I guess this must have already been said, but I couldn't see much sign of the debate if so just now... so...

the best way to 'clip the wings' of the anonymous psychopaths, social rejects and spies is simply to say, if they want to be a 'public figure', taking decisions that affect people, causing nervous types to have breakdowns, twisting the information to fit personal, corporate or 'national' agenda - then they have to forgo their cloak of invisibility.

If they want to be anonymous, they have to stay humble wikiusers like the rest of humanity.

We have often discussed this. It doesn't work, though; plenty of the people we object to most strongly have well-known real-life identities. Some even use their real names as user names.

Mind giving me the rundown? I know there's Cberlet and Dking...who else is controversial?

Other admins who are frequently criticized on this site and also non-anonymous include JzG, David Gerard, Will Beback, Elonka, and Raul654. Then there are former admins Durova and JoshuaZ. Broadening the definition of "non-anonymous" somewhat, you get SlimVirgin. And, of course, there's Jimbo.

Cberlet and Dking will never be admins, because they piss off too many people at the project; their POV-pushing is clumsy and belligerent, unlike the smoother operators like SV who cultivate a lot of allies, and cloak their insults in Wikilawyerese.

Guy is referring to admins who may not be "notable," but make no effort to conceal their real-life indenties.

You'd fall into that category too.

Tony Sidaway

Hmmm... but there's thousands of admins - many of them no doubt the same person. All the decisions are taken by groups of admins some of whom are anonymous even if some are supposedly 'out of the shadows'. And getting rid of anonymity would start to undercut the activities of cliques...?

That I will disagree with. I find it highly unlikey that many of the wikipedia admins are sockpuppets.

FeloniousMonk, KillerChihuahua, and now two new names: Blueboy96 and Toddst1.

Many prominent Wikipedians -- good, bad, and hard-to-classify (where do I fit?) -- use their real names. Still, the paranoid hysteria over "outing" those who choose to conceal their real name is a particularly annoying part of the site culture. It's like some of the members think of themselves as superheroes with secret identities, and they and their friends go to excessive lengths to try to protect those identities. (But, back in the Silver Age of comics, when Superman went to excessive lengths to protect his identity, he had "good friends" like Lois Lane who tried their best to be evil, slimy "outers"! [But "their best" wasn't particularly good, since everybody in the Silver Age of comics was a moron.]) It gets very silly when "anonymous" Wikipedians go around sending e-mails under their real names to involve themselves in Wikipedia-related issues, or even let themselves get interviewed on Internet radio shows under their real name, but it's still a horrible offense to mention that name on Wikipedia.

----------------
Now playing: Bangles - Complicated Girl
via FoxyTunes

Jeez, turn it around and ask "What admins are contraversial/problematic and anonymous?" and I don't think I could come up with that many names.

Am I criticized around here much? Greg tore a few strips off me at the beginning of the nomination period for the WMF Board elections, when everything I was saying was inaccurate, but I don't think I've ever seen any of my admin actions questioned here. I don't read every forum, but I suspect I'd noticed that.



I agree with Viridae on this - I don't think it's likely. There are probably one or two instances among the 1100 or so active admins, but I doubt there are more.



How?



I thought of him after, under former admins. I also thought of Georgewilliamherbert, Fred Bauder, and Jpgordon.





Jayjg's easily the most complained-about admin to successfully remain anonymous. FT2 is still anonymous too, right? Or am I just paying insufficient attention?

Requiring people to link there actions and statements to IRL identities generally makes them want to avoid shameful, destructive and irresponsible conduct and statements. For those that it fails to deter it provides an avenue for accountability for defamation, copyright vios, misconduct toward children, misrepresentation, academic improprieties etc.

Dunno about FT2, though I don't think he's nearly as contraversial as the named "known person" admins, or other known identity admins I could name (Bauder, for instance, or Danny). And if I think about it, I can name a few more contraversial anonymous admins - Ryulong,Crum375, FeloniusMonk, Viridae (who doesn't get criticized much here, but must realistically be considered contraversial). Maybe it's more like 50-50, but I don't think that's the rate among uncontraversial admins.

Of course, ArbCom could select the "desysop them all from orbit" option in the Omnibus case. That'd cut a good chunk out. But likely they will not.

Will Beback is not his real name. Someone "outed" him here at the Review a few years back, and he immediately sent an email demanding that the personal info be deleted. It was.

And the flip side is that some of the most influential users are not admins anyway. I speak of super users like Cberlet, MONGO, Durova, and to a lesser extent Orangemarlin, Tony Sidaway, ect.

I suspect many admins maintain sockpuppets and use them illegitimately, but I share Viridae's suspicion that few admin socks exist.

3 of those are desysopped or retired in controversial circumstances

Right. My point is that desysopping them won't help. Moreover, one can attain the status of POV-pusher in residence without the bit. If anything, it makes their job easier (less being hauled into ArbCom for "abusing the tools").

