• "Some female users and admins are enormously worried about such harassment. One banned user, Andrew Morrow, has been jailed for it."

User:JzG while defending Mantanmoreland at arbitration. February 2008

• "I have received an email from JzG who has informed me more clearly of the situation. If I had been informed, I'd have stopped so much sooner."

Majorly explaining who informed him of Amorrow's "status". March 2008

__________________________________
What a lot of people want to know now is:

What has Amorrow actually done to warrant this extreme reaction on Wikipedia? No really, What has Amorrow actually done?

JzG says he went to jail for harassment. Implying he was jailed for harassing Wikipedians.

What we do know is that this is not true.

How do we know that all the good folks here and at Wikipedia haven't also been duped by JzG emailing them and "informing them of the situation"? We've seen how JzG and others have consistently spread lies about this site. We've seen how Wiki admins claimed Daniel Brandt had people "stalked at airports". We've seen how GeorgeWilliamHerbert claimed Judd Bagley was harassing people by "calling their homes, their employers, their friends, trying to get them fired, urging others to stalk them in real life, threatening violence, etc."

And all of these lies about "banned users" were politically motivated to win personal disputes. Why should we not assume that JzG's lies here are not spread for the same reason?

It seems that Amorrow is universally acknowledged to be "creepy". But beyond that...

I got the feeling it was for stalking the subjects of wikipedia's biographies (not just its editors) that Amorrow was infamous. He edited bios as a way of intimidating the people who those articles were about or something...

Do we?

There are two "sides" to this, each of which theoretically has reasons to say what they are saying. Has anyone actually searched public records (are there public records of this sort of thing?) to confirm or refute it? Or is it just a matter of taking one person's word over another?

Somey did.

Some people may know things they cannot say publicly. This happens all the time. It then leads to the problem that saying "trust me" isn't well received, for good and valid reasons, but also doesn't admit to resolving the problem.

If Daniel Brandt would turn his not inconsiderable skills to searching out what is of public record, but hard to find with naive google searches, about Andrew Morrow, that would be an interesting exercise, I expect.

Here's Alison's take on this:

The post, for the record, is this one.

That's not all that clear to me - if he needed details to be supplied by Amorrow, his information may well not be complete.

My point is, we don't know the whole story, and anything someone else says that we don't know may be lies or it may be part of the story that they know but we don't.

Here's Somey back in November:


Here's the post from yesterday

We are drowning in clues.

What we lack is efficacious clue processing to assemble an accurate and insightful picture.

It's Udderly E-Mazing How Much Time We Waste Chuting The Bull.

Jonny

It's highly unlikely he was jailed for harrassing wikipedians- no judge would care. I think they've said he wound up some wikipedians in real life, but never went into details about what he did, leaving a pig's head on their doorstep or whatever. Even that would only get him cautioned or something.

However, he did disappear for a while, didn't he? So maybe he did get his internets taken off him by police of his ISP. But it's very unlikely he was jailed for either his online or real life conduct towards wikipedians.

Of course he may have been, for similar behaviour in real life or something mostly unrelated like that.

........

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he caused some hastle/worry, I just don't think he went to jail for harrassing Wikipedians in particular. Wouldn't some of you have had to testify in court? Proof please.


Alison you know I would be the last person to question someone saying they were harrassed, and I believe you got hastle from Goldheart etc. Indeed you know I have written to you to support you, so your last post was rather rude, if you don't mind me saying (if you were rolling your eyes at me or maybe at the possibly hyperbolic statement itself?) When I saw you had posted, I was going to say, welcome back

But I don't think it helps the cause of stopping harrassment of wikipedians if people are being mislead- not that I'm saying you would deliberately do so, but I think other people are spreading this rumour so people believe it.

If someone had gone to jail for "harrassing wikipedians," it would have been picked up on slashdot etc or by the media, plus those on wiki saying that would have some actual proof.

I could give you horror stories about being hassled and harassed by sociopathic characters on WP and Slashdot (among others)

Oh, I'm so sorry I didn't mean to sound rude, but I was being circumspect. I don't want to make accusations on a public forum, especially regarding someone who isn't present but I want to categorically state that at no time was he sent to jail for harassing wikipedians. That's not to say he wasn't sent to jail - I've no comment on that at all one way or another. But I really want to make clear that Guy was wrong in connecting the two. That's all. It's an important point.

Sometimes people go as close to the edge of saying something they shouldn't say as they dare.

Maybe my saying THIS is going too far, but I suspect that's not at all what Alison was saying... Rather I would guess it was a hint as to WHY the statement "AM went to jail for harassing WPians" is false.

