Hipocrite, who posts here (Hi Hipocrite!) has retired because of Jimbos intervention into "L'affaire de l'enlèvement journaliste du New York Times". Seriously Hipocrite? You are storming off in a huff because Jimbo intervened so that Wikipedia didn't contribute to the the death of an innocent journalist? What planet are you from?

Userpage with retirement notice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hipocrite

Jimbo's reply (since moved to talk page): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=299580745

At least he was smart enough to quit, which is more than we can say for you.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=181166

Yeah, that's just plain weird. It's hard for me to believe this was the real reason anyone would stomp off.. maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but surely you could find a better straw?!?

I'm still not convinced that the captive's safety increases by pretending that he's so non-notable, nobody in the media has noticed he's gone missing, or cares enough that he's gone missing to report on it.

Does anyone know what the kidnappers were "demanding" in exchange for Rodhe's life? Were they looking for cash? Or was it release of their comrades from Afghan or Pakistani prisons?

If the bargaining chip is made to appear unimportant, is the natural reaction for the kidnapper to keep asking for his original stakes, or to give up and release the victim, or to just off with his head and get back to herding goats?

I'm certainly no expert on this, but I'll bet that neither the New York Times nor Jimbo Wales consulted any experts in hostage negotiation before they acted on this "hunch" that suppression of the news of his capture would make Rohde more safe.

Captain Richard Phillips' story was on CNN about every 15 minutes for a week or so. He escaped his captors, somehow. Would he have escaped the Maersk Alabama seizure if the media and Wikipedia suppressed news of it?

I'm not alone in my musings, either.

I'm not either. I think it's plausible, but I'm not convinced. On the other hand, I just don't see the harm in keeping this bit of information out, at least in the short term.

The only "harm" that I see alleged is that if this information can be kept out that means Wikipedia isn't really the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But that's fine with me. It shouldn't be.

You want to report on the kidnapping on your own servers, I will support your right to do so. You want to censor the reports of the kidnapping on your own servers, I will also support your right to do that. Personally, if it were my servers, I would have chosen to censor the reports, because I don't see how the information is useful and I do see how it is potentially harmful. Ultimately Wikipedia has a shitty system where the owners of the servers let any random anonymous fool to run amok, but that is the problem, not something else.

If you want to argue against self-censorship in any all cases, regardless of the content of the information, then we can have that argument. But I don't think that's your intention.

What we really need are better camels.

Oh excellent news! He'll probably be back with a sockpuppet though like he did last time. No great loss.

I'm pretty sure I recall at least a few times seeing evening-news footage of some hostages articulating their captors' demands while tied to a chair and holding a current copy of the New York Times to prove they weren't half past dead.

But maybe I'm mis-remembering and this procedure is only used for movie characters (and U.S. soldiers).

I don't know who the experts are or what they'd say about this. Maybe more publicity would have made the captors more alert and difficult to escape, or maybe it would have helped the local authorities or bounty-hunters or vigilantes or somebody to figure out the location and raid it, or maybe it would have encouraged some eccentric philanthropist to remit the ransom money via paypal or whatever. There would be several factors and potential outcomes to consider in any case.

As a news agency you can flip a coin and cross your fingers, or you can respect the wishes of the victim's family, so that maybe they won't try to sue you if the chosen strategy backfires. The latter is often the best choice, though if I were Judge Judy I'd throw out a case like that.

As an encyclopedia, there's no real harm in waiting to see how things turn out or which source is (factually or judgmentally) correct when they disagree over something like this. If one source says "he's been kidnapped" and another says "nonsense, I played golf with him last week", we'd want to avoid printing anything until we know what the hell is actually going on.

Now that Mr. Rohde and Mr. Ludin have released themselves of their own recognizance, the whole story is told, and Wikipedia can claim to have made the right decision and helped save lives, and maybe some millionaire will donate to us instead of to the islamic militant group, though doing so would give Jimbo too much credit.

All's well that ends well in this case, but what if there was no escape, and the captors got tired of feeding and watering hostages nobody seemed willing to pay for? Would they have decapitated Mr. Rohde or just let him starve? I think there would be some columnists and bloggers and WR'ers calling Mr. Wales an accessory to terrorism and murder in that event—or rather the more disposable Mr. Wizardman as Jimbo would surely deny having anything to do with it, and with a name like that, uh............

But I don't think the accusation would be justified even if the hail-mary play was an epic fail. I think he made a good-faith decision which he thought would save lives (which in this case they may have), but people tend to be judged by results rather than reasons.

Of course it's not inconceivable for arguably intrusive news coverage of a heinous crime to break the fifth wall by actually saving a victim's life. It's probably as dismissible as apples and oranges, but when I started writing this I honestly was reminded of Reginald Denny.

The Journalist's Dilemma makes a complicated exercise in game theory, and everyone got very lucky here except for perhaps the third hostage Mr. Mangal—what's his status anyway? Are we putting him at risk by reporting that the other two escaped?

