Seeing as the now Tarpitted discussion has brought out pretty much every major Wikipedia editor from long-time editors to arbitrators, maybe now you all will realize it is time to take proactive steps to defend children editors on Wikipedia rather than sweeping it on the rug and saying that it is only the parents'/guardians' responsibility? Have any of you learned anything from this?

Without going into complete details, during this whole kerfuffle, I noticed a young Wikipedian declaring his age on his user page and a prominent adult (I assume adult) editor repeating the young man's age on AN. I had to ask for it to be suppressed. Yet how many instances of young editors declaring their age do not go unsuppressed or reported? Look at Simple Wikipedia. If I were a pedophile, it would be a garden for me there!

All Foundation-supported projects need to require editors to be 18 and older with technical solutions and administrative backing to ensure this is enforced. Do any of you honestly think that any Wikimedia Community will back this? The English Wikipedia Community? This will have to be done through an order from the Wikimedia Foundation if these Communities will not take steps to help keep children safe. Yes, parents and guardians and the children themselves have a responsibility, but it is our responsibility as human beings to look out for one another, especially vulnerable individuals and groups like children who do not always make the best or wisest decisions.

Is anything going to change now on Wikipedia to address this? What say you long-time editors, administrators, and arbitrators? Mmm? What say you?

Not going to happen.

The whole modus operandi of the Wikipediot confidence game is totally dependent on exploiting gullible, inexperienced, and otherwise naive people, of which children and adolescents are just one portion of the target population, all the while using women and children as human shields against any brandt of criticism.

Jon Awbrey

What exactly is the problem with someone under the age of 16 (or 18) revealing their age, in your opinion? I wish that more would be so honest, so that the kiddie admins could be cleared out.


Bollocks.

It should also be clear to you by now, Joy, that you cannot have a serious discussion about a serious issue with these infantile twerps.

Jon Awbrey

I would say there are two lines of thought here. One is what Wikipedia would need to do to best protect children and the other is what the major community focused websites on the internet do. I would put forward that requiring identification via a credit card or driver's license number is the best way to protect children since it would preclude them from Wikipedia (this isn't an argument that Wikipedia should do that, only what the most effective way would be). Also I would say that other major websites protect children with a checkbox or birthdate entry field that rejects them if they are below a certain age. While this probably satisfies legal requirements, it is rather ineffective, since any determined child will simply put in the "right" age to register an account. That the prevailing method is actually ineffective at reaching the desired goal is a reasonable argument against such a method, but it is not a reasonable argument to the current status of doing nothing.

I once encountered an incident with a pedophile on Wikipedia who was after a kid editor and it was a scary, sad experience for me. The poor kid never even realized what was going on. Thankfully it was resolved by other administrators after I and others complained. Any other time I complained about minors declaring themselves such on Wikipedia, I felt my complaints were dismissed. I'm glad that that one complaint got through and was acted upon.

I believe Wikipedia as it stands can be an avenue for sickos to prey on children. It's sad to think that such an incident must happen before anyone will do anything about it.

The Internet can be a great place and most people are good people. But there are very evil people who use Wikipedia and other websites to prey on others. I can assume the best and the worst in people. I've seen both.

Now do you see why I am angry about this?



I'll have been here three years in February. I should know better by now.

Why is that "bollocks"? It seems practically self-evident.

The fact that WP exploits gullible/inexperienced/naive people, including children, is hardly in dispute. Those people might be reasonably intellectual, and might have a certain amount of expertise in some field or other, but that in itself doesn't make them non-gullible.

As for the human shields, we've seen this time and time again - I might agree that they use it more as a means of bashing anyone who threatens to identify them, or question their group commitment to the anonymity culture, so it might be more accurate (or at least more charitable) to say they use them as shields against that particular aspect of criticism. But it seems to me that it's all bound up in one big system which many of them defend almost exclusively by casting aspersions on the critics themselves.

Having said that, IMO we're seeing improvements in that area, generally speaking, though Mr. Awbrey will probably disagree. But when these incidents involving children occur, people just lose all perspective. And like they're saying above, nobody on WP ever seems to learn from it - they mostly see it as not really being "their" problem.

