I looked through the WikiEN-l mailing list, and found this:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikie...ust/078952.html



So let me correct you:

1) This is a site that welcomed Amorrow under the presumption that Wikipedia had banned him for a joke he made. As it turned out, Wikipedia had actually banned him for stalking and harassment, something that they neglected to tell us. Once we found out, we banned him too. Indeed, we went one hell of a lot further than Wikipedia went. It would be more accurate to say "Wikipedia Review is a site that doesn't tolerate harassment, while Wikipedia clearly does - example Amorrow"

2) This is a site that commented about Phil Sandifer's irresponsible blog post, which is quite seriously of the same level of someone who makes a fake death announcement on Wikipedia only to find that they had actually died. Any responsible police force would investigate it. We didn't force them to, they considered that it was suspicious and rightly investigated. That isn't harassment, that is Phil Sandifer being very stupid.

3) This is a site which we actually DID find fault with Katefan0, because she had been abusing her position as a court reporter, and was subsequently fired because of it. We didn't drive her off - Amorrow did. We exposed her corruption.

------

I was subscribed to the mailing list briefly, and, after a week long wait, was allowed to have posts submitted in response. I don't think I'll bother doing that again. But seriously Wikipedia, can you lie straight in bed?

You guys do tend to Assume Bad Faith of Wikipedia admins (and Assume Good Faith of banned users), perhaps a necessary counterweight to the opposite tendency among the WikiClique, but still sometimes reaching wrongheaded results.

Wikipedia's secrecy and coverups regarding such matters doesn't help; it's hypocritical of them to cover up the fact that somebody is a stalker, ban them for a silly trumped-up charge unrelated to stalking, then regard others as evil for not going along with their ban.

I tried reading that list for a week and a half, but couldn't stand it. It is amazing how solicitous they can be to people who are absolutely stark raving bananas batshit crazy. I just couldn't deal with that in my inbox anymore.

I unsubscribed this morning

In view of the behavior of Wikipedia admins (or at least some of them), then the default policy of WR:Assume Bad Faith seems a reasonable position.

True, but we have been right more often than not. This forum fills a definite need. We have also made a point of acknowledging the contribution made by admins such as Ashibaka, who have challenged the corruption of the aforementioned WikiClique.

Okay let's go back to the Amorrow case.

When we first heard of it, all that we saw was the claim that he had made a joke that was taken the wrong way. Perhaps warranting a short term ban, but nothing more. Since he seemed to be critical of things generally, we brought him in. From all that he had said, we all felt that he should have been banned, and that it was reasonable to ban him, but that he could still contribute here. That was the initial reaction (we also felt that Skyring should have been banned, and that Lir and Blu Aardvark, at least later on, were quite right to be banned).

Then Essjay came on here to say that it was wrong for us to reproduce his site, doubleblue.info, because it was revealing personal information and he was using it to stalk users. Amorrow said it was much the same as Daniel Brandt's Hivemind, to track them. Essjay used it as an excuse to add us to the spam blacklist. We said to Essjay hey if he is stalking users, tell us, because you're not telling us anything, and HE REFUSED TO. We didn't get sent any links in a private message, nothing. Yes, we were told, and yes Essjay is normally a reasonable person, but it sounded like a lie.

Then there was a big storm on WikiEN-l that we were encouraging stalking, and we responded by saying get fucked Amorrow isn't stalking anyone.

Then Amorrow said a few seriously worrying things, and we were considering banning him for it. Selina deleted a few of his posts, just because they seemed to be, at a bare minimum, sexist, and really sexual harassment, and he insisted on knowing who was female and so forth. It just seemed to be a bit of a front.

All of the Wikipedia admins quit, at least 3 of them, Musical Linguist, Katefan0 and SlimVirgin. Katefan0's was a result of Daniel Brandt exposing her corruption, so we just thought that the others were doing it as some bullshit way to hide the bad stuff that Katefan0 was doing. SlimVirgin looked like a publicity stunt. Musical Linguist was a joke.

