to go on the warpath, but I've never responded
well to being told "Hello, you're Belgium."

I would never have taken the slightest interest in Will BeBack if he
hadn't been harassing me and Patrick on Wikipedia. When I looked into
having that problem arbitrated, I discovered that WB's a high-ranking
Wikipedian, so I concluded it was useless for me to protest his
harassment. I also concluded that it was useless for me to try to have
any substantial participation in the Wikipedia project.

I remained mildly curious about the identity of Will BeBack. A little
while after I made the original post that started this thread, I
casually googled on his pseudonym. It didn't take a lot of looking for
me to find an old mention of his real name via Google cache. It had
been discussed in Encyclopedia Dramatica: an irresponsible site, but
the information itself sounded real enough. I linked to that page.
Later in the thread I mentioned that the site had gone down, and a
couple of commenters supplied the name.

That's all.

----

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008953.html#189979

I cannot say I particularly trust your interpretation over hers.

> > My questions for Will Beback, or anyone else in the future who
> > proposes a new policy that forbids all links to "sites that contain
> > attacks" are this:
> >
> > #1.  Do you agree that the Making Light case was an abuse of power (or
> > at least, incorrect.  .-- i.e. Do you agree Making lights should NOT
> > have been purged)?
> >
> The blogger abused her power to harass Wikipedia editors.

No, the blogger made an entirely understandable vent, in reply to some
comments - as she had been many times previously - about the
bureaucratic insanity of Wikipedia. She mentioned one admin who had
particularly irritated her by name (and not entirely without merit, as
far as I can see); later that day, she idly googled the name,
discovered ED mentioned that editor, and posted the link in a later
comment, as a footnote. (The rest of the commenters fairly quickly
pointed out that ED was nutbar, incidentally)

This was *in a personal blog*. The comment was not being forced upon
Wikipedia editors, advertised to Wikipedia readers, or even positioned
in such a way as to be easily visible to anyone following a link from
Wikipedia; it was one person engaged in a free and frank discussion in
the comment thread of one post on their personal blog. It was not even
directed at the Wikipedia community, save that very small portion of
it (me and Arwel Parry, I think, the only ones I can name) who overlap
with TNH's regular audience.

I think "harassing" is a rather wide assumption here - are we so
self-centred that we believe everyone who writes about us does so with
us as the intended audience? Do *you* believe she was directing it at
you personally, rather than as a footnote to her disgust with our
project? "Harassment". Christ. If this sort of unconnected writing is
"harassment", I harassed the Prime Minister three times this
afternoon.

> Should her
> self-published website have been removed as a result, or should she have
> been "rewarded" by adding more links to it?

Ah, yes, an entirely irrelevant nonsequitur.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk