Alison e-mailed me with this information which I was not aware of till I saw it.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikie...uly/077670.html

Looch, is it against Wikipedia policy to "out" known trolls? By their definition of ethics, I mean?

Greg

Well, what do you expect from a sexist, anti-catholic, anti-GLBT scumbag, anyway?

He needs to find a blackhole and fall inside of it....

Oh, and JzG? The sexist statement is NOT in the link that you gave: it's here : You said that there were no important womem composers because there were none on your Ipod.

The women of the World are waiting for your apology....

Also, don't forget what I pointed out in the other thread - Mr. JzG's claims in this area are highly dubious and disingenuous to begin with.

Here's a reason to get rid of these anonymous accounts: your real identity should not be a political football.

In any case, it's clear that JzG is upset about being called a sexist because he has something to be guilty about.....Otherwise, why would he care??


JzG, you need to get more women composers on your Ipod!!

(Oh, and you also need to stop dropping Marie-Claire Alain's name, because she doesn't remember you at all and is wondering why you keep mentioning her....)

If it was anyone other than an admin outting a banned user, that person would be banned from the mailing list and disciplined and their post deleted.

This gets back to I guess a philosophical question with regards to the internet - should you be anonymous or should you be real?

Anonymity sounds cool, as then you can do whatever you like. You can surf gay porn, pretend to be a girl, have cyber sex with furries, and do whatever floats your boat, with no repercussions whatsoever. You can be as abusive as you like. You can secretly slag off your boss, your family, your friends, whatever. All sounds fine.

The problem is that anonymity eventually gets exposed. While slagging off your boss, woops your boss finds out and you're fired and black banned. Friends get upset when they find out that secretly you'd bagged them. And if you were doing anything illegal or morally compromising then you're in trouble there too. And to the trained eye, no matter how anonymous you are, you are leaving little breadcrumbs to find out who you are. Detectives know how to find it out, and so do a lot of others, if they can be bothered finding out. No matter how secretive you are, you are never completely safe.

The other problem with anonymity is that for some reason you feel like you can do anything, so you become more abusive than usual, and you act in ways that you wouldn't normally act. This is all fine and good if you're somewhere that everyone is anonymous, but what if you're somewhere that some people are public? Wikipedia has many people who use their real names, as do journal sites. Its probably fine to be anonymous on a message board where everyone else is anonymous too, or a game, but sites like Wikipedia are probably not a good idea.

It sounds like a bad idea to use your real name, or at least a nickname that you always use, or your first name, because then it prevents you from saying something that you have a conflict of interest with regards. For example I was actually investigating the Peter Falconio case at work while I was writing the article on Wikipedia about it. In theory, I could have got in trouble at work over it. Of course, I wasn't actually breaking their rules, but they might get upset. And Wikipedia of course would have said hey, that's something that you have working knowledge of. You are involved in the investigation, hence you're an expert! Ban him! Not to mention that what we reported to the media was the opposite to what I was putting in Wikipedia (because we were massively covering it up). So they wouldn't have been too happy to have known that one of their employees was uncovering something that they were trying desperately to cover up.

But what if you say your real name? You're more careful then. You do real things. Oh sure, you get the odd abusive phone call from someone who then looks up your phone number, but then THEY are breaking the law by doing that. And okay so you get the odd idiotic police officer who just says "Well what the hell were you doing saying your real name on the internet for? You deserve the abuse". But you're overall doing the right thing.

Indeed, there is an argument that for most uses, you should ALWAYS use your real info. Only in exceptional circumstances should you be anonymous.

Something of a philosophical argument though, and not merely related to Wikipedia.

The whole thing is a demo of how WP:V and WP:RS is ignored when people want. Dame Ethel Smyth is listed in Kobb??'s Complete Opera Book, so this very reliable source asserts that she is a notable opera composer. That should have been it.

I hate to seem to be defending one of the Clique, but I don't like all the feminist / socialist / Marxist / academic PC claptrap that insists that all of history and culture be retroactively altered to give a proper quota of "representation" to various persecuted groups. If there were few female opera composers, then that's the way things were, and you can't just make them up, or declare non-notable ones to be notable after the fact, to achieve "gender equity".

Wikipedia believes quite firmly in "outing" known trolls.

Take, for instance, Rebecca - a user crying "foul" at being exposed as a male Australian who most certainly does not go by the name of "Rebecca" - who has, in the past, went out of "her" way to search for various newsgroup postings by one "Zordrac" in order to find some justification for banning him,

And Wikipedia's LTA page on Blu Aardvark contains quite a few personal details. True, most of those facts were added by the user in question himself, but that hasn't stopped, say, Musical Linguist from crying "foul" when someone points out her IRL name which she had on her fucking userpage for over a year.

