Global ban for Abd?, Gotta stop that POV-pushing Options

[Milton Roe]

I'm doing Landmark Education, taking the Advanced Course in a week.

I can just imagine you after Landmark training. Yes I can.

Hey, Abd, right after that, you could perhaps notify Cirt that you're a Landmark graduate, and then ask for him to intercede for you with JzG.

[Emperor]

People who attack whistleblowers frequently claim that the whistleblower is motivated by envy, revenge, or is otherwise "disgruntled" and "disturbed." So nu?

You've spent hours and days writing about JzGs and related items. No one needs to attack you. Your posts practically scream ***DISGRUNTLED****DISTURBED*****COO COO FOR COCONUTS!!!!!

It's almost like you're a double agent attempting to make real whistleblowers look like nutjobs.

[Abd]

I'm doing Landmark Education, taking the Advanced Course in a week.

I can just imagine you after Landmark training. Yes I can.

. Well, I'm considered a "graduate." I'm aware of at least one other super-banned editor who is also, but he took the Forum, like more than 20 years ago, and never followed up. It's good, but it's not magic. On the other hand, it sure can seem like it sometimes.

Hey, Abd, right after that, you could perhaps notify Cirt that you're a Landmark graduate, and then ask for him to intercede for you with JzG.

"Graduate" is used in Landmark-speak, for anyone who has taken the Forum, and I did that in March. There is what they call the Curriculum for Living, which consists of the Forum, the Advanced Course, and the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, plus the Seminar Series. (Only the first two are moderately expensive, the seminars are cheap for value, perhaps because they are led by volunteers. I just completed the Forum in Action seminar, which was led by an Israeli psychiatrist, fantastic guy. Day job, psychiatrist, assistant department head at a major hospital, but gave hours upon hours of free coaching to seminar participants, we could call him up any time.

If Cirt is Landmark-connected, here is what I'd expect from him if I took this situation to him: he'd point to a particular Landmark distinction. It rhymes with this thing: [

And it was.

Intercede with JzG? Why? Is there something I want JzG to do? JzG is just JzG, he does what he does, it is what it is. Interesting question, though. What's the possibility here?

[Abd]

People who attack whistleblowers frequently claim that the whistleblower is motivated by envy, revenge, or is otherwise "disgruntled" and "disturbed." So nu?

You've spent hours and days writing about JzGs and related items. No one needs to attack you. Your posts practically scream ***DISGRUNTLED****DISTURBED*****COO COO FOR COCONUTS!!!!!

It's almost like you're a double agent attempting to make real whistleblowers look like nutjobs.

Almost like that. Not quite, eh?

And your motive in writing, Emperor, Boss of Bosses? You have very close to the same post count here as I.

This is what I found over twenty years ago. A would attack B. B would respond, upset. People would read B and, seeing the upset, assume that it was unjustified, that B was deranged. Friends of A would also attack B, now for being a serious troll. Now comes C who sees this and realizes that this social situation is unlike past RL ones, now that what happened (what *actually happened*, the entire personal interaction) can now be seen, so C goes back over the history and finds that A did, indeed, attack B. B might be over-reacting, or not, but the incident was actually caused by A's incivility, and that's clearly visible. C reports this, citing the record.

The friends of B now begin to attack C, since he's obviously siding with a deranged troll. They do not look back at the record to correct possible errors of C. Why should they? They can tell that C is on the wrong side, it's obvious.

And anyone who would actually take the time to go through history like that must have an axe to grind, anyway. Block them both! "Now, A, I'm sorry you had to put up with that mess."

A then does it with someone else.

Is the solution to block A? I don't think so, not usually, anyway. A is not the problem. The problem is dysfunctional social structure, part of which is based on people believing that they can read minds from this skimpy text. Yes, skimpy, for if I write a tome, it's still tiny compared to the information you'd get in a face-to-face encounter. Text is very low bandwidth.

Emperor, you are believing that you can read my mind, that you can infer my emotional state from my writing. Maybe. Sometimes. And maybe not.

I can say this for sure: I write to learn, primarily. Others sometimes profit from it as well, and sometimes not.

[Emperor]

And your motive in writing, Emperor, Boss of Bosses? You have very close to the same post count here as I.

My motive is obviously very different than yours, as I've never revealed my original user name on Wikipedia. (It's still there but not used.)