Or maybe it isn't that at all. You'll have to figure it out.

(I also have no comment on whether he went to jail or not)

that's what I was saying in my post really

Can we please forgo the innuendo and have a clear explanation of just WHAT is going on with Amorrow? When everyone is making insinuations and everyone else is assuming they're lying, it takes away from everyone's ability to deal with what i suspect may be a very dangerous person.

And maybe it'll snap Daniel Brandt out of the fantasy world he lives in where no-one uses the information he publishes for any evil purposes.

After reading this thread, I think it's probable that I can guess that maybe it's reasonable to say that Morrow went to jail for stalking or harassing somebody who is apparently, probably, seemingly, not a Wikipedian. I think this means I know more than when I started reading the thread, but I'm not sure.

If Morrow was convicted of a crime, I don't see the problem with stating that he was convicted of that crime. That's not like throwing accusations around; it's a fact and a matter of public record. In any case, those "in the know" don't seem hesitant to accuse him of being a dangerous, misogynistic psychopath, so I cannot fathom why they are so reserved about explaining exactly why he is such a threat.

Now This Is Rich —

The Names Have Been Blanked To Abstract The Lesson:


Just Exactly Who Is The Biggest Blank On The Block?

Jonny

If you just throw words at someone, they can't really do much about it (at least in the US). But once you start making specific accusations, you can be in deep trouble if you're wrong, or even if you're only mostly right.

Define "stalking or harassing," please?

Let's just use a little Occam's Razor here. Lots of men (who may in some cases be creepy misogynists, I won't deny that) get involved in nasty child-custody disputes, have restraining orders put on them, violate those restraining orders, and get thrown in jail for it. That's really very common, particularly in California where this sort of thing has practically choked the legal system into a standstill, what with the unusually high proportion of celebrities, models, and rich people with high-priced lawyers getting divorced in general.

So what are the chances that Morrow, whose first several hundred edits on WP were to an article about a female physician involved in a high-profile California-based child custody dispute around the same time, went to jail for "stalking Wikipedians," as opposed to something like the far more common act of violating a restraining order, and/or threatening his ex-wife in some way? I'd say just about zero, and I'd say that even if I hadn't actually looked it up.

I would hope this question is resolved - we don't really need any specifics as to what Mr. Morrow actually did that got him thrown in the pokey; we only need to know that that had nothing to do with Wikipedia. OTOH, if he's currently making violent and/or creepy threats against people on the internet, whoever they may be, then that's bad, and he should of course stop forthwith. But all I've seen so far are vague allusions to that, and while I'm not saying it's untrue or even unlikely, where I come from we do have presumption of innocence, at least in the absence of proof. So I'll just have to leave it at that, then.

Well, I hope that at the root of this there is somebody who is actually informed and knows whether or not he went to jail and if so, exactly what he did that caused that. It would otherwise be highly irresponsible to make such claims and insinuations about Morrow, and to use the belief that he is dangerous, buttressed by those claims and insinuations, to justify taking measures against him that cause collateral damage to encyclopedia content.

The reason I'm insinuating instead of stating is that I don't have firsthand knowledge. I only have second or third hand, and no matter how reliable I consider those sources, I am not going to state it directly. I know that sometimes criminal matters don't get publicized in easily searchable places. My own feeble research skills have not unearthed anything at all, but the absence of a result is not necessarily the result of absence.

If I had first hand knowledge I'd be stating it. So Brandt, make yourself useful. Research this in the obscure places most of the rest of us can't get to or don't know how to, and tell us his conviction record. I am not the only person that would appreciate it. Publishing those details strikes me as a lot more useful than publishing the details of a mother with young children who has committed no crime, just annoyed you.

And yet no-one ever has. Go figure.

I'm not the one making the insinuations against Amorrow. I've never had an issue with him that couldn't be solved with an email filter to the spam mailbox. That was only for a month or two, and it was over a year ago. He mentions my name once or twice on his website, in reference to hivemind, and I have no problem with that.

To my mind, the issue is not what Amorrow has done, but what Wikipedians are claiming he's been doing lately by way of "stalking."

Hell, I spent time in jail too. A vicious federal judge didn't like me (a young whippersnapper with long hair) and refused to set bail for four days pending appeal of my Selective Service conviction in 1969. During the trial, he ordered the bailiff to remove my father from the courtroom because he had a silly grin on his face. ("Why is that man of the cloth smiling? Bailiff, remove him!") He wasn't smiling, he merely had a standard grin on his face that looked like smiling, and his hearing deficiency made it difficult to assess the situation in real time.

