[Wikimedia-l] CNET News: "Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia"

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 8:50 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19 September 2012 15:36, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 05:19:19PM -0700, George Herbert wrote:
>
>>> I'm curious as to the internal view of the details, but... this is
>>> Violet Blue blogging about us.
>
>> Violet Blue is a known quantity to you?
>
>
> Internet-famous blogger and ex-Boing Boing contributor who now
> occasionally posts to CNet. And has pretty clearly less idea of what
> journalism constitutes than I did when I was eighteen and started an
> indie rock fanzine. I wouldn't mind if the article was just critical
> of us, but it's actually incompetent.

Ah, that's not helpful, David.

To answer Kim - Yes, known quantity, both online and off.  She is an
active sex and gender issues journalist / commentator / whatever the
heck that role is titled now (not just blogger, she is published in
several paper venues on a semi-regular basis).

She has a long history (along with her at least then-boyfriend) of
having gotten into an online tiff with a Wikipedia contributor to her
article that escalated to restraining orders and legal threats in real
life, though I don't believe any lawsuits were filed for real.

There were real name identification, age, and other issues - both
privacy issues, and a legal name change and desire not to be known by
her (well sourced) original name.

She does not like Wikipedia in general or that editor in particular as a result.

It's still not clear to me that the editor did anything wrong by
then-current standards, though BLP and current standards would
potentially be a different story.  It was reasonably clear that Violet
Blue and her boyfriend or fiancee at the time (whose current status I
do not know) edited and discussed confrontationally on-wiki for some
time, regarding the incident, along with the real-world legal threats.

It's been years, and I believe it's all calmed down, but she evidently
and not surprisingly still has a strong and somewhat negative opinion
of Wikipedia.

She is or was living somewhere in San Francisco but despite knowing a
number of people in related communities I have not to my knowledge met
her in person.  I've been told by some people that she's perfectly
community normative (cough) in behavior and reasonableness in person,
for that community.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com