Jimbo's recent intervention in Wikiversity, where he declared various academic lines of inquiry (primarily associated with a course on Applied Ethics) to be "Beyond the Scope" of Wikiversity (and all other WMF-funded projects) is probably a bigger issue for Section 230 Immunity than other arguments.

At the same time that Jimbo publishes an appeal to donors to contribute to WMF's mission of bringing the sum of all human knowledge to 21st Century youth, he declares that a wide swath of educational material on Wikiversity is beyond the remit of the project, and he personally expunges it.

To my mind, that not only abrogates the letter and the spirit of the WMF Mission Statement, it also dispenses with the "hands-off" Section 230 argument that otherwise lawful and traditional educational content is not censored.


Jimbo never actually said exactly what was "Beyond Scope", and he failed to answer questions from others who asked him to explain himself.

Superficially, he made reference to "outing" on my talk page. But the only "outing" on that page was a paragraph near the top where SB_Johnny referred to me as "Barry".

But to your point about the case studies...

Originally, the course material on Applied Ethics was all theory, with no examples or exercises. Hillgentleman, who was helping us to structure the course, asked us to provide examples of ethical dilemmas against which the theoretical principles could be applied. Initially, PrivateMusings responded with a "scenario" roughly paralleling his experiences on WP. Hillgentleman said he didn't want synthetic scenarios, but live examples from WP. So several of us wrote up cases as Hillgentleman had requested.

When Tracy Walker took issue with the cases involving her, I invited her to write up her own account and we would both submit our versions to scholarly peer review, accepting and responding to questions from others. Tracy declined to do that, preferring to edit or delete the cases that John Schmidt and I had constructed, based on the evidence.

Time and again, I invited the editors from IDCab to present their versions and submit everything to peer review, in accordance with the principles of scholarly ethics.

Instead, they shredded the project, creating a fresh batch of ethical dilemmas to chew on. Ultimately, Cary and Jimbo issued veiled and not-so-veiled threats to shut WV down. Most of the custodians buckled. Some left the project.

I still call for a scholarly review of the travesty that took place on WV in the wake of the unprecedented intervention of Cary and Jimbo.


That's been predicted for a while now.

But what concerns me more than the plausible prediction of an epic failure of WMF is the fraud that is being perpetrated on the donors and the disservice being delivered to impressionable 21st Century youth who have fallen into the anachronistic culture of the Jimbonic Jackboot Juggernaut as it ambles down the Puerile Pogrom Parade.

More than anything, it grieves me to watch these youngsters fall into reprehensible fascistic practices that ethical pioneers fought so hard to eradicate down through the past 4000 years of bloody political history.