"Due to the recent actions of Wikipedia administrator Joshua Zelinsky (aka User:JoshuaZ), this website will no longer hide its "Editors" forum from searchbots. All publicly-viewable material about Wikipedia users will, from now on, also be listed and indexed on all major search engines."

That's a LOT of threads for Google to hit. This site is gonna get a lot, LOT more views.

What are the recent actions of JoshuaZ, exactly? Does this have something to do with Brandt?

Probably, and when isn't he dicking around with lax BLPness?

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...837&#entry66837

Or if you prefer to go straight to the smoking gun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Xol...dt_Housekeeping

It should be noted that Zelinsky did this all on his own, without asking anyone, getting "consensus," or anything. At the very least, he should have worked it out in advance with Xoloz and Doc_glasgow, and preferably recused himself, given his past history with the article.

A lot of Wikipedia usernames are going to be a lot more Googleable after the next week or so, and it's all going to be on his head, as it should be. There's no other causative factor whatsoever, other than our unwillingness to let him just get away with it without consequences.

Despite the good faith efforts of people from Wikipedia, Joshua Zelinsky did his utmost to prevent the peace-making closure of the article (a 2 year long coming procedure) not happen. He fought like an animal to prevent that the next stage didn't complete (and forced them to have a next state, called a Deletion Review).

When the consensus called for "Merge" Joshua Zelinsky, JoshuaZ took it upon himself to harass the closing editor, to try to inhibit the final clusure of it.

Joshua. Please. When you grow up finish Yale Law School. Please don't go into politics.

Joshua Zelinsky is an infant. If people become angry at Wikupedia Review for publishing the names section of the site (which is previously hidden out of courtesy) then please they should speak to Joshua Zelinsky. Maybe someone can get him diapers or a pacifier for a holiday gi]ft.

Yeah, I'm confused as to what exactly Josh did?

17:46, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (Talk | contribs) protected Daniel Brandt ‎ (per Xoloz [edit=sysop:move=sysop])
17:46, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (Talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" ‎ (3 revisions restored: to keep all previous logs and other issues in record)
17:45, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (Talk | contribs) moved Talk:Public Information Research/merged material to Daniel Brandt ‎ (to restore to earlier status quo. Previous breaks many links to by people linking to difs of this article in the archive and makes it hard to find, thus breaking the spirit if not the letter of the GFDL.) (revert)
17:45, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (Talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" ‎ (deleted to make way for move)


I look at the pages themselves and they're all confused.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Joshua engaged in draconian manner toward me, when it would have been far more productive and professional to engage with me in a civil conversation over the issues I raised regarding negative reframing and character assassination in BLPs.

Now it appears that Joshua is being similarly treated by some of those whom he previously treated with callous disrespect.

While the irony and the poetic justice are not lost on me, I still don't think this is the path to peace.

I still think it would behoove those in power at Wikipedia to negotiate a treaty of reconciliation and peace with those whom they have alienated in the past.

As I understand, JoshBot restored the article history, which had been blanked by other editors based on community consensus and long negotiations.

By doing so, he has opened up all previous revisions of the Daniel Brandt article to viewing -- they had been hidden when the article history was deleted.

In other words, he's proven (again) that at Wikipedia, "consensus" = "whoever last hit the edit button".

Wikipedia cannot really be a consensus community, because it's in the throes of multiple adversarial encounters that keep reverting it back to the gaming culture featuring multiple competing factions.

To my mind, the only practical way to manage such a culture is through the medium of a social contract. Other large open source projects have successfully adopted that regulatory structure, which provides best practices for peaceably resolving otherwise contentious disputes.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Wikipedia eschewed that model for something considerably less functional.

JoshuaZ is a member here. However, he's never posted. Let him defend himself here if he cares to.

Let the sunshine in and let there be light.

He's also welcome to join Odd Nature and others who have chosen to engage in dialog with me on my blogs.

I'd be glad to converse with him about Georg Cantor or Douglas Hofstadter.

Usually how it goes is no other administrator goes and says "hey this is wrong" and instead they all silently go along with it.

Open note to AW:

Thanks to you, I think I'll skip the effort of arguing
with these people about whether or not to hide
the Editors forum from Google. Great work!

AB

Who is "AW", and what did they do?