Then Katefan0 sent us a private message, which said that she had been contacted by Amorrow in person, that he'd been to her house.

Selina, with support of everyone here, had no hesitation in banning him "just in case", and moving all of his posts to a moderators forum to look at, to see if there was anything to them. All threads that he had contributed to were moved.

After analysis, we saw that we should have banned him sooner, and we were angry at Wikipedia for lying to us, for not telling us enough.

And the thing is - why should we automatically ban someone just because Wikipedia says so? I mean many of the people here were banned from Wikipedia unfairly, so why should we ban someone just because Wikipedia did? Surely they have a voice, and a right to get a second chance?

I don't see why Wikipedia couldn't have shown us some evidence as to what he actually did, at least in a private message.

And furthermore, why didn't Wikipedia do more to actually stop him from stalking users? They didn't contact his web host - WE DID. Why didn't Wikipedia do that? Why blame US for something that was their fault? That was just absurd. Why not try to protect their administrators? They went after us, and used it as a manipulation, rather than facing the facts that they hadn't acted appropriately in dealing with that situation.

So according to Wikipedia, we were supposed to magically know that oh yes on this occasion Wikipedia was actually right, for like the first time ever, in spite of them refusing to have even a hint of evidence, and indeed having false evidence as for his ban.

I mean why can't Wikipedia say "Banned for stalking users"? What's wrong with saying that? It's true, after all. Why link to something that has nothing to do with why he was actually banned? Why all of the cloak and dagger bullshit?

Bliss,

Thank you for your clear and cogent summary of this case.

The only catch I see is in that last paragraph:


The reason why Wikipediots are incapable of communicating the facts of a clear and present danger like that is because their whole argot is so totally confounded with ediosyncratic senselessness — like they would need to say "So-&-so is banned for REALLY, REALLY stalking users, not just WP:STALKING users", but they can't say that, because it would expose their ordinary and statistically predominant use of "WP:STALKING" for the BS triviality that it really is.

Jonny

But you see, that is the root of all of the problems from Jimbo on down. If you're not with us, in agreement with us, or doing things as we proscribe, even OFF of Wikipedia, you are EVIL. You are wrong. You are deluded, and we'll even send trolls like David Gerard and Durova to your site to let everyone know it. If all else fails, Jimbo will mail you from jwales@wikia.com to threaten legal action in a Big Scary Voice. Mention that he nor the WMF can't sue shit over factual reporting of public information or GFDL'd information, and he blubbers like the IQ 95 marketing "Got Lucky Once" guy that he is.

That's the problem. "...then regard others as evil for not going along with..." ...with everything that WP wants.




Section 230. It always, eternally comes back to that. Wikipedia will do NOTHING that endangers that or even may.

I agree completely. Unfortunately it remains a good source of information concerning WPs bizarre mental processes. A good hot shower after reading helps.

This is just about the worst summary of the Katefan0 incident I've ever seen, and I've seen some rather weird ones on Wikipedia user pages, and on the #wikipedia IRC channel.

Correction:
Katefan0 was and is a reporter at Congressional Quarterly. She is still employed there, assuming that their current staff listing is accurate. In May 2006 I discovered her real name, based on the fact that she left a long trail on the web, and had identified herself on her user page as an alumus of the UT Austin journalism school, and identified herself as a Congressional reporter elsewhere. At that time she was certified on the House/Senate press gallery, which meant that she had extra access to members of Congress. She was just beginning to dabble in biographies of members of Congress on Wikipedia.

I asked her to announce her real name on her user page on the grounds of journalistic ethics. She immediately left Wikipedia and implied that I had done something naughty. All other Wikipedians took up the "bad boy Brandt" chant at that point.

