John Patrick Bedell Facebook Wikipedia Accounts!

LALATE (blog)

John Patrick Bedell maintained Facebook and Wikipedia accounts under JPatrickBedell. John Patrick Bedell's Facebook account has reportedly been deleted...

View the article

John Patrick Bedell: Rants on Wikipedia and YouTube May Have Foreshadowed Breakdown

CBS News (blog)

WASHINGTON: John Patrick Bedell may have left red flags all over the internet, including blog posts about 9/11 being a hoax, and YouTube videos ranting about a complex system of "information currency," but it seems that no one was listening...

View the article

Story links to this scraped version of Bedell's WP user page - looks like Krimpet deleted the original on WP.

This isn't really all that fair to the WP'ers - nobody would have looked at that userpage and thought he was anything more than the usual garden-variety conspiracy theorist. There's nothing to indicate he was about to go off on a shooting spree at the Pentagon, IMO... If anything, most people who are keen on repealing marijuana/cannabis laws are quite well-behaved. You're more likely to find people who are about to "snap" among the repeal-all-gun laws crowd, if you ask me...

Registered Democrat Bedell snapped when pulled over for failing to make a turn signal, and was arrested for possession of marijuana. As soon as he figured out that this was going to ruin his life, he decided to go to war against the United States. So he practised with weapons and then procedured to try to do one of those shootout things like you see The Matrix, except it doesn't work so well in real life as in The Matrix.

He'd have been better off just moving to Oregon and fighting extradition.

Back in 1977 (October 2) Jimmy Carter said one of those famously reasonable things which mark him as perhaps our most tragic modern presidents (since of course, nobody listens to reason in politics). Carter had a good mind and good heart, but failed.

Saith Jimmy: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."

Poor bastard. Poor bastards all.

I don't see how anyone could have seen this coming from what was on WP. I do think the article on the incident should have a redirect from Free Culture Shooter.

It was oversighted (not in the deletion log). Krimpet doesn't have that power. See this Village Pump thread on the oversight.

I'm not sure that oversight was entirely necessary either, mostly because it can only make the WMF look bad. Not much of a point since it's cached by hundreds of mirrors and search engines.

Great! The Village Pump thread itself has disappeared completely!

Oops! Now it's back.....

Wikipedia hasn't caught up with the idea of irreversibility, have they? Once a thing is done on Wikipedia, it can't be undone. Ever. By anybody. See Horse. Out. Barn. They can shut their eyes and pretend very hard, but it will do them no good. It's not like trying to put toothpaste back into a tube, it's metaphorically more like trying to put the flash and mushroom cloud back into the bomb case.

Since these things are irreversible, it seems as though WP would spend more time on prevention. Alas, they do not. Anybody can edit. Which means anybody can make irreversible damage to the world. Are you a moron? Well, Wikipedia has a gun for you.

"Oversight" Why don't they simply rename it to "window-dressing"?

Yeah, I didn't delete it; I recreated the page with a basic explanation, since having it sitting there as a protected red link just looked silly, like we were trying to cover things up and deny he was ever a Wikipedia user.

I don't know why the page was completely oversighted, and think doing so was a bad decision. I've heard that even some of the oversighters disagreed with its erasure, but since any of them can un-oversight the page at any time, I guess none of them feel strongly enough about it to bring it back. Oh, well.

Sorry I misinterpreted, then...

I'm not surprised they'd want it gone, though - I might have done the same thing myself, to be honest. Even with non-updating scrapers carrying the page for who-knows-how-long, they know they're better off this way - anyone can still argue that the content of the page is damning against WP (when IMO it's actually exculpatory), and in the internet age it's always better to take the PR hit for "sweeping it under the rug" than for appearing to support terrorists or psychos on an ongoing basis. The PR hit for the former approach is only likely to last for one or two news cycles at most.

Yeah, it should probably stay (admin-level) deleted, just because Wikipedia isn't a soapbox for the ravings of lunatics, whether or not they follow through with their plans and go postal. The oversight was unwise not because the content should stay up, but because oversight really should be limited to extreme circumstances like personal information and libel. Oversight is a crucial tool when used correctly, but folks need to be able to trust it's only being used in these cases, especially given some of the well-known cases of misuse in the past.