I know this goes against the party line here to even say it, but aren't the people here on Wikipedia Review being a bit hypocritical when they insist that Wikipedians are being downright evil by restoring the revision history of the Daniel Brandt article (which they're doing on the grounds that content from it has been merged elsewhere and thus the revision history must be in place to comply with crediting requirements of the copyright license), while meanwhile Wikipedians are being downright evil for deleting the revision history of various articles created by Jon Awbrey, whose content has been merged into other articles, and thus failing to comply with the crediting requirements of their copyright license?

Double standards are alive and well on both sides of the Wikipedia vs. Wikipedia Review divide.

That would be Andrew Lloyd Webber. AB hates that guy, enough to refuse to include his middle initial completely, and I don't blame her - Starlight Express and Cats were bad enough, but Evita - that was just unforgivable.

Admittedly, I don't know why this would preclude AB from arguing against exposing the Editors forum, or parts thereof, but I try not to get "too curious" about things like that.


Not necessarily. Remember that few people here, if any, are basing these arguments on the provisions of the GFDL, but rather on basic ethics, common decency, and pragmatism. The Brandt article was the product of over a thousand edits by over a hundred individuals; the Awbrey articles were written almost entirely by Awbrey. Awbrey's claim of authorial control is based on common publishing practice and publishing ethics, not anything to do with the license - in fact, I think he knows full well that the license can't be used to bolster his argument.

What I think most of us are saying is that the GFDL is just a bunch of words, and should not be used as an excuse for refusing to do the right thing. That's fairly consistent between the two cases, isn't it?

Maybe I should have put that in boldface...

Perhaps the most salient difference between the two cases is that the multiple anonymous authors of the biography of Brandt are not professionally trained biographers with academic credentials, governed by the ethics of biographical journalism, while Awbrey is a credentialed (if besmirched) academic who can legitimately lay claim to subject matter expertise on the work of Charles Peirce.

I hear what you're saying, Daniel. But my immediate reaction (not too well-thought-out) is that Jon Awbrey's articles centered on the logic theorems of a deceased scholar. Daniel Brandt's article is about a living human being. Surely there are differences in how we look at the two?

Greg

Not a double standard in the slightest. One involves a BLP which has been turned into a redirect, the other involves factual information written by an expert about a dead guy and his work. I don't usually disagree with you Dan, but you're not seeing the difference here.

What's more, Mr. Awbrey was asking for the material to be deleted, just as Brandt was. Guy Chapman's "solution" of merging the material he'd written into another article without proper attribution was just a deliberate attempt to piss Jon off even further, as in, "we can (and will) do whatever we want with your material, and you can't stop us."

Ok, I reeeeeeally have an opinion here, albeut it is a thesis founded and based on real life law in the U.S., where I happen to live part of the year. I have also spent a few sober 24 hours abiding by and practicing the law in the " United Snakes."

Here goes: The Brandt issue and all of the issues surrounding real live people, has/have everything to do with privacy law and rights to privacy.

Simple? No, but that is the name of that tune.

I credit my music counsel: http:www.Musiclaw1.com (he represents Clapton, Tool, and some other notable people) for helping to stop imposters of me at WP; not because I did or did not want an article, but because he saw a potential for me to be hurt by lies, vandalism, and a lack of privacy re: real life information that can and does get spread on the web via WP and other sites that have no adequate policing of their "information."

Some people chose to become me (from MySpace and Facebook.) I was in Aruba when I finally wrote an appeal to Jimmy Wales on his talk page. NYB and Isotope23 finally saw some truth in what I was saying and they deleted my user name, etc.

However, prior to my knowledge of anything happening to my good name, employees, kids, and various other people started an article, called me names, sexual inuendos, and that was the end of my time on WP, for my buddy Frank, et al. (My business adventures involve an investment firm with 120,000 employees.)

Not a soul will ever know the full history of my music work and when I started recording. That is by choice. I do not need money, but I do want and "need" privacy. I have played under different names and different identities for many years. Most of my friends in the music business (many times) travel under "fake" identities and stay at hotels using puppet names.

Our laws are changing and evolving very quickly as they pertain to privacy issues.
I suspect we will see some very successful litigation about this issue, very soon. If the vendors are not very careful, they will get a lot of hell and fury and it will cost many of them their entire business / model.

BTW...Wikipedia will not be immune to the cutting edge of the new laws. They will not be able to hide under a cloud of "charitable" anything, anymore. Their users will be tracked down and prosecuted. End of song.