Meanwhile back in Gerardland, David is now claiming that "my main concern is the serious defamation."

K.

Why, I wonder? Dave's never been concerned about the consequences of his defamatory WP-related writings in the past... I doubt that Andrew Landeryou is going to sue Dave over this, since they're in different countries, and he's already gotten some publicity out of it. Admittedly, English libel law is stricter than Australia's, but the cost of conducting an international lawsuit of that nature is likely to be prohibitive.

"Bound by policy"? Silly Kelly, that's not how we do things over at our anarcho-libertarian Randian paradise.

DeeGee feels he's been defamed? Well, poo on that. I've been trying to convince Jimmy to get Wikipedia to stop hosting defamatory comments about me for years, and I've gotten nowhere with that (at best he just promises to "look into it", which is Jimbospeek for "Go away, leave me alone.") No reason I can think of for DeeGee to get better treatment.

Give me one recent instance where Jimmy has "dictated" anything, and anyone paid the blindest bit of notice?

So is he making some sort of veiled legal threat?

He also thanks Everyking for his ''wise counsel''. He can be polite when it serves his purpose, as well as extremely sarcastic.

Either Jimbo has some kind of approval from arbcom to use checkuser/oversight on enwiki, or (being the founder/god-king and all) he is exempt from needing said approval. I don't know which of these is true and I don't reckon it makes any difference.

I'm only saying that since enwiki has an arbcom, and since this arbcom does not allow the assignment of these enwiki user-rights at the discretion of any outsider (steward), it is not an unreasonable expectation for Special:Listusers/checkuser to in fact be an exhaustive list of individuals allowed to use this tool on enwiki.

And no, that doesn't mean they have to use it, or that it should be removed from anyone for "inactivity". As far as I'm concerned even the slight possibility that somebody is monitoring the top-secret logs for cases of abuse (enter Smith and Jones) is reason enough to let them continue lurking with the tool, plus someday they might need it.

On arbcom-free "frontier justice" wikis (those fully open to steward intervention) no similar expectation would exist, and none of this would matter. I'm not sure how Lar's interpretation of this (to mean that stewards should permanently retain every access level on every project, just because they can) is anything more than a straw-man.

I agree; I was rebutting Lar's point.

Jimbo does have Arbcom permission for Oversight, see Meta request.

Ah, thanks.

That's fine provided he doesn't confuse people by switching it on and off for no apparent reason.

Or even worse, switching it on and off for reasons that actually are apparent.

Recent? Now, you know that he's not doing it on IRC or in some other public-readable area. Remember this? He learned his lesson. Now he does his backstabbing (and his butt-suckers do their sucking) more quiet-like. No more "let them eat cake", just whispering.


That's more like it. Thank you.

Actually, that was the admin irc channel, which was supposed to be confidential. You should have seen them go apeshit when they realized an admin on that channel was leaking logs. The next log is even more impressive - Jimbo basically saying he fired Sanger for cause, and calling on his army of admins to do his dirty work at Larry_Sanger (T-H-L-K-D). Seems to me like a pretty solid case of defaming Sanger's professional reputation.

I think I made that point so badly that no one understands it.

Let me try again. The DerHexer incident notwithstanding, if there is a dire enough CU (or OV) emergency and no en:wp CU (or OV, respectively) to be found, any steward can and will turn on the CU (or OV, respectively) bit and do what needs doing. Exceedingly rare, but not in any way against policy. (but the steward better have had a darn good reason or a shitstorm will ensue)

So unless every steward left their CU bit on all the time, on en:wp anyway, Special:Listusers/checkuser will not ever be an exhaustive list of individuals allowed to use this tool by policy. Ditto OV. Because it would omit the stewards. Who are allowed to use the tool by policy.

I think it's silly to suggest that all stewards leave their bits on, but since there is no other way to do that exhaustive list thing, it's not actually a straw man argument I don't think, it's a rebuttal via reductio ad absurdum. (1)

1 - well, the text that is displayed for Special:Listusers/checkuser could be modified to remind you to go look on meta to see the list of stewards and give you the link, so that by addition you yourself could construct the list.



Ah, there's the rub... that's a false assumption. Broken out for emphasis. No Arbcom has the authority to do that (in emergency situations... if the emergency is dire enough).

Okay, has anyone provided a definition of "darn good reason" in this context?