Protection from being "outed" on Wikipedia is extended only to those who are in the inner circle

To comment on the general issue (and aware that this is a bit of a can of worms here), I don't see it this way. It is possible to look at history in a different way and see things that were important and meaningful, but were historically downplayed, ignored, or distorted because of the dominance of one group (men, classes, ethnic groups, and so on). Of course, in seeking an alternative perspective on history you could make mistakes, but much more worrying are the enormous errors implicit in the pervasive skewing of history by dominant groups. So I think it's extremely valuable to have people look at history critically and bring the obscured portions to light.

When I first used the internet, I used my real name, first and last, and even listed my phone number on my web page. This worked out well, I didn't get harassed - until a couple of jerks decided to call me on the phone and make obscene nuisance calls. I tried to trace them back, but police wouldn't (or perhaps couldn't) do a thing, and I had to change my number. While they were breaking the law, the police said to me "You were stupid enough to put your real name and phone number on the internet? You deserve what you get".

After that, I went through a period where I didn't reveal my identity too much, and indeed I stopped posting my own photograph even, and in most places didn't even refer to my own first name. What happened then was that first off a couple of people that knew me went on to my LiveJournal and misinterpreted a bunch of stuff and then 10 guys decided to assault me over it, and then after I beat them up in self defence, they tried to have me charged with their assault, just because they lost. Thankfully the police weren't totally stupid, and the charges were dropped, but it was bad enough that it adversely affected a lot of other things for me. Then I had a girl from America who published my real name, photo, phone number, address, and where I worked, alongside a bunch of lies and half truths. The fact that I didn't reveal my personal identity everywhere meant that she could attribute a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with me to me.

Now, would those 2 things have gotten as bad as they did, and seriously affect my real life if I'd remained completely public? I don't think that they would have. If you are already public, what more can they do? They can send you harassing phone calls, which are illegal anyway, and while they can still run smears against you, they can't succeed as well, and they are more easily caught. So then the biggest danger is for them to find out your address and come at you with a big shotgun and try to murder you. But that is so rare over the internet that you don't need to worry about it. Publicised heaps, but very rare. And if they did do it, they'd seriously be breaking the law.

When I first used Wikipedia, I hid my identity because I was testing it. I made Internodeuser in response to legal threats that I received, to dare them to come after me. They of course lied about it to then accuse me of making legal threats (which I have always said shouldn't have been illegal - but if they are then why was I banned and not the people that made them?) And of course I used my game playing name Zordrac because I didn't want to reveal who I was, as I was only using it briefly with Longhair's permission, after he apologised for getting me banned. I agreed not to interfere with the articles that he owned, and he agreed to not let anyone know it was me. Simple enough agreement. Ruined by SlimVirgin, Kelly Martin and Snowspinner after I protested Poetlister's ban.

Would Wikipedia have treated me so badly if I'd used my real name from the beginning? Probably. It is hard to say. But they now make all of these false accusations of sock puppetry, which they certainly wouldn't have done if it had been my real name all along.

And that's it really. Why should you be being anonymous? Its your personal choice of course, but why should you? It suggests to people that you have something to hide. Do you? Or don't you trust them?

That's the opposite of what I'm saying. I don't deny that, for whatever reason, there have been very few female opera composers. However, Ethel Smyth was a notable opera composer; there is an impeccable source to say so. To ignore this because you don't have her on your iPod - to use original research to support your POV thesis that there were no notable female composers at all, not just "few" - flies in the face of everything that Wikipedia alleges that it stands for.

That's not what happened though. JzG was commenting on an arbitration of a user, and was musing in passing that he didn't know of any major female opera composers, and speculating as to why. Making a perfectly reasonable inquiry. He was not trying to support a POV thesis. JzG might be the biggest ass on the site - and there is plenty of evidence to suggest he is - but I don't think it is at all fair to suggest that he was forcing his POV of an article here, and it is certainly unfair to label him a sexist on the basis of those comments.

Why? Because he doesn't know much about opera otherwise he'd have heard of Ethel Smyth.

And just try bringing this up on Wikipedia in any formal process. You'll be shot.



Honestly, its because people enjoy the freedoms of anon work online, and it lets them act like asses. Aside from the odd exception like Jeff Gustafson (if thats even his real name), real-name people tend to be level headed and sound fair on-wiki. It's the anons that screw up everything. The real reasons people are anon:

* Lets them act like asses/with impunity to acceptable "real world" social norms.
* Lets them try to avoid "real world" scrutiny or effects from online effects. See User:H/User:HighInBC, SlimVirgin for example.
* Many edit from work, and simply don't want that attention at work. For example, a major player in a certain cabal works for Intel in a high level role. And edits somewhat (but not directly) related articles. Could be a COI. See also KatefAn. What if a government employee did it? It's OK for MONGO, admitted US employee, to focus on US government articles, but not for Congress employees to edit Congress articles? Why?