It only lasted four days because my lawyer sweet-talked him in chambers. I won the appeal (both counts reversed) at the end of 1970. And President Jimmy Carter restored my civil rights with his 1977 amnesty. The judge was wrong, I was right.

I suppose we'll now get a bunch of emails flying around on sooper-sekrit lists to the effect that I'm a "stalker" and I've been to jail. After all, Chairboy claims I hang out at airports in order to stalk Wikipedians.

The Names Have Been Blanked To Abstract The Lesson:


And yet, somehow, some people just never cache on.

Jonny

I don't see why wikipedians are covering up what they really believe/what he did. My understanding is that they believe he went to jail for harrassing a female political figure. If this is true, I don't see why they don't want to be open about this fact- although they may think it would lead to more harrassment for her, I'm sure she has the clout and mechanisms in place to be sure he gets nowhere.

I heard it was a business executive. Which is the best reason for not actually saying it--there would be 10 different stories and we would look like fools again. I can see why Wikipedia just wants this guy to leave--he makes creepy edits to women's BLPs, especially women whose articles have a sexual component (rape victims, etc), and he makes creepy edits to and about female admins. So if Wikipedia really wants him to leave, isn't the best response to ignore him and not talk about him? I do wish that someone would get the (provable) facts to one of the blogging Wikipedians like Kelly Martin or Danny Wool, who don't have anything to lose by pissing him off. I certainly would like to know what the fuss is about once and for all.

My understanding was, this time round, they felt they had to mention it on-wiki a little because Majorly was reverting the reverts, so they felt they had to explain them a bit. Though they could've just mailed him I suppose, and hoped no-one else noticed.

Not best, or even approaching good. Requiring contributors to verify their identity to a reasonable standard would be significantly better.

Yes. One of the problems is that it seems to be defined by Wikipedians so that only individuals who have some kind of identity, are capable of it. If Wikipedia does it to YOU, they don't consider it "stalking", no matter how invasive it is.

Like Siegenthaler, you may find one day you have a bio up on Wikipedia, edited and vandalized by anonymous kids, and there's nothing particular you can do about the situation, unless you raise a powerful stink. But on the other hand, if YOU decide you're going to do that to some WikiWonk, in retribution or to teach a lession, why then that's considered stalking, and you're labeled "creepy."

I can sort of understand the mindset. You see, the WP'ian's I've pointed this out to, really believe (or have convinced themselves by autohyposis) that they work with near-neutrality. Thus, they think they have no particular responsiblity. What they do, you see, is "automatic writing", sort of like back in the late 19th century seances. BIOs just pop out of the Wi-ja board, and nobody's responsible for them. So how could malice be involved? It's all just a product of the institutional rules, operating by remote control, at the Command of The Maximum Leader. No harm intended. There's an absense of malice.

Did you ever see that 1981 Paul Newman movie "Absense of Malice"? The government defence was pretty much the Wikipedia defense. But the point of that movie is that you can do just as much collateral damage by being passively irresponsible in the process of doing something else, as if you were actively malicious. So who (in the protagonists' words) do we see about that? Not Jimbo, that's clear.

Last night's South Park was topical: Paparazzi-stalking of Britney Spears. She blows the top of her head off in a suicide attempt, and nobody notices, since they're all still fascinated by her crotch, which is the continuing topic of the evening news, as she is led around, decerebrate. Many heavy-handed references to The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, a short story I'm sure you all know...

To return to Amorrow: he did post here (or rather: on the old board) back in the wild old days. He was the first one, I believe, to be banned here. That was after posting some of the most nasty things I have EVER seen on the internet; a combination of sexual/sadistic fantasy about two female admins on WP. It was all removed, so nothing is left to be seen on the internet. It was extremely disturbing stuff. Far worse than the stuff he left at Susan Polgar´s blog.

Shame on you all for not taking it seriously (And yes: I am also female)

That is so very true.

Not accepting the irrational distortions and plain childish exaggerations that have been put forward in this sorry affair are not quite the same thing as "not taking it seriously".

Since the substantive details have not been disclosed, there is little or nothing to regard, seriously or otherwise.

All we really have is that there is a controversial figure (and who among us isn't awash in controversial figures), and different observers lining up on different sides of the controversy.

Those of us who have next to nothing to observe in all this fog just shrug and wait for the fog to clear.

Which is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.

Gosh, this is almost as entertaining as Adult Swim.

But not quite.