Looks like this was missed during the Kelly Martin AfD madness:

Someone who works for the UN made up a bunch of articles about UN employees working in the translation department. The UN saw it and didn't like it, so they asked the person responsible to get rid of the articles. The person asked them to be deleted under COI. We then get this discussion on ANI which proves just how deluded these people are. A representative sample of discussion :






Jimbo finally weighs in, in a very wishy-washy way :



Now, this looks as if it's being sorted out (most of the articles are deleted), but the ramifications of what happened are, um, interesting....

It would seem to be consensus among WP editors that they don't even have to listen to the UN's concerns about employee security if they believe that a subject is notable. Jimbo's statement is simply baffling. Where has he been during the past few months? Hasn't he seen that this is exactly the same thing going on, over and over again? Is he just scared because this is the UN?

Anyway, interesting time we live in, huh?

Probably.

Whereas Seth, Daniel and others were just individuals with little means to hit back. Screw 'em. It has been repeatedly established that Jimbo takes no responsibility for the monster he unleashed on us, and shifts his position on core issues at a whim.

So he's forgotten all about Daniel Brandt then?

....and Don Murphy and lots of other people too...

I don't that this was a huge security issue, but it was big enough for the UN to notice. I can't imagine that this "The UN's security is not our problem" attitude was a big hit with them. Now, I'm curious: are there other instances when diplomatic incidents (as this probably almost was) and intelligence, military and/or state secrets have been compromised by WP? I don't think that this is the first time. It seems that probably, before, OFFICE was able to take care of these.

It would seem however that the OFFICE does not have as much power as they used to, and COMMUNITY CONSENSUS is beginning to take over that part of the operation...

When you get a bunch of teenagers saying "we don't care what the UN thinks", what happens? Where is this going?

The possibilities are endless....

This Jimbo character is the same guy who deleted an article about the Arch Coal company, which nobody asked him to delete, and which was installed in Wikipedia by a reputable user who had no conflict of interest whatsoever. Jimbo called it "corporate spam", even though the company had no knowledge whatsoever of the article's creation.

The Arch Coal article was nothing more than an experiment to test Jimbo's character, and we all see how that panned out. Predictably unpredictable.

The man really needs to leave the Wikipedia project and resign from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors. He adds nothing but these wishy-washy (good phrase, fieryangel), unpredictable soliloquies that cause more harm and chaos and drama than repair, order, and calm.

And I'm actually biting my tongue right now, withholding what I'd really like to say about him.

Greg

One of the side effects of WP is to undermine shared institutions, either by design or by accident. And Jimbo isn't going to give much of a damn about that. It serves his ideology.

Actually — this is one of the lessons of the Essjay-NYT embroglio and the Zoe-NIU fiasco — Bubble Boy Jimbo strikes me as being well aware of just how little a prick from the Real World it would take to burst his bubble in a final fantasy flash of soap operatic suds.

Too bad most of the other Wikipediots haven't clued into this yet —

Rood awikening ahead for the not so wishi-washi wiki-wakis …

Jonny

Oh, they never meant that stuff to be a serious barrier to the whims of the "community."

Most of the articles still exist: Correction: 9 articles still exist (24 were deleted)

Teresa_Heinz (notable in other ways)
Jeffrey_Tao
Alberto_Reyes
Elisabeth_Heyward
Pavel_Palazhchenko
Igor_Korchilov
Jean_Herbert
United_Nations_Interpretation_Service
United_Nations_Art_Collection
Category:United_Nations_interpreters

I am not sure what to make of all of this. It seems like, for the most part, Wikipedia is content to keep the articles, in spite of a lack of permission.

An example of an older edit that was undone is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=161198935

Yes, it seems that they weren't deleted at all.

And this is what he got for nominating them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rod...letion_requests

So is the position here that it's ridiculous that the articles exist, ridiculous that the articles should be deleted, or that Jimbo's statement is ridiculous?

I can't see why these are problematic on the surface - this is the type of article that can make Wikipedia into a great resource - subjects that a traditional encyclopedia can't touch, but are still of significant importance and detail.

And here is the complete list, including those that are deleted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rodsan18...elated_subjects

Deleted list:

Secretariat News
United Nations Tour Guide
Jesús Baigorri Jalón
Tuan-Li Diana Liao
Brigitte Andreassier-Pearl
Elena Howard
Raul Galer
Stephen Pearl
Hossam Fahr
Ashraf Kamal
Ruojin Wang
Coralie Ress de Tomassi (proposed - added to List of UN interpreters
Silvia Maginnis
Nora Weiss
Jacqueline Mitchell
Jean Neuprez
James P. Nolan
Vyvyan Pinches
Guillermo Suro
Monique Fong Wust
Donald Lineburgh
Robert Confino
Anthony Mango
Lynn Visson
Edith Macherez

Ergo, it seems that my earlier comment was misinformed. They do seem to have deleted most. But still left a number.

