DISQUS

That's one way of putting it. Of course, I don't recall making any false claims against good faith users, and I certainly recall people like Charles Ainsworth making some blatantly false claims against me. I've been a Wikipedia user since 2004, so I'm not sure if I'm genuinely a "new generation". I do know that most of the criticisms against me have been by justly banned abusers of the project like Jonathan Barber (user JB196). As a paid up card-carrying depressive I do of course get down from time to time, but I have given thousands of hours of my time to the project and made many thousands of edits to articles. The refusal to accept that admins are devoted to the project as well was, in fact, a core part of the problem. And another core part was the refusal of some people to acknowledge that harassment of Wikipedia users is a problem at all. Perhaps they would change their minds if they were the ones being called at home.

I note that the word collegiate is used. Giano, held up as a model of probity, is, in point of fact, one of the least collegiate people on the project. Most of his work is done one article at a time, with mostly him doing the work. He, like me, is prone to being rude, bullheaded and obnoxious. Neither of us is perfect, but there is no doubt in my mind of his commitment to the project. He, on the other hand, thinks I should be hounded out. This is emblematic of this particular teapot tempest: admins are evil, "contributors" are being done down. Only, most admins are contributors too. And if I was not committed to Wikipedia I hardly think I'd have put up with the kind of shit that's been sent my way over the last couple of years, since well before I was an admin, almost all of it from people who Wikipedia needs slightly less than it needs to be sued by a disgruntled article subject. The first time I was savaged by a website for a Wikipedia action it was for removing defamatory and false text from an article on a living individual, written by a tiny group of people who consider the individual concerned to be some kind of ogre. I was far less hard on them than others were, and they are all now banned from the project as being constitutionally unable to be anywhere close to neutral.

Like it or not, Wikipedia is now a big target for people pushing an agenda. The old days when nobody cared, we could take time to fix things, and every newcomer was probably an OK guy at heart, are past. Every single article on a politician, fringe science subject, controversial individual, group, band or anything else that inspires strong passions, is at risk of being hijacked by zealots. And many of these zealots have to be shown the door, which was always the case. There are more articles, the profile is higher, there are more zealots. If you feel the existing admins are doing a poor job of dealing with them, then you are free to stand for adminship - it's no big deal. The more the merrier.

So leave.

I love being a member of the cabal. As soon as I find out who the other members are I can get start getting my own way on Wikipedia :-)

Dan, a list devoted to discussion of stalking *has* to be private.

http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk/wiki/The_Durova...

Er, no, it's more that the people who planted the Register piece are simply wrong. I am on the list, I know exactly what went on on the list, and they are wrong, and they have been told it numerous times. It really is as simple as that.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Next case.

Except it wasn't secret, just private, and its existence was necessary to fulfil a function that cannot be fulfilled by any less private forum. Oversight is also necessary; we really do not need to leave Andrew Morrow's addition of people's addresses and telephone numbers in article history, for example.

!! was not "banned" he was blocked, briefly, due to a gross error of judgement on the part of one admin. End of story.

The fatuous claim of sockpuppetry against SV should also not go unchallenged; over two years ago she considered changing accounts due to harassment but finally decided nto to. Big fat hairy deal. If you want to see sockpuppetry, see user JB196. Or Jon Awbrey. Or WordBomb. Yet strangely it is these people's criticism of Wikipedia that is taken at face value, while the opinions of long-standing members of the Wikipedia community counts for nothing.

And a very tiny proportion of it might not actually be gross misrepresentation or complete bollocks :-)

That has no relevance. It doesn't matter how many people misunderstood or misrepresented what went on, there was no need for Giano to post the email, he did it for entertainment not out of principle, and he should not have done so.

Still flogging the bloody smear where the dead horse once lay, I see.