Tony Sidaway wasn't anon and there's a lot of hillarious quotes of him.


What do user User:H/User:HighInBC do bad that got him stalked?

One reason why people need to create anonymous accounts on Wikipedia is because if they want to write any quality articles, they need to have some level of expertise in those areas. The inventor of one product is going to know a lot more about that product than some random person on the street. But Wikipedia's anti-expertise rules means that you can be banned for being an expert. So you need to write anonymously in order to produce quality work. If Wikipedia decided to work towards quality, and to respect expert editors, then people wouldn't need to be anonymous.

Yes, many people use this anonymity to alter facts that benefit them financially. Congress staff members changed facts to try to win an election. People have tried to advertise their own products. There are many examples of this. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. The problem is that by not allowing experts, the experts that have an alternative view are not allowed to present their case either. So staff members of the opposition aren't allowed to change the case, we aren't allowed to have a moderator, and so forth.

I mean how do we establish that something is a fact? We either have a totalitarian rule in which the king etc tells us what is fact, or else we decide through expert opinion.

A typical interview would involve at least 2, but sometimes as many as 5 or 6, people who represent different views on the topic. These people will ideally be experts in their field, the most expert that the interviewer can come across.

Saddam Hussein insists that the Americans are pig dogs trying to take over Iraq for oil, murdering innocent Iraqis and getting rid of his legitimate democratically elected parliament.

Osama bin Laden insists that the Americans are crusaders persecuting innocent Moslems, and that whilst he hates Iraqis personally, he must support them against the Jews and Christians who wish to destroy their faith, and he wants them out of their holy land, out of the nation of Islam. That he will stop this invasion to try to establish the evil American Empire at all costs.

George H Bush insists that America had to invade Iraq because they had invaded Kuwait, and destroyed this legitimate democracy because of Iraq's thirst for oil, that Saddam Hussein was never legitimately elected and that he rigged votes, and that Saddam Hussein was guilty of genocide against the kurds, and of murdering many of his own people besides this. He insists that Iraq has to be controlled for a while to get things back on track, and that their environment encourages terrorism.

Bill Clinton insists that he did not want to go to war in Iraq, but the complaints about Monica Lewinksy left him with no choice, and really it is the fault of the Republicans, and that he never intended to starve millions of Iraqis children. He insists that he never believed that there were any weapons of mass destruction, and we should not have gone to war this second time, but it is the fault of the Republicans who rigged the election to get George W. Bush in ahead of Al Gore, even though Gore got the popular vote.

Al Gore would say that he doesn't think that Iraq should have been invaded, and he never would have done it, but nowadays he is happy being a Hollywood movie star, so who cares?

George W. Bush says that Iraq, just south of Mexico, is a great place to go for a holiday, and they have dancing and good drinking, and everyone is happy, and he is proud of the troops and what they are doing. His press secretary and the people that tell him what to say do the rest.

And so forth.

And from all of this we have a bunch of biases, and we can piece them all together and get the truth. And in the end we decide for ourselves what to believe.

But on Wikipedia we don't have any of those prominent people, on the basis that they are all biased. Wikipedia may decide that they allow George H. Bush and George W. Bush on the basis that they have buttloads of power, but they wouldn't allow anyone else, especially not Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

So Wikipedia then creates wholly inaccurate articles written by people who are force-fed information from the mass media, and don't really know what is going on. Or alternatively they push one particular view, perhaps George H and George W's stance on what happened.

But if Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein go in anonymously, then we can get a more accurate article.

While Wikipedia won't allow expert editors, people must be anonymous. The two issues are related.

This is the entire problem: JzG knows next to nothing about music. He's at the level of somebody who sings in the local choir or plays in the town band, but he's not qualified to make these kinds of pronouncements. He is convinced that, because he's a WP admin, he somehow has gained a doctorate in musicology and can therefore use the contents of his Ipod to make this kind of POV statement.

He then pretends that having using this original research and taking this POV position is innocent; It's not. It's sexist.

The whole point of what seems like a rather unimportant arb-com case (painted as a COI incident, which was present, but which was not at all the subject of the dispute) was giving the classicalmusic CABAL the right to make these kinds of statements. There ARE people in that sub-group who are qualified to make these kinds of statements (they would definitely NOT make THIS specific statement however), but JzG isn't one of them.

Even Moreschi is less overtly POV than JzG is (except when his meat-puppet Folantin is involved...). And when he gets into discussions where he doesn't know, he says so (at least for the time being....).

JzG really is one of the worst admins on that site. I don't know why people think that "he's such a nice guy". He's on an extended Wikibreak....He needs to extend that indefinitely......