It would depend on what the so-called cliques are doing and who's in them, wouldn't it? In some cases it might actually bolster their activities. In other words, if you could use the identities of cliquers to prove that there's some agenda-driven promotionalism or COI going on, then yes, you'd probably undercut them. But if you couldn't, i.e., it turned out that all the cliquers are Pure as the Driven Snow™ or even that they're well-respected experts in their fields (or whatever), then you'd only be hosing yourself, at least as far as content disputes are concerned.

Obviously, the more controversial the subject matter, and I do emphasize that controversial is spelled with an "o," the more likely it is that the cliquers are agenda-driven. But you'd also have to be careful about the nature of the agenda - with something like Intelligent Design, for example, you're not likely to get much sympathy once you cross over from criticism of blatantly rotten-apple edit-warring tactics into actually saying things in support of ID itself. So the cliquers are going to do everything they possibly can to convince others that the latter is your own "real" agenda, no matter how false that may be.

{{Weasel}}

The last time someone called someone an alien here was Lir to Poetlister, and look what happened then.

Yep, like Dorftrottel puts it, in the email to Wikigiraffes quoted elsewhere on the Review:

"* You have inserted an outing attack on a Wikipedia editor, which is
absolutely positively impossible *regardless of anything else* and are
*rightly* indefinitely blocked for it."

Funny thing, still seems okay when Slim does it: viz:

"I would appreciate more eyes on this, and some administrative help if necessary.
Julian Baggini (edit |talk |history |links |watch |logs )is a British philosopher and writer that I created a stub in 2005. In June 2006, Docmartincohen  ( talk  ·contribs ) — who was engaged in a non-notable, real-life dispute with Baggini — added some unsourced and poorly sourced material about that dispute, in violation of BLP. "

That is clearly to say that user docmartincohen is one particular Martin Cohen who Baggini (and evidently now Slim) dislikes. Not content with one offence, Slim then goes on to 'out' Wikigiraffes as also 'docmartincohen' or 'linked in some way'. Yup, like Slim is linked in some way to Linda Mack, only no one can say that! An admin called 'Wizardman' noted this discrepancy and put a query by it, saying the above ought to be investigated - but then Slim's 'outing attack' mysteriously disappered, leaving only Wizardman's query. Someone then posted the quote back on Wizardman's page but just 3 minutes later! it too had disappeared.

Is this a record!

As far as I know,all references to it have been cleaned away except in cached pages.
There, the smoking gun, so to speak is:

SlimVirgin talk| edits 20:08, 9 June 2008 (UTC) BLP noticeboard "

Personally, I think Slim's guess is no big deal. The hypocrisy is the thing!

Now the thing about Superman's Complicated Girlfriends is that they all had the same initials — Lana Lang, Lois Lane, Lorelei Lemaris. (And, of course, so did his arch-enemy, Lex Luthor).

So it's particularly delicious and ironic that it was LaraLove who asked me the fateful question that led back FM's evil slimy outing escapade.

Ah, another excellent question.

What happens now?

Let me explain why it never fazed me that FM 'outed' me in that snippet from the International Digest Forum of World Crossing.

You see, the detail of linking an avatar name to a real name isn't what significant (to me) about FM's Scathing Indictments.

Nope, nope, nope.

What is significant to me is who FM is relying on as his sources.

Now whenever a Wikipedian goes off-site for sources for a non-article space biographical sketch, there are certain requirements to be met. They go by such acronyms as WP:RS and WP:V. (I first learned about this from Filll and Hrafn, among others.)

In the above cited biographical sketch, FM relies on quotes from 'gotham', 'Bela', and 'notluom', (aka 'SimHacker' on Slashdot), who orchestrated a dramatic takedown of 'Moulton' on Slashdot after only 31 posts, the last 24 of which occurred over a two-day period in April of 2006.

It's instructive to discover how and why he did that.

And it's even more instructive to discover the next astonishing fact about 'notluom'/'SimHacker'.

But that revelation will have to wait for another episode of this remarkable opera.

From today's colloquy at the RfC/ID discussion..


The cite is actually in Post #25, directly above this one.

Yes, it's true the FM linked my full name to my WP avatar name on-wiki, in a single tight paragraph that quickly became available to anyone doing a Google search. I had scrupulously avoided using my surname on-wiki so that no one doing a simple Google search of a Wikipedia page would see a concordance like that in a single tight paragraph.

I have no objection to collaborating editors on-wiki following off-wiki links to validate my bona fides. What I object to is publishing a concordance of avatar names and real names in a tight paragraph that a stranger might see in a single Google snippet whilst skimming or searching Wikipedia pages. FM was the first person on-wiki to publish such a concordance, soon followed by Dava Souza doing the same thing.