I wonder if you will ever get tired of misrepresenting things in this way. Perhaps you are just paranoid, I don't know. Nobody is banned for being nonconformist, Giano's problem was (as ever) trolling, something he has done since well before I ever came to Wikipedia, combined with repeated gratuitous posting of a private email with intent to humiliate someone who had already done a pretty good job of humiliating herself.

Er, not as such, no. No whistles required blowing. The arboitrators already had the email, and Giano freely admitted that his aim in posting the private email was "your entertainment". Sorry, that's not sufficient reason to post private data., although it does give us the fine irony of websites where Wikipedia's lack of respect for privacy is a recurrent meme praising an editor for gratuitously violating privacy. Seems it's OK as long as you are getting one over on The Man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Linking_... may be of interest to those who would like to contextualise Dan's comments.

Dan's not teling the whole story here (who'd have guessed?). What he's fighting is a battle to prevent people removing links to offsite harassment, principally from a site in which he participates and from which some extraordinarily vicious attacks have originated - mostly from editors who have been justly banned from Wikipedia. Contrary to popular belief, Wikipedia is incredibly tolerant of dissent and you have to try really quite hard to get actually banned. At least four Wikipedia articles (that's under one quarter of one thousandth of one percent) are known to have been impacted by misinterpretation of rulings against attack links; in each case the problem was rapidly fixed. In no case was the article itself skewed or biased, it was links that were the problem.

Dan is still fighting this war, when most of the rest of us have learned fomr the experience and moved on.

Unfortunately, Dan made some rather intemperate comments, including likening harassment of editors to mentioning the word "rutabaga". As Jimmy says above, we've seen some pretty vicious attacks, several long-standing contributors have been driven form the project and the police have had to be called. We're not really dealing with rutabaga-mentioning here.

In case anyone is interested, the mailing list was actually set up as a way of managing an increasingly cumbersome cc list in a lengthy email thread started by a past victim of harassment. The group was constituted to discuss the problems of harassment arising out of actions taken on Wikipedia, such as the blackmail and attacks launched by Judd Bagley when he was frustrated in his aim of promoting Patrick Byrne's jihad against naked short selling. The irony here is that Wikipedians are, in the main, all to happy to get one over on The Man, and a less obnoxious approach would have resulted in support rather than banning.

Whatever, the group includes people who've been around long enough to have pissed off someone who then went off the deep end. Most of those engaging in harassment are just garden-variety kooks, but some are incredibly dangerous - one has served jail time as a result of stalking and is considered particularly dangerous.

Unfortunately, attempts to manage harassment often fall afoul of the free-speechers on Wikipedia. This puts us in a no-win situation: we leave unfounded allegations on the site, or we delete them and then have a weeks-long drama about it. This is the fundamental problem the group was set up to discuss. And no, we don't have an answer yet, but if anyone feels like suggesting one then we'd be glad to hear about it.

Unfortunately, one of the group made a jaw-droppingly bad call, based on evidence she mailed to the group but nobody, it seems, interpreted as indicating she was intending to block the user. This has brought out of the woodwork a nunmber of people who have a pre-existing agenda against this person, others close to her, or the Cabal (TINC) in general. A lengthy discourse on the Wikipedia mailing list, wikien-l, left some people feeling dissatisfied. I have a view on that; one individual repeatedly insisted that we provide evidence to identify the individuals plotting to ban the editor despite repeated statements that no such plot existed and therefore no such individuals existed and therefore no evidence would be forthcoming. And so on, round and round the same loop.

So yes, it's disappointing to see the blatantly false picture of this group, rebutted at great length by long-standing editors of the very highest levels of community trust, members of the Arbitration Committee, and even Jimbo Wales himself, taken to media that are all ears for any kind of low drama. It was a petty and vindictive thing to do. One of them seems to have been retaliating for a 90 day ban enacted that day as a result of his careless editing of biographies of living individuals and abuse of multiple accounts.

All in all, one of the more depressing outcomes of a genuine good-faith attempt to make Wikipedia a nicer place.