In fact, she had done something naughty and she knew it. If she had ignored my request to identify herself on her user page, I was prepared to contact CQ and complain that she was an anonymous administrator at Wikipedia. For those of you who are too steeped in cyberspace to know that there is any such thing as "journalistic ethics," you will have to take my word for it that this would have been noticed at CQ. Think of Essjay and The New Yorker — it would have been a scandal at that level, or worse. There is no way CQ would have "regarded it as just a pseudonym and had no problem with it."

Since she immediately sang her swan song on Wikipedia the very same day that I made my request, I never needed to contact her employer. And I never did. If anyone called her employer, as Wikipedia lore has it, it wasn't me.

If you feel compelled to watch the train wreck in progress every now and then, it's easier to subscribe to it on Gmane — no junk in your inbox, but a lot faster to sample than the scanning the archive.

Jonny


Daniel,

Thanks for your corrections to Blissyu2's account. Maybe when we get a complete and accurate report nailed down it could go in one place in the blog where we won't have to keep tracking down scattered details all over the place?

Jonny

Funny... that's just what I've sometimes thought about Wikipedia Review...

Okay thanks for the correction.

Maybe it can go in the blog once we have it all down pat. Hmm. There must be an echo here.

Amorrow went to her house? If she said this, I still don't believe it. Katefan0 was in Washington DC, and Amorrow was, if I remember, in Southern California. If she's going to make statements like this, then they need to be published in the blog, and Amorrow should be asked for a comment that is also published. Hey, if she cannot behave like a responsible journalist, at least we can!

Most wkikidicky admin assume bad faith as a matter of SOP... So, stop whining...

I don't think its a good idea to defend Amorrow. I think we went over this at the time. He had kept a compilation of activities by female administrators, and indeed a number of female non-administrators on Wikipedia, to determine who they were, what they did with their spare time, and so forth. It wasn't for criticism, it was for stalking. There was a reason that we banned Amorrow, and we had basically unanimous agreement to ban him when we did. We did a poll and I think it was around 32-2 or something in that order, that Amorrow needed to be banned from here.

It's not defending amorrow, it re-affirming that fact that wikidicks' admins assume bad faith
and have no morality, ethics or soul.

Thats what I'm trying to say.

Pot Kettle Black much?

Which part?

Based on what I've read here, I believe Amorrow threatened to initiate some sort of physical encounter with Katefan0, but I'm about 99.99 percent certain he didn't act upon that particular impulse. He was apparently angry over her having deleted or objected to something that was posted about his father (who was Navy officer), but one of his last posts before being banned was to say that she'd apologized for whatever it was, and asked him to leave her alone, and he'd agreed to do just that.

There's a difference of degree from one item to the next in this list:

1. Keeping lists of female admins and their activities.
2. Contacting these admins by email.
3. Showing up at the house of one of these female admins.

I'd probably ban someone for 1 also. But if you are going to post something that asserts that Katefan0 said that Amorrow showed up at her house, then you should post the exact message from Katefan0 and under that, you should either post Amorrow's response, or at least indicate that he was unreachable, or he had no comment.

Just plain, common, "real world" good sense, it seems to me.

I can't recall the specifics of it. At a bare minimum, he definitely kept extensive details of female administrators, and many female editors as well, documenting who they were, what they were like. He didn't just include their real names (if he could find them) and their occupations, but also what they were posting about, any personal things that they might have said, and so forth. What I think most people would describe as stalking.

I don't know personally whether he e-mailed anyone, or visited them. I do know that he said that he was going to, and that they indicated that he had. I don't know for sure what actually happened.

I would never support anyone that does that kind of thing. And whilst we did delete all of Amorrow's posts, I think that we should still have the poll about whether or not he should be banned (which was after he had already been banned), that should give a hint as to what went on.

Okay here are all of the relevant Amorrow posts:

Poll as to whether to lift the ban on Amorrow: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1563&hl=

Post about doubleblue.info: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=892&hl=

Don't stalk people (what the law says): http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1625&hl=

Also 2 hidden posts:

E-mail from Flonight: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1742&hl=

Amorrow: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1650&hl=

I can summarise that if you like.