The only bit of "improvement" I see coming out of that whole blasted discussion is that now we got Alison keeping vigil through the night like some frantic Little Dutch Girl trying to plug the leaks in the dykes — but the moral of that story only works if the Village Wikipediots wake up the next morning and rush to her aid —

And It Ain't Gonna Happen !!!

Jon

And what will Wikipedians do if Alison is incapacitated or goes away? There's no one else taking up the banner and, honestly, you need more than one person like Alison to clean up the mess. Requiring age verification (and I would throw in identity verification) and enforcing an age limit to participation are the best solutions to make Wikipedia more responsible.

I suppose. But let us not forget the issue of scale. Let N = number of people scouring Wikipedia for child targets, and M = number of people scouring Hivemind for child targets.

I have a sneaky suspicion that N is much, much larger than M.

Which means we could could blow up hivemind, and take Brandt out back and shoot him dead, and have his body dragged through the wiki-streets to the cheering throngs of wikipediots ... and it won't modify the threat in any significant way.

Here is the point in the previous discussion where I thought that some light might be breaking through.


But no, the true believer must scuttle back to her State Of Denial —


How many years of futile attempts at working within the system does it take a true believer to see the fundamental dynamics of the cult that will obstruct every effort toward genuine reform?

Jon Awbrey

Quite probobly, but think of it as schooling fish. Fish school because they know that while they as a whole might be a more visible target, the individual is actually safer. On WP any indvidual is one among many thousands, and while the number of potential predators attracted to it might be higher, any potential predator who is familiar with wikipedia's internal workings would know about hivemind, which then provides a useful list of potential victims, replete with full names ages and locations.

I agree.

I just don't know how to get it to happen. Changing things orders of magnitude less sweeping than that change has proven to be basically impossible.

So if it's not going to happen, what then? Perhaps what Alison(1) and others (there are many others that work in this area) do is sticking fingers in dikes at best but wouldn't it be worse if everyone just walked away?

Kylu(1) oversighted the image mentioned. I would have done it (as would any of the other Commons oversighters) if I had been around at the time or if it had been requested via the mailing list.

Should I(1) quit oversighting things entirely, because I can't solve every problem as fast as I might like?

1 - A person who has been attacked, bitterly, here and elsewhere... with charges levied that they shouldn't hold oversight, that they are unfit to even be an admin, that they have all sorts of issues... then put on Hivemind for their troubles... I wonder why they bother at all?


What makes you think that she, or I, or any other "true believer" doesn't know this? Because we are foolish enough to keep sticking fingers in dikes and trying to ameliorate things, instead of sitting back in comfort taking potshots at everything, doesn't mean we don't get it.

Lar, how many ways does this have to be pointed out to you?

Your robotic, futile efforts are perpetuating the status quo, creating more and more work for you, Alison and others.

You are working hard, but not too smart.

My suggestion: even police officers go on strike. Gather up a bunch of like-minded admins, write a demand letter to the WMF, with deadline, and then simple stop working if steps are not taken. All of you will eventually have to give up at some point, and the sooner you all realize this and use it to the advantage of those you are trying to help at the project, the better for everyone.

I realize it doesn't apply in the most recent case, but the vast majority of the people listed on Wikipedia-Watch are admins and experienced WP users. Even if we grant that many of them are immature and/or foolish, is someone who's made it past the RfA process, etc., likely to be so naive about online pedophiles and their tactics as to be victimized by one? I'm not saying it can't possibly happen, just that it seems a bit far-fetched.

IMO the most common scenario is that a known WP user/admin is going to piss somebody off, and that somebody will then try to find out who that person is so that he can make various threats, call their school/employer/whatever, and generally make life unpleasant for that person. It's a legitimate thing to be concerned about to be sure, and a terrible stress factor for the person so targeted, but in terms of sheer numbers, weighed against WP's own potential for needless harm... it kinda seems like small potatoes.

I think all personal details should have been edited off the topic, e.g. referring to the attacking child as "Child X" ... and the topic should remain in public so show how these issue resolve.

For all reasons, it is too an important topic to languish in the tarpit. Parents and responsible adults should be able to find and see it without jumping through the hoop of membership.

I'd encourage digging out a modified version and merging with this.


Let's face it ... on the principle of wearing a short skirt ... the victim was "asking for it" by joining the Wikipedia and bitching on a blog.