What's needed now is a review by impartial responsible officials to examine all three cases — my Answers to Filll's 8 Questions at RfC/ID, FM's Evidence Page where he republishes on-wiki the comments he gleaned from forums at World Crossing, and Dave Souza's republication on-wiki of a concordance displaying my WP avatar name with the name I am known by in academia.

Um, I have to say this is splitting hairs. If WP [[user:Mo]] happily says on WP that he's a real life researcher and his professional CV can be found at this link to htttpwww.joeblow.com, and that link indeed turns up the professional CV of Joe Blow, all cites included, you can hardly blame other editors if they occasionally refer to the Mo guy as Joe Blow. And as for putting Mo and Joe Blow in ONE paragraph where Google can "find" it, well, considering that there's a whole page of Mo essays on the Web with plenty of links of Joe Blow also, this has to be the world's worst kept secret that was supposed to be a secret, you know? Just assume that Google can be one click away from doing what a curious human would do. That's not such a bad assumption, you know.

Mil

It is very curious that Some People just cannot get it through their heads that there are many valid reasons other than deception and disingenuity for a single person to maintain distinct authorships, say, as reflected in noms de plume and screen names. And that respecting these is a simple matter of courtesy that is wholly independent of whether one knows the person's real name or not.

Jon

Milton, just as there may be many different "Miltons" on many different Internet sites (some of whom may be the same real person), there are many Moultons on the Internet besides the handful of Moultons which happen to be me. I've used the name Moulton on MicroMuse and a few other MUDs and Muses (most of which no longer exist). I've used Moulton on a few discussion forums, some of which no longer exist.

I generally don't go around publishing concordances identifying all the sites where I have avatars of one name or another, linking them all back to a single real person.

I don't mind if those with whom I am collaborating on a site learn of my other appearances, but I don't expect them to go around publishing concordances that any random stranger can find with nothing more than a trivial Google search on any minor subset of my various avatar names and associated Internet venues.

On most sites, doing so is a serious violation of privacy.

I didn't say there weren't. I am saying that two of the hardest things to keep track of in a piece of knowledge are where you first learned it, and (with some obvious exceptions) whether or not you're "supposed to" know it.

At Bletchley Park, which we were discussing in another thread, they had a particularly useful technique. After the person had finished signing the documents swearing themselves to secrecy, the security man pulled out a pistol and pointed it at their heads and said "And if you tell anyone about this place, I PERSONALLY will kill you."

This worked well enough that nobody said anything for a generation.

The easy way to solve the problem is to simply refer to somebody by the name they are using in a given context.

So, for example, when Filll posed his 8 questions, I referred to him as Filll, with the exception of a portion of the answer to Question 5, where he asked about Picard's responses to E-Mail messages. In that answer, I was obliged to refer to the sender of the E-mail by the name that sender used when contacting Picard, since that is the name she (and Alexandra Kahn) know the sender by. And that is the name of the person to whom Picard responded.

Friday night, when I was at the Picards playing D&D with her husband and son, I asked Roz if she knew who 'Filll' was. She said she had never heard of anyone by that name. But she did recognize the name of the person who had sent all those annoying E-Mails to her and to Alexandra Kahn last August.

Indeed. I've hear rumours of another Guy on a site that is occasionally mentioned here.

Absolutley, it's an important part of the philosophical and literary world, not to forget special appearences in science.

And there may be an etiquette involved in respecting strategies, but it surely must be no more than that - etiquette. Like if I want to put peas in my mouth with the fork, I should not be banned from Wikipedia!

Etiquette, by definition, is a voluntary contract.

For instance, Eric Temple Bell and John Taine, or the numerosity of Kierkegaard's authorships.

But all of these literary liberties and poetic licenses are normally exercised in due observance of the customs and practices that govern their sensible use, and nothing about these conventions makes it somehow immoral to spill the beans of true origins when any reason to do so prevails on their domain of application.

Courtesy and etiquette make sense only under conditions of respectful reciprocity. The instant that someone starts using a pseudonym as a duckblind from which to take pot-shots at others — well, that is a different field of action, and the kid gloves come off.

Jon

Yes, I couldn't agree more and generally I work to respect appropriate use of screen names. Of course this has limits. A screen name is appropriate as a shield but never a sword. It is at its height of legitimacy and is deserving of the greatest respect if used to voice dissent while on the short end of an unequal power relationship. It is never appropriate in the exercise of authority. If a person opts for a screen name they must leave all credentials at the door.

Finally because it is a matter of courtesy and respect anyone offended by its breach ought to keep this in perspective and not manufacture a bunch of felonies.

Science fiction author James Tiptree, Jr. was "outed" as Alice Sheldon by fans doing detective work in a manner that would be regarded as evil stalking if done in a Wikipedian context.

With respect to the "outings" festival that FM, Dave Souza, and I engaged in last week, I have sent the following suggestion off to a handful of responsible Wikipedians. If anyone else here would have liked to have been on the list, consider this to be an open letter.


Please refer to Posts #25 and #26 above, for the balance of the message.