That would make it easier to stomp off, I suppose. But have you ever tried to ride one of those things? Not easy.

Anyway, I agree, I think this was more of a straw-breaking-camel's-back sort of thing than anything else. As for his returning eventually, well... Have we ever tried to come up with figures on WP-escapee recidivism? Based purely on anecdotal evidence and having followed a few cases, I'd say it's at least 50 percent, particularly for the first two or three attempts.

I think one important tip for a successful withdrawal is to not actually say you're "never coming back." Instead, go ahead and say that WP is a disgusting pool of fetid slime and disease, but that you're just going to "do some other stuff for a while." That way, if you do go back, you won't be breaking your word. Once you've broken your word once, it's much easier to do it a second and a third time, and you end up in an even more harmful escape-return cycle that can be nearly impossible to break completely.

Usually, Sir, the men just ride the camels into town …

Ja Ja

They're not Privatemusings?

I have actually, in the Sahara. Takes a bit of getting used to at first, but it's quite soporific, at least for me it was anyway.

I seem to recall someone once remarked that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

There may be times when publicity works, there may be times when it does not. In some circumstances, the people involved will understand the subtleties of the situation, other times they are just guessing.

So the choice is between leaving the negotiating strategy to those who may be informed and experienced (or may be uninformed idiots), and leaving it to a world wide committee of people who definitely do not know anything about the particulars of the situation (absolutely uninformed, and, if determined to take action without any knowledge of the situation, definitely idiots).

It is not that hard a choice to see where the responsibility for strategy should lie - unless you are a Freedophile where you cannot imagine that any solution but FREE INFORMATION can possibly have a good outcome.

Yeah, the evolutionary design committee. Which had been tasked with coming up with a "horse" that would work in the worst extremes of heat, windstorm, deep sand, and lack of water.

Okay, it's a dune buggy of an animal. It's not supposed to be anything else.

Meta Note: Shouldn't this be under "Editors?"

"I'm certainly no expert on this, but I'll bet that..."

On a scale of 1-10, unintentional humor score of 9.5.

Near as I can tell, hostage stuff is handled by making the captors calm and comfortable. After that, the whole situation is just a big wait: eventually you get bored and pay the ransom, or they get bored and walk away from the situation -- it is not difficult to arrange for the victim to 'escape'. Naturally, they could just kill the victim too.

Occasionally, you can get the drop on the captors and take them down. The pesky problem of picking up the money...

It's easy to speculate that extensive media coverage would play to making the captors much more agitated -- too many eyes, too many ideas for fellow captors, etc -- and this would be an undesirable, as it would put the victim at risk. However, alternative theories are:

1. that a media extravaganza helps the victims,

2. monster media plays are utterly irrelevant.

Evidence, based on simple observation of mainstream media behavior, is strongly against the theory that exposure hurts the victims. If it was known, hell even simply suspected, that media exposure tended to kill kidnap victims, there would simply be no reportage of these events. Ever. Things like "Amber Alert"s would not exist. This kind of censorship in the media is not unheard of: consider the touchy issue of suicide.

Now, since the media loves video footage of teary-eyed mothers pleading for the lives of their children -- and running it with embarrassing frequency -- we do have a big problem in this case (and one that Hipocrite notes): why the deliberate, engineered, silence given the response when almost anyone else is victimized in this way? What better way to gather clicks but to milk this story for all it's worth?

I'm going to guess -- and I'd like to emphasize that word -- that simple economics was at the bottom here. Since it was the NYT (or their insurers) who would ultimately foot the ransom bill, making the victim appear less valuable would lower the amount of any ransom to be paid, and thus be in their interests. Whether it is also in the interests of the victim isn't especially important from this perspective, but we can expect special pleadings that apply for NYT journalists -- but, somehow, no one else.

You've got to see this post on Reason, including the comment following from none other than Jimmy Wales!

No shit, Sherlock.
Got plenty o' sockies, he do, he do.

The problem is not in your stars, Jimmy. The problem is in your users.

(And as usual, Greggie just couldn't resist. Right as usual, but nobody's listening.)

And then, they "ride" them dogies!! Yee-haw!

I for one don't understand just why people don't take the Randroids seriously, when they're capable of sparkling observations like:

I think this phenomenon of people "retiring" from Wikipedia for this or that moral principle is usually "drama queening" rather than actual moral outrage.

There are honourable exceptions to that rule, like WindyCityMike, but not that many.

I think we should organize a 12-step plan for Wikiholics, one of which is they produce a wiki article themselves on a special Wiki which looks just like Wikipedia which is then crapped on by bots simulating real Wikipedia behaviour before the article is speed deleted as "non-notable" and they are banned for sockpuppetry/abusive vandalism/conflict of interest. A few weeks of that and some group hugging and they could be returned to society, cured of their addiction.

Maybe Emperor would volunteer Encyc for the purpose?