My goals have evolved over the years and at this point I simply want people to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of wiki encyclopedias and why their use may be inappropriate for certain people and situations.

I've tried to create something better with Encyc, and it gets some decent traffic on certain topics. Occasionally by participating on WR I pick up a tip that I incorporate into Encyc.

Very few of my posts have been about the community on Wikipedia, mainly because that stuff just sounds like gibberish to the layperson and that's really who I care about.

[Abd]

My motive is obviously very different than yours, as I've never revealed my original user name on Wikipedia. (It's still there but not used.)

I don't understand why that would reveal a difference in motive. But there is a difference, sure, that's likely.

My goals have evolved over the years and at this point I simply want people to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of wiki encyclopedias and why their use may be inappropriate for certain people and situations.

No problem with that.

I've tried to create something better with Encyc, and it gets some decent traffic on certain topics. Occasionally by participating on WR I pick up a tip that I incorporate into Encyc.

Again, no problem. Just because I know something about it, I looked at the Encyc article on cold fusion. Awful. Unsourced blather, giving prominence to someone with no credentials at all, a crackpot critic. Hmmmph. And I could waste a lot of time fixing it, or not. I think not. I'd rather work on wikiversity at this point, but who knows maybe, someday baby, I'll come and be crying to you.... Recognize that?

Very few of my posts have been about the community on Wikipedia, mainly because that stuff just sounds like gibberish to the layperson and that's really who I care about.

Well, an encyclopedia should care about the "layperson," for sure. However, it should connect them with expert opinion, real expert opinion; traditional encyclopedias did this by hiring experts. Wikipedia tended to ban them, imagining that lay editors could adequately interpret sources and maintain neutrality.

It often worked, which is part of the problem. When there was a real controversy among experts, neutrality would sometimes go out the window.

The community I came out of was one where unity was considered crucial, real unity, so true consensus process was used. If a project is to be both crowd-sourced and neutral, yet not controlled centrally by some publisher (as is typical with traditional encyclopedias), consensus process is essential. Wikipedia completely missed it, and has heavily resisted it, because consensus process is difficult and can be tedious. But what it builds persists, with little effort. When "consensus" really means "most of us," it creates outsiders, people who aren't "us," and who then have motivation to tear the place down or otherwise subvert it.

[Wikifan]

What's offensive about Wikifan's comment is "crying to wikipedia review." Last I noticed, I wasn't crying. Why should I cry when I set up a situation to test and demonstrate, should the test turn out that way, Wikipedia dysfunction? As well as what I expect to eventually do, show how what this experience implies could lead to better function?

Okay, maybe I should clarify. You aren't crying, but you are melting down. I totally understand the rage of getting sandbagged by wikipedia's judicial process when you feel the process was unfair and prejudged, but how long has your community ban been in effect? weeks? months?

i spent a few days defending myself in my AE, lost. angry for a few hours, then moved on and went back to school and deal with RL issues.

venting is okay when you have time to kill, but clearly you are intelligent enough to do something else with your time than entertaining the banished wikipedia editors here.

[thekohser]

The friends of B now begin to attack C...

I think you mean the friends of A.

[Abd]

What's offensive about Wikifan's comment is "crying to wikipedia review." Last I noticed, I wasn't crying. Why should I cry when I set up a situation to test and demonstrate, should the test turn out that way, Wikipedia dysfunction? As well as what I expect to eventually do, show how what this experience implies could lead to better function?

Okay, maybe I should clarify. You aren't crying, but you are melting down.

Really? How? I'm documenting and describing what happened. I'm not upset, I consider what has happened to be normal response for that community. Lots of people have experienced it. It's predictable from the structure.

I totally understand the rage of getting sandbagged by wikipedia's judicial process when you feel the process was unfair and prejudged, but how long has your community ban been in effect? weeks? months?

There were a series of bans. The longest-standing one was the so-called MYOB ban, passed as part of RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, in September, 2009, as a never-before-declared ban, invented for me. Indef. Originally, it passed with a mentor escape clause, it might not have passed without that, but then the mentor provision, another remedy, did not pass, and the offer of an arbitrator to mentor me was later rejected by the Arbitration Committee.

