Sandifer calls "Brandt, Bagley" "nutjobs", ...odd, B&B's proof shows Sandy's WP friends to be nuttter Options

[Piperdown]

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikie...ber/082715.html

[Daniel Brandt]

The ArbCom and/or Slim could have stopped all of this in its tracks long ago, and if this was the real world it would have stopped long ago.

ArbCom: Request that Slim submit her résumé since 1988, and make it available to journalists on request. I'm talking about information that any employer would insist on. It's also information that would give us a flurry of leads to check out for a few weeks, and then we would have nothing else to add. We would get bored, and start looking for something else to do.

Slim: Make a statement and respond to reporter's questions. Even email interviews are okay — she doesn't have to reveal her exact location in central Canada. But when I'm talking about an email interview, I'm assuming that she will respond honestly, and present information about herself that the reporter can verify from other sources. When I asked Slim by email in October 2005 if she owned the slimvirgin.com domain, she denied it, twice, by email, and I was pretending to be just some dude who buys cool domain names. This sort of game-playing is not what I have in mind.

This whole sorry saga would have been handled this way in the real world. Of course, it's ArbCom's option to keep yakking away about attack sites, and it's Slim's option to the tell the ArbCom to go to hell even if they do the sensible thing. It's also Slim's option to not make a statement and not answer email. But these options, as we have seen, just raise the stakes for both Slim and Wikipedia. What both ArbCom and Slim have to realize is that this is not a situation that tin-foil-hat wackos like me have imposed on them, but instead it's a situation that they have created themselves, and continue to defend.

Bottom line: It will never happen. Wikipedia is permanently stuck in a mode that rewards the occasional Essjay more than it rewards accountability, and Slim doesn't care about this or that encyclopedia. This means that Slim will continue to drag Wikipedia down with her. Sandifer is right about that.