And I should apologise that the e-mail came from Flonight, not from Katefan0. It was however written on behalf of Katefan0, who I think may have also e-mailed someone else. I can quote what the e-mail said:



There was a lot more discussion, but it seems that we deleted the rest. That should give you enough of a hint as to what went on.

And for the record, we were unsure what to do, as it was an issue as to on one side banning someone who was fully 100% supportive of Wikipedia Review, didn't attack any established users here, and secondly was banned from Wikipedia and Wikipedia were demanding us to ban him but on the other hand he did seem to be stalking people.

It wasn't the easiest decision to make, but we did it.

Also note these links:

List of links: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...findpost&p=8966

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1205
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...7257&#entry7257
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1404
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1102

He did at least occasionally post anti-semitic posts too, it should be noted, but he was primarily involved in harassing female editors.

Katefan0 links:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1422&hl=

and

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1528&hl=

Both by Daniel Brandt

Just to keep everyone up to date as to what happened.

It's exactly that type of thinking that is wrong (in my opinion), not all admins have no morality, etc.
The ones that stick out like a sore thumb, yes, but some others manage to keep under the radar.

You'll notice that people on the mailing list paint all WR members with the same brush also, that's equally as wrong.

This was actually what got us in trouble over this.

Amorrow is still the only person on Wikipedia Review ever to be banned that wasn't attacking Wikipedia Review members. Granted he attacked Freakofnurture, but Freakofnurture was a Wikipedia administrator so it didn't really count. Amorrow was well behaved on here, and we had no reason to ban him based on his behaviour here.

I was surprised to find, in searching, that a handful of Amorrow's posts actually still exist - MOST were deleted. Also most which he posted in were deleted. We did this to protect people's privacy. You can surely see enough in the ones that we didn't delete to see what he was about.

In the end, Wikipedia administrators are people, and, while Katefan0 surely was doing something wrong in not stating that she was a reporter while editing Wikipedia, she didn't deserve to be stalked and harassed by Amorrow. And there really isn't any doubt that he was doing it. The only doubt is whether it was cyber stalking or regular stalking or both. And I for one won't tolerate either.

We have to be clear that we will not tolerate stalking on here. I know that I am only one person here, but in the end if we did tolerate stalking here, I would quit. If I could, I would delete all of my posts from here, or else make such a big song and dance that I'd get banned. That is the line for me, and I will not tolerate it anywhere. So you know that there is none here because I'm still here. Wikipedia Review might still exist, but I wouldn't be coming here, and certainly wouldn't be supporting it.

Just be clear here that there is a difference between saying who someone is for the purpose of accountability as opposed to saying who someone is for the purpose of finding out who they are, to study them and either make advances towards them or else harass and threaten them. There is a difference between such posts as "Katefan0 is a congress reporter who should acknowledge this conflict of interest" as compared to "Katefan0 is an interesting lady, who I'd love to get to know more, and find out where she is, what she is like, see if she likes that". There was one particular post by Amorrow just before he was banned that said something very close to that, I believe it was the last post he made before he was banned. Perhaps it was a joke, but if it was, it was a rather sick joke.

Some people think that what Daniel Brandt does is wrong too - that he should leave people to be anonymous if they like. I would answer that by saying my personal opinion - if Wikipedia acknowledged people's rights to be experts in subjects, and at the same time to have a bias, and stopped pretending that there is any such thing as neutrality, then I would think that anonymity was fine. But whilst people continue to have secret biases, that they pretend don't exist, it is important for us to find out what those biases are, and in some cases this includes finding out their identity. This is to prevent falsehoods being presented as facts, and this is the point of what Daniel Brandt is doing, and the other people here. It isn't to stalk, or harass, or spy on other people. It is to stop the spread of falsehood, as simple as that.

We do need to distinguish between the two.