Look, Wikifan, it's Kafkaesque, the whole thing. You could think that I'm angry, because maybe you'd be angry if this happened to you. What I feel when I'm emotionally affected by this, as I've been on occasion, is more a sense of perplexity and hopelessness, it shows up as an obsession, an inability to sleep, for example, no matter what I tell myself. That's not common, though, I've only felt that a couple of times over the four years as an active Wikipedian.

i spent a few days defending myself in my AE, lost. angry for a few hours, then moved on and went back to school and deal with RL issues.

You are in a very different position in life than I. For starters, I'm 67 years old, I have seven children and six grandchildren, two of my children are very young and I'm involved in their care, but I'm also retired, mostly. My long-term interest is community structure and process, and what I'm doing at the present time with Wikipedia is demonstrating certain models that have transformative power, in my experience. I don't expect this to be understood at this point, most people, even those sympathetic, don't. But I'm not asking anyone to do anything unless it seems right to them....

venting is okay when you have time to kill, but clearly you are intelligent enough to do something else with your time than entertaining the banished wikipedia editors here.

Perhaps. It's something I frequently consider. But I also have the sense I'm not quite done with Wikipedia.

Look, it's fun to act and move outside the box. I don't have anything to lose here (other than my time), I'm already banned XXX. What more can they do? I'll admit something: it was a nuisance when all those files were MfD'd because I didn't want to lose them and I had to download them, and the attached talk pages, that was one huge MfD, it took hours, I was worried the MfD would snow, so I had to act quickly. There was nothing really unusual about this, I've seen a lot of user files deleted once the editor is banned.

In the end, some editors did save some of the files of obvious utility, but there were others that were missed. The only problem for me was due to my own lack of preparation. Any other problem is a loss to Wikipedia, not to me.

One thing that the MfD showed was that ArbComm was not interested in maintaining transparency, because they allowed evidence used in a significant case to be deleted (and they knew about it). (And another file that was deleted was accessory evidence in RfC/GoRight, and was also cited in the later RfAr as well, it was a study in mutual involvement, an issue that ArbComm has been as eager to take up as it would be to have multiple root canal operations. The file was not an attack page, at all. It is not a crime to be involved.)

I'm not surprised, but neither would I have predicted this. To me, it simply put another nail in the coffin of the respect I once had for ArbComm.

I'm open to being surprised, and there have been nifty surprises all along. For example, I just noticed that a month ago, some editor, never heard of him before, put a link to the Wikiversity Cold fusion/Energy Catalyzer resource in the WP Energy Catalyzer article.... those should be routine, in fact, and if there isn't a Wikiversity resource on a topic that someone wants to discuss, they should create one! This, just by itself, is a way to blow the lid off of Wikipedia....

[Abd]

The friends of B now begin to attack C...

I think you mean the friends of A.

Gad, you can keep it that straight?

Yes, the friends of A attack the whistleblower, the only one who has actually reviewed the evidence.

[Wikifan]

or starters, I'm 67 years old, I have seven children and six grandchildren, two of my children are very young and I'm involved in their care, but I'm also retired, mostly. My long-term interest is community structure and process, and what I'm doing at the present time with Wikipedia is demonstrating certain models that have transformative power, in my experience. I don't expect this to be understood at this point, most people, even those sympathetic, don't. But I'm not asking anyone to do anything unless it seems right to them....

67?? Geez. Go on a vacation or something. For a senior you seem way too interested in drama. If you're into "community structure" go on a jury or volunteer for animal rights.

something productive. you aren't doing shit here.

[thekohser]

In the end, some editors did save some of the files of obvious utility, but there were others that were missed. The only problem for me was due to my own lack of preparation. Any other problem is a loss to Wikipedia, not to me.

If you ask nicely, there are admins here who would happily give you the wikitext from any of the lost pages.

something productive. you aren't doing shit here.

Oh, the irony.

[Abd]

In the end, some editors did save some of the files of obvious utility, but there were others that were missed. The only problem for me was due to my own lack of preparation. Any other problem is a loss to Wikipedia, not to me.

If you ask nicely, there are admins here who would happily give you the wikitext from any of the lost pages.

I know that, Greg, but thanks. However, that was a very long list of pages. I didn't want to trouble an admin.

I did get the text of a deleted revision, last month, when they were pulling that stunt (Using revision delete to conceal harmless/helpful edits) in history, going well beyond RBI.

Anyway, I think I saved it all. Just took me a couple of hours.

something productive. you aren't doing shit here.

Oh, the irony.

Yeah. Am so doing shit!