Amidst the relentless shambolic occurrences at Wikipedia, recent news to digest for those Kremlinologists of the Court Of The Jimbo King are the revelations that 28 year old Berliner Erik Moeller has resigned his board membership in order to take up the role of “deputy director” of the Wikimedia Foundation. Erik Moeller is notable to us watchers for going by the name of Eloquence, having no sideburns, and being the former boyfriend of Wikia, Inc. co-founder Angela Beesley.

No wonder relations became strained between the wiki-couple. While Fraulein Angela was trying to remove her Wiki-bio from Der Jimbo’s inhumane Database Of You, after complaining that it had  “become filled with lies and nonsense,” the sensitive boyfriend was lecturing us with Stasi-esque lines like the following:

Giving such an individual the choice not to have an article written about them is an obscene suggestion if your goal is to build a general reference work.

Der humanist?

Erik Moeller clearly didn’t feel the Wind of Change coming because Angela — along with Daniel Brandt and Seth Finkelstein — managed to escape the cruel tyranny of having to check their bios everyday for the rest of their lives. Their articles were rightfully deleted during a Cold War glasnost. The prisoner exchange was arranged by sympathetic Sekrit Police Kommissar Durova, who cut appropriate holes in the wires and sneaked them across Checkpoint Jimbo hidden from view. (She remains the last Westerner to manage that feat).

But the deletions didn’t go unnoticed by one Wiki-Tower Guard, who was only too eager to redirect the harsh Google searchlight onto any dissidents who thought they’d escaped to freedom.

Step forward Wikipedia administrator JoshuaZ, self proclaimed “little snot” whose emotional range often draws comparisons with a robotic household appliance. Noticing that traces of the Brandt article had all but disappeared from search engines, Joshua took it upon himself to resume his long personal feud against Brandt’s privacy by unilaterally restoring the full history of the article for the benefit of Google. And, presumably, his own personal files. All against consensus. The Little Tin man then moved automatically over to Angela’s now deleted article, to lawyer that article back to restoration. Angela was therefore back under house arrest and her article deletion was overturned. Here’s a YouTube clip of an interview with Joshua. Oh wait, no, here it is.

The Review’s resident Agony Aunt, Somey, takes up the JoshuaZ slack:

______________________________

Somey: Y’know, I never thought I’d end up making a statement like this, but this is just such an obvious case, and somebody has to say it.

A long time ago, before I was a member here, there was a big brouhaha because two or three people suggested that physically unattractive people can sometimes become unusually abusive online, more so than might otherwise be considered typical, as a form of subconscious retaliation for their feeling unwanted or unpopular. Needless to say, a lot of people felt this was insensitive and unfair, and indeed it was. But how can you look past something like this? It is, quite simply, a perfectly legitimate and logical explanation for his apparent near-hatred of well-known, successful people.

JoshuaZ has, on multiple occasions, stated that those whom “Wikipedia” considers “notable” not only deserve to be profiled in WP, they actually forfeit their rights to privacy if they became notable because of their own activities. Putting aside the obvious question of whether this means that the Wikipedians themselves therefore forfeit these same rights, one has to consider the chilling effect this might have on individuals who have socially beneficial ideas, but who might from now on keep those ideas to themselves — because they value their privacy too much to let it fall into the hands of a website full of anonymous goons with “Edit” buttons.

This statement, posted during the Angela Beesley DRV (article deletion review) showed up only a week ago (boldface mine):

I’d rather not have this DRV now but if we’re going to have it now overturn. I continue to maintain my position that courtesy deletion for people who are ”willing public figures” is uncalled for and almost ridiculous. I understand cases like Brian Peppers where the person in question has become notable in a completely unwilling fashion, but people who are notable precisely because they have injected themselves into public sphere simply do not have the same rights. Furthermore, in such cases we as a whole owe our readers to have articles about them. I find this particular disturbing in a case where the subject of the article has a website devoted to promoting herself.

Note the term “injected themselves into” which he added later when correcting a typo. It originally said “taken actions in.” (They also would have added the word “the,” of course.) Most people would use a term like “promoted themselves in”, or simply “entered”, but Josh here apparently sees the attainment of personal success and notoriety to be almost a form of parasitism.

(Even so, Angela Beesley hasn’t “injected herself into the public sphere” in a personal sense. She was involved in the founding of a major website, sure, but that was hardly self-promotion. She also has a site of her own, but in a culture that values “transparency” as highly as Wikimedia does, she’d probably be considered suspect if she didn’t maintain such a site.)

The idea that people like Joshua Zelinsky can make value judgments about a person’s motivations in doing things that make him or her a public figure, deliberately or not, represents an extremely dangerous proposition. And even if we give JoshuaZ the benefit of the doubt on any given case, which I don’t, the question of “willing notoriety” is beside the point. The point is that special considerations have to be made for a website that anyone can anonymously edit, which is run by people who are often prone to personal vendettas and revenge fantasies, and which has a near-ubiquitous presence on most major search engines.

But it seems as though he totally refuses to accept that one simple principle, no matter how often it’s repeated — and not just by us, but by well-meaning, decent people on Wikipedia as well.