Many of them were deleted by Eliminator JR:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...minatorJR&page=


The position by those above is that it is ridiculous that the articles were deleted, when other similar ones weren't. That they should be deleted for everyone.


Look at the articles that weren't deleted and see if you think they are useful.

PS for those confused User:Rodsan18 signs his name as Dragonbite.

The count is 24 deleted, 9 kept.

It's ridiculous that people in WP are putting process before UN security issues. All of these articles should have been immediately deleted, no questions asked, at the beginning of this discussion.

Or do you REALLY think that WP process is more important than the UN?

Oh, and Jimbo's statement is ridiculous too because it says nothing. He should have said "delete them all", of course. It's the UN, after all!

As usual, Wikipediots are too busy harbouring people with wikiportfolios to worry about people with real portfolios.

Jonny

This is Wikipedia Review, after all, so the answer is "all of the above... even if they contradict one another!"



Who made the UN a world dictatorship that gets to override freedom-of-speech provisions in national constitutions?

Who made Jimbo Wales an evangelist to undermine freedom-of-speech provisions in various national constitutions? And further, I don't live under any National Constitution. But I've still got to deal with his crap.

On the Wiki-en list, Peter B Monahon sets out a manifesto for the WP insiders. He begins by quoting Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which pertain to freedom of speech, and then requests that WP "stand up for Tor operators who get abused". Monahan's fairly innocuous looking set of statements actually betray an ideology that sits at the root of the WP movement.

This ideology believes that WP should be performing a function to free individuals from what they perceive to be the stifling power of their respective states. Westerners sitting at their PCs in Oregon believe that WP provides an opportunity to challenge those mean censors in China and elsewhere. Internet entrepreneurs sitting by their pools in Florida believe that they know better than those foreign state bureaucrats in their bland uniforms.

I wish, Squeak Box

And how many times do we have to tell you to read this section of WP:'SNOT?

The answer is blowin' in yer nose —

Or out a WP:ORFICE of yer own choosing …

Jonny

Oh, my, Daniel is in blowhard mode.

Maybe I didn't evaluate this situation carefully enough, but am I correct in understanding that the ORIGINAL author of these articles was a UN employee who later thought better about the wisdom of including somewhat private information about other employees at that institution, so s/he asked to have these articles (s/he created) removed from Wikipedia?

How is that a constitutional issue, Daniel? Sounds more like a "common-courtesy-to-an-individual-volunteer-helping-you-with-your-harebrained-project" to me.

Greg

What is Mensa, and why is DT giving it such a BADNAME ???

I mean, where would any ½-way sentient life-form get the idea that Wikipedia supports Free Speech?

All aside from the fact that DT apparently lacks the reading comprehension to make it ½-way through WP:'SNOT, he then proceeds to wikiplump himself here — in a Forum that would not even exist if Wikipedia did support Free Speech, and he cannot seem to compute the obvious inference from the data in front of his nose.

Now, what would Gandalf say about that ???

Jonny

I was thinking the same thing but was going to let it slide.

They apparently did delete most of the articles in question, but if a few of them happen to be notable people who deserve articles, they shouldn't be deleted just because somebody with the UN says so, though if there's any inappropriate private info in them that should be removed.

Libertarians (and that includes the Randroids) are essentially inconsistent anarchists. They hate local government and hate federal government even more but reserve special scorn for the very notion of global government. After all, government is inherently evil because it dares to interfere with the free market, and global government gives you nowhere to hide.

Having said that, I think we shouldn't necessarily attribute to ideology what can be accounted for by hubris. Jimbo just thinks that his virtual kingdom is above the petty limitations of the real world. I don't know that it would ever occur to him that there's something wrong with ignoring the safety of real people.

Al

I don't disagree, and hubris is the term we repeatedly return to when referring to Der Jimbo. However, it takes someone with a certain background to ignore the "petty limitations of the real world" in the first place. Someone like fellow Rand devotee Dan Tobias for instance.

And as spoken by that noble preacher Fred Bauder only the other day

I know it's an open secret among us Wikipedia Review Old-Timers (WROT's), but since I see so many new names on the Jousting Lists these days I probably ought to drop a hint that the only reason why we berate our beloved DT so constantly is precisely so that he can remain in good standing in the Halls of the Mountebank King Jimbo.

Joust between us, of course …

Jonny

Point taken. Rather than asking whether it's Randism or hubris, we should consider whether the hubris is a result of the Randism.

Still, I haven't formed an opinion on dtobias and I'm not sure I need to. I've at least seen him say things that seem semi-sane by contrast with the WP PTB.



Yes, Randists are idealists, not pragmatists. They start with certain "self-evident" principles and ignore the consequences, even when they wind up with absurd positions.

For example, Rand claimed to be anti-racism but consistency forced her to simultaneously oppose racism by the government while endorsing the right of corporations to be blatantly racist. Does it make sense? I don't see how, but that hardly matters.

Al