Surely, I would have thought redacting a user's suspected personal info would fall into this category, even if it later proves to be a (very amusing) false alarm, as in the case of…

Guys, will you just knock it off already Not only are you getting all holier-than-thou about David Gerard, but you're also messing about with his family who have nothing to do with this.

I'm no massive fan of David 'skull dancing' Gerard, but this is just wrong. BTW - there aren't a whole lot of admins who had the cojones to deal with this particular nuisance, but David was one of then who did. Kudos and respect to him for doing that

Once again, all three members of David's "family" are completely open about their living arrangement, so I see no problem with the initial question (I wondered myself, though I would have used the term "girlfriend" rather than "concubine"). Be angry at David and/or Liz and/or Arkady if you don't like the idea of a man living with his wife and his girlfriend/best man/baby mama, not at us.

I do think bringing the "bridesmaid" into the thread was unnecessary.

I would say it would be wrong if anyone posted the child's name, pic or any other information. But not what's been said here. This is more "we make the world anew without regard to convention, rules, morals etc" and if you don't like it then "let's skulldance." Besides if I can't say "concubine" here, when do I ever get to say it?

I use the term "baby mama" all the time. It's so much cooler than "child's mother". Not in front of anyone I mind offending, though. I don't see it as an offensive term, but some people do.

Like I say, we'll remove the references if he asks, but he's got quite a few other things to remove himself, preferably before he asks others to do likewise. And like GBG says, we're not referring to the little tyke directly...

Still, whenever I see things like that I'm reminded of the Kathie Lee Gifford (T-H-L-K-D) story. In 1995 she wrote a book entitled Listen to My Heart: Lessons in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy, essentially a memoir of her first 2-3 years raising her son Cody. Unfortunately, the book is little more than her fulminating at great length about how "cute" Cody is (or was), including his propensity to "poop" on things, such as (in most cases) himself. You can still find the book on amazon.com, the page for which includes a Publisher's Weekly review containing a reference to the poop-related content, and two hilarious (though short) customer reviews, one of which reads thusly:
In effect, Kathie Lee transferred her extreme-narcissistic psychological issues onto her son by proxy, published a book which inadvertently detailed it (without no self-realization whatsoever), and in so doing saddled the poor boy with an account of his childhood toilet-training issues that will follow him for the rest of his life.

Thankfully, there's no account of this book (or any of her other books) in Kathie Lee's Wikipedia article, nor is it mentioned on her personal website. Cody is now 19 and hopefully doing well, but who knows how much hell he had to endure growing up because of this?

I can only hope Dave, and other parents, learn from this and try to keep details of their children's development private. He wasn't doing a good job of that around the time of his own child's birth, but to be fair, he seems to have done a lot better since then.

Everyone poops.

Uh, best not to give 'em any ideas eh?


Starring Al Yankovic as Michael Stipe.

Paging Dr. Moulton…

Now what?

Looks like all mention of this is about to disappear....

Looks like Gerard kissed the right ass to have the "defamation" removed....

Quote some text, please, for those of us trapped on BlackBerry!

It looks like Risker has oversighted the whole ordeal, on Gerard's talkpage, and the discussion on the arbcom noticeboard.

No text - that's just it. A bunch of revisions to David Gerard's talk page appear to have been revision deleted.

For sure. A mother's obscessive fascination with her baby's poop would be SO unusual; it would probably overwhelm the rest of the article.

David has always been fond of censorship, except when it comes to obscene images.

Child Porn is information that needs to be free. Embarrassing comments about DG, not so much.

David has always been very fond of playing with himself, this inevitably leads some to label him an irredeemable wanker. Such a label though would be rather unfair, as I'm sure given enough counselling he could be redeemed.

Here's David censoring information about his beloved super secret admins-irc channel, (you know - the very same one where Jimbo went to round up his posse of admins to go demolish Sanger's bio). And here's Gerard protecting it, to make sure the censorship sticks.

Oh, and you're gonna love this. When the case went to the arbcom, Gerard hid behind closed doors and presented his defense in secret, by virtue of his membership on the arbcom mailing list, which none of the other parties to the case had. Needless to say, Gerard got a pass, and the arbcom took full advantage of the opportunity to demonstrated what a joke they were.

