David Gerard "dances on the skulls" of the IWF, his words not mine Options

[Kato]

In a blog post, disgraced WMF UK spokesman David Gerard - previously best known as the guy who blocked a whole region of Utah, and censored various IPs round the world, as well as censoring "encyclopedia text", all because he didn't like the views of one person who turned out to be correct anyway - and the guy currently accused of entirely deleting ("oversighting" or "censoring" if you will) edits on the subject of zoophilia to protect a fellow high-powered Wikipedian who made them, for political reasons - boasts that after his appearances in the media to oppose the recent IWF censorship:

A small amount of gleeful dancing on the skulls of the IWF today.

This is aimed at a group who work with the Police and Child Protection agencies to alert ISPs about potentially illegal exploitative images of children.

He goes on to write:

I predict a flood of helpful citizenry going to the IWF reporting page and entering any image on any top 10 website that might be “potentially illegal.” Much as the head of the IWF is “potentially a fabulous drag queen.”

Can Wikipedia get more hypocritical, arrogant and obnoxious?

EDIT: More on David Gerard here.

[Somey]

To some extent, people like Dave can get away with this sort of thing by pointing out that there are "a few exceptions" and then telling anyone who objects, "well, of course, you're one of the exceptions." (Which is usually followed by, "Would you like to see my collection of early-Baroque Italian butt-plugs?")

He's also used this term "ad-banner trolling" quite a bit in the past - you'll never hear anything positive from him about ad banners, even though they're one of the main reasons the so-called "information economy" has survived this long. And it's clear that Dave doesn't understand the relationship between the commercial web and the "free" web that Wikipedia supposedly is a part of.

In fact, his essential point doesn't even scan correctly - the purpose of the "unsubstantiable bullshit" is to reward both new and existing advertisers, and convince them to advertise more - not "GET THE CLICKS." It's the advertisers' job to put together something that people will actually click on. The tech press's job is to produce copy that's reasonably accurate, of interest to at least somebody, and that will rank well in search engines, so that people will see the ad. Sure, ad banners suck - so does all advertising. But advertising allows commercial sites to do things that mob-sourced sites like Wikipedia can't do, such as have stable versions of things, and impose quality standards (not to mention behavioral standards) that are actually meaningful.

And evidently, at least in Davegerardland, Wikipedia's job is to try to make commercial media websites look bad, and also to have as big a search-engine footprint as possible so as to help put them out of business. Presumably, the idea there is to replace them with "free" media sites, at which point we'll get more stories whose message is, "FREE IS GOOD! FREE IS GOOD!"

At which point, the end of the information economy as a viable human enterprise will be close at hand, and we'll all have to go back to actually working for a living.

[tarantino]

To some extent, people like Dave can get away with this sort of thing by pointing out that there are "a few exceptions" and then telling anyone who objects, "well, of course, you're one of the exceptions." (Which is usually followed by, "Would you like to see my collection of early-Baroque Italian butt-plugs?")

He's also used this term "ad-banner trolling" quite a bit in the past - you'll never hear anything positive from him about ad banners, even though they're one of the main reasons the so-called "information economy" has survived this long.

His is a bit of a hypocrite, what with his hosting lemonparty dot org and a dozen other shock sites used in trolling. They each contain links to adultfriendfinder, heyya and other similar sites that pay referral fees.