I agree, and I am not against exposing people when their contribution is in conflict with their real life work. I edited in very different things compared to what I do in real life, and even then when I had strong biases about a subject I rather clarified my opinions in talkpages rather than jumping in the namespace right away. I expect the same from others. But it is obvious that ill faithed editors are poluting the entire project and Wikipedia is victim of its own popularity by attracting malicious editors. So yes, I think that if someone does discover who someone is, and that that particular someone edits are in conlict of interest given his/her real life occupation. Those people should be exposed.

Someones biases does not necessarly harm the project, it could bring people to contribute by exchanging relevent information. The biases can serve in that case to inform people. This should not be mistaken with a malicious act of distorting, deleting, twisting. This is what specifically conflict of interest does. The person interest is in contradiction with the main goal of the encyclopedia. Ill faithed editors are those who are destroying the project, they are worst than vandals who's bad faith is obvious and could be dealt with.

that was aimed at Jeffrey100 above, sorry Somey.

Can you provide quotes, references, and examples of this?





Hmmm... there's a lot of transgender wikipedians. I don't just mean the two everyone knows about, but a lot admins and non-admins are male-to-female transgender. I wonder how many times Ammorow thought he found a woman and it turned out to be not so.

Yeah, that would be the ultimate revenge for someone like him.

Except that, if he is as bad as he seemed to be, that might lead to something violent from him.

This is very silly. I don't know why everybody would assume that WR editors are harassers. People as nice as Daniel Brandt, Blissyu2, and I could not be harassers and stalkers. From what I hear correctly, Lulu of the Lotus Eaters stalked Blissyu2. S/he is not blocked yet. There are more stalkers there than here.



You mean Chris Benoit?

I believe that that is one of many examples

Can you give me lots of examples of these two being nice guys?

When is Daniel Brandt nasty? He is very forthright but he is very kind. He is also very forgiving.

I don't think I've seen DB be nasty with someone but feel free to refresh my memory.

As for blissyu2, probably if provoked enough - and I can't remember him being particularly nasty either.

I was asking for examples of them being nice guys. My mind draws a blank but I think it would be good if we made a big list of them being nice guys.

I am always nice lol.

This is my nice character. I use Zordrac when I want to be nasty. I am sure that I explained that.

Cat was my first ever internet alias. That was kind of neutral, but pretty sex-obsessed really. I would use this all the time, but of course its such a common alias that its rarely possible to get to use it.

Zordrac I created for games, and to be nasty to people.

Blissyu2 I created for chat sites (AOL initially) and is to be nice to people.

Ergo, whenever I am Blissyu2 I am nice to people.

Of course, I use my real name a lot too, but that can be nice or nasty.

I have actually had Zordrac play a mud, and start off as an abruptly evil demon-dragon (as Zordrak from the Dreamstone was a villain - my favourite kid's show villain of all time, by the way - and the one that I most wanted to win!) and then before too long I'm a newbie helper! I just find it hard to be nasty to random people, even when I'm playing a game.

Of course, I can be nasty to people who I've got to know, that's easy.

I don't think I can really imagine you being nasty, if anything you're too nice and reasonable.

That's not to say you don't speak (IMO) fruity crap a lot of the time, but you've pretty much exemplified WP:CIVIL and WP:AGF.

WHILE ON AOL DID YOU OBSERVE PROPER AOL ETIQUETTE? I AM GIVING AN EXAMPLE OF PROPER AOL ETIQUETTE NOW.

Lamont: You forgot OMG, LOL and ROFL and all those other horrible all-capssy AOLey (Yes, AOLey. I make up my own words) netspeaky things I rarely type.

Not really. In fact I have basically nobody talks to me on AOL nowadays. Most of my people are on MSN messenger at the moment, with a few on ICQ. My AOL and Yahoo chats are just open for the sake of it.

So what I am saying is that I haven't talked to all that many people on AOL. I mean AIM actually, since I never used AOL as an ISP.

Actually, I've never heard of a time when Daniel Brandt wasn't nice.