But you are absolutely right, GBG, Gerard loves censoring except when it comes to obscenity, like pictures of men sucking their own wieners. For example, when discussing images on the Autofellatio page, Gerard threatens; "If this looks like becoming the Jesusland Extremely Abridged Encyclopedia, I will be out of here."

Is this your roundabout way of calling David Gerard a cocksucker?

So David Gerard can get vaguely defamatory comments about himself disappeared, but the volumes of stuff that is equally defamatory of me gets, at best, courtesy blanked (and most of it just sits around in archives for anyone to read).

I suppose I should send Mike Godwin a letter or something, the numerous discussions I've had with King Jimmy have been decisively unproductive.

I'd go with the "or something". It'll be a surprise for Mr. Godwin, though not necessarily a pleasant one.

You hit it on the head, so to speak.

Okay: There is a motion from the floor to rename WP to:

The Jesusland Extremely Abridged Encyclopedia

Second? Benefits are obvious. The crew from Exodus (1960 film) that hangs around the place would probably be annoyed at this, and leave also.

I never quite did get a good reason why an admin can't named Nipple37 but the 'pedia can have a complete article on autofellatio (which, if I am not mistaken involves sucking a tailpipe, as Republicans are wont to encourage rather than do something about global warming).

Look at it this way: unless you go into "edit" mode, you never even SEE usernames, right? So what would it matter if they were all obscene? But there are plenty of oportunities to see [[autofellatio]] in a regular article, even if you weren't particularly looking for porn or exotica. I'm tempted to see what links to it-- is there any way to do that easily?

Is there a chance that [[autofellatio]] links only to itself?


Since Gerard's powers to do this kind of thing are suspended, who is doing this stuff for him? Inquiring minds want to know. Jimbo himself?

Nevermind autofellatio. Somebody's doing Gerard, and he's doing somebody in return. Who?

This link is all incoming links to the article. This link is only articles that link to "Autofellatio."

Email me a list. Assuming I decide to keep my checkuser and oversight privileges, I'll give it a fair review.

I think Lar has oversight on Commons

It's a very long list. There's hundreds of instances of people on Wikipedia speaking of me in a defamatory way. SlimVirgin and Irpen are two of the worst violators.

I've heard rumors that there's a right kerfuffle within the Inner Cabal, which views this as an Old Guard/New Guard sort of thing: the new guard (which controls the arbcom now) is "cleaning house" of the old guard, which includes David. The reason for removal was a pretext (ask everyking how that works if you don't get it). Reportedly the revision hidings were flat-out ordered by Mike Godwin. Whether Jimbo going involved is an open guess at this point.

If that's true, when people ask ArbCom why the edits were deleted, ArbCom should simply answer, "Ask Mike Godwin."

The problem then is one of scope. Consider one bad comment that was visible on a page for a week before it was archived. I could suppress the diff itself, so no one could link directly to the comment, and the archive could be cleaned up fairly painlessly, but hiding the comment in every revision it appears could involve suppressing dozens or hundreds of edits per comment. I'll still look if you want me to, but suppressing something is easiest if it is reverted right away and gets progressively harder the longer the text hangs around.

I won't believe that Mike Godwin is involved at all until such time that Gerard's name, listed twice on this Foundation page, is deleted. That's absolutely the most obvious thing that Godwin should do at this point. But I suspect that Godwin isn't even trying to do his job on this issue.

Meh, there's no such thing as being "forced" to do anything. If they disagree strong enough they can always resign en-masse.

How Nazi-like!

And the peasants are mad as hell.

You'd thing Mike Godwin would have more important things to do, like addressing the problem of Wikipedia giving minors the responsibility of administering porn.

he didn't seem so concerned with the serious defamation of Judd Bagley on Wikipedia.

I think we have to assume that Andrew Landeryou actually did call in some US-based attorneys to act on his behalf with the Foundation. There isn't much else that would explain this kind of activity by these particular individuals... is there? I wouldn't think just an e-mail would do it, there would have to be a letter or a phone call from an actual attorney.

IMO it's conceivable that they may give DG his access privileges back, at least for the time being, in order to avoid the appearance of having punished him, as this might be taken as an admission of wrongdoing. But I'd only give it a 10-20 percent chance, personally.

No, that doesn't sound too plausible.... The cat's already out of the bag if they're trying to protect themselves by protecting Gerard.

More likely that Gerard whined to the right people about being "defamed" by the arbcom, and him and his buddies got the arbcom to back down.