California student arrested in criminal threats made on Wikipedia, Wikinews Reports Options

<img alt="" height="1" width="1">California student arrested in criminal threats made on Wikipedia
Wikinews Reports -18 minutes ago
A student at Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, California was arrested Friday on suspicion of making criminal threats against students. ...

View the article

I'm not sure if this is being discussed elsewhere, but the full wikinews article is here: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/California_stu...de_on_Wikipedia

I hope that people will start to notice that the "motive" for this crime seems to have been a power struggle on Wikipedia. The threat was contingent on the EDIT not being reverted.

Wikipedia is the problem, once again. It makes stable people unstable, and it makes unstable people go over the edge.

Greg

I hope that people will start to notice that the "motive" for this crime seems to have been a power struggle on Wikipedia. The threat was contingent on the EDIT not being reverted.

Wikipedia is the problem, once again. It makes stable people unstable, and it makes unstable people go over the edge.

Greg

Maybe you could lay that out for folks, here and there, as just about everything in Wikipedia space is TL;DR to me these days.

Jon

I hope that people will start to notice that the "motive" for this crime seems to have been a power struggle on Wikipedia. The threat was contingent on the EDIT not being reverted.

Wikipedia is the problem, once again. It makes stable people unstable, and it makes unstable people go over the edge.

Greg

No, the very first edit by this person was in the text of the article on the high school itself, saying something to the effect of, "If this edit is reverted, the following people will be killed on April 18" and naming names. When it was reverted, the person then posted something like, "You leave me no choice, now I will be forced to kill these people."

It wasn't a power struggle, it wasn't a content dispute. It wasn't even on the talk page or the edit summary. It was a threat posted directly in the article. It was straightforward vandalism and teenage fuckwittery. The edits have been oversighted so I can't prove this, but I did read them at the time.

Yes me too, he just inserted a threat in the article against some other kids, to shoot them or something if his threat was removed.

This post has been edited by wikiwhistle: Sun 20th April 2008, 1:40pm

Prior to the express threat, there had been some related vandalism disparaging selected individuals and some team sports. The express threats appear to be embedded within that little insult-drama.

Note that the hinge was that his edit not be removed.

There's an inherent problem with people's natural sense of "ownership" and the complete lack of ownership on Wikipedia. The kid's a screwball, for sure. But, let's ask -- why didn't this demand not to remove his comment happen on MySpace, on Facebook? Wikipedia has that special draw for nutty types.

Greg

Note that the hinge was that his edit not be removed.

There's an inherent problem with people's natural sense of "ownership" and the complete lack of ownership on Wikipedia. The kid's a screwball, for sure. But, let's ask -- why didn't this demand not to remove his comment happen on MySpace, on Facebook? Wikipedia has that special draw for nutty types.

Greg

This was likely a kid who had defaced pages before, had met a half-robot reverter, and just wanted to mess with them and failed to consider what could happen.

I think the student chose Wikipedia because he didn't want the people he knew to hear about it, and was just pulling a particularly stupid joke. If he had chosen Facebook, he knew that the police would shortly be at his door, like this guy.

Not to belabor a point, but...

... there are teams of people at the FBI who's JOB it is to be on Wikipedia.

So.......... when this place has a lot of FBI admins, or when Jimbo was the 2006 keynote speaker for the FBI, and when the FBI is sort of in a hair-trigger mood as they are this year....


... any nutjob kid is going to the clink for making some offhand (admittedly nutjob) threat, that in a schoolyard would get laughed at, and ignored.

Strange times we live in.

And yeah, Wikipedia is a weird place. But even weirder when you see that the FBI takes it so freaking seriously.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Mon 21st April 2008, 11:20am

<img alt="" height="1" width="1">California student arrested in criminal threats made on Wikipedia
Wikinews Reports -18 minutes ago
A student at Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, California was arrested Friday on suspicion of making criminal threats against students. ...

View the article

While I disagree with the idea of making criminal threats on Wikipedia, it is refreshing to have a break from the non-criminal threats construed as illegal by editors.