If a 15 year old yob kicked over a 60 year old man (I have no idea Brandt's personal details), society would equally condemn them.

If you want. But I'm hoping for some intelligent responses to the questions I asked, above. (the post that started out:


)

Haven't seen any yet.

Thanks for trying, Lar.

And as long as you slave away, you won't see any from the only authority that can order the job done properly.

Why should the WMF do anything re: age verification, or anything else, when they have useful slaves like you, Alison and many others to clean up the messes the kids make?

You guys all have the power, yet refuse to use it efficiently.

Moderator's note: Several posts relating to a recent precipitating incident were moved to this thread in the "tar pit." We would like to request that all members please confine their remarks regarding this incident to either that thread, or one of the other two on that subject that were both also tar-pitted a few hours earlier. We apologize if this amounts to "sweeping it under the rug."

In short, no. If everybody who did the hand-bailing-out of the boat quit, and swam off to shore, those people lounging around getting a tan in the HMS WikiMuthaF***er deck chairs might actually have to change course, or do something else to stop the massive leaks in the hull. A computerized auto-bilge-pump has been sitting there waiting to be turned on, for months, just as an example. Perhaps somebody in authority would like to give the order?

And Horsey, you are forbidden to think about any images associated with Alison and her finger in a dike. Stop it.

Thank you, good catch there Milt!

In my opinion you should quit oversighting things entirely if there are systematic problems which are causing your efforts to be largely ineffective, and you have given up hope on fixing those systematic problems. Well, maybe not entirely. If you happen to come across something especially bad I don't see a problem with hitting a few buttons to oversight it. But as with editing a controversial article, I think you could accomplish a lot more focusing your efforts on something else.

I largely quit editing Wikipedia when it became clear to me that there was going to be no system put in place to resolve content disputes. I think these problems with oversight are much the same thing. If all (or most of) the mop-pushers (admins, oversighters, arb com, and just plain vandalism-cleaning editors) would just quit, I think things would be better in the long run. Of course, if just you quit, things will be slightly worse for Wikipedia, but then again, depending what you spend your efforts on instead, they might be greatly better for some other project.

Lar, you seem to be an intelligent person. You could be doing a lot more than repeatedly rolling a huge rock up a steep hill. Ultimately, it's up to you, though. You asked the question, and then commented that no one answered, so I figured maybe you'd be willing to consider the answer. If not, nothing to see here, move along.

Sometimes a typo is just a typo —

Of course I should have written, "trying to plug the leaks in the tykes" …

Jon

The whole thing about being a true believer is how you remain so stubbornly oblivious to all the things that are so obvious to anyone outside the warpfield of your belief system.

It's a theme that's been dealt with most intelligently in many classic science fiction novels.

I remember especially:

• Christopher Priest, Inverted World, lately reissued as a NYRB Classic.
• Frank Herbert, Santaroga Barrier.

Jon

Putting aside the usual source of Fatuous Yammering, there is a lesson to be learned from all this. It is not a terribly new lesson in the Cosmic Scheme Of Things, so we find it embodied in all of our oldest moral codes, even if it's something of a novelty to the aforementioned Fatuous Yammerer. It is simply this — that when anyone impacts on your life, positively or negatively, you are going to ask yourself, "Who did that?", and the greater the impact the greater the motivation to identify the source.

That is just human nature — So get used to it.

Jon Awbrey

If we've seen it once, we've seen it a hundred times, how the Frei Kulture Kinder will not modify their encyclopedia's approach toward pornography or pedophilia because of the concerns of how that plays out for some hypothetical 15-year-old.

However, in contrast, when it comes to the topic of AdSense, the potential adverse impact on a 15-year-old becomes front and center for another high-ranking WMF'er:



Hmm... "Watching him..." Was Moeller not available?

Remarkable. Don't ya love the straw man arguments? This is the quality of thinking of the "Chief Community Officer"?

I.e., if Wikipedia were to allow advertising, "scam websites" would necessarily be allowed to advertise?

Of course, the 15-year-old couldn't tell the difference. He'd had no experience!

Of course they would. Because it's NOTCENSORED.

WP advertising would be the worst of the malware installers and pornsites, judging by the "community" and its "standards".