Jimbo Unilaterally Cashiers WMF's Section 230 Immunity, Declares Course Materials in Applied Ethics "Beyond Scope" Options Rating

[Moulton]

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'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.

It wasn't the concept of a course on applied ethics that was declared "beyond the scope" of wikiversity, it was the implementation (drawn heavily from your personal disputes).

While it might not have been your intent, can you at least see how someone else looking at it might see your implementation of the course in this way as somewhat self-serving (allowing you to present your adversaries as the "bad guys" in a story supposedly being used in an academic context)?

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.

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.

An excellent point---falling on deaf ears.

Eventually, if things continue as they have, all Wikimedia projects will fall apart, primarily due to declining funding. Wikipedia etc. will end up like Geocities---a vast, Balkanized and almost-invisible digital slum.

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.

[dtobias]

It would probably be better for objectivity and detatchment in a course on ethics if you would have provided examples not directly involving conflicts in which you were a combatant.

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[Moulton]

It would probably be better for objectivity and detatchment in a course on ethics if you would have provided examples not directly involving conflicts in which you were a combatant.

Initially I had no plans to include any study cases at all. I had been asked to provide the core Theory of Ethics as I had learned it from a colleague of mine who teaches an undergraduate course in Mass Media Ethics.

Even before we began the Ethics Project, John Schmidt was writing up his own independent review of the IDCab case from Wikipedia. He had left sections of his report open for comments by others, including sections set aside for comments by those whose conduct was under review. I filled in the section reserved for me, adding clarifications, details, and additional evidence above and beyond John's independent account. When Tracy Walker came by, there was a place for her to likewise add her comments and clarifications. However, instead of adhering to the protocols of Scholarly Ethics, she undertook to edit and redact the sections written and signed by other scholars. As you know, it is a gross violation of scholarly ethics to tamper with the academic submissions of other scholars. Rather one submits comments, questions and challenges, which participating scholars are honor bound to address, per the principles of Scholarly Ethics.

Meantime, PrivateMusings had written up his own scenarios, highlighting the ethical questions to be studied, but initially redacting any reference to the live cases from which his scenarios were drawn. That's where Hillgentleman urged everyone to include actual cases rather than synthetic scenarios loosely modeled after real events. It was at that point that I wrote up my own first-person accounts.

I think it's fair to say that had we stuck to purely theoretical materials, without including any case studies, the project would have drawn negligible attention from anyone. In the final analysis, I think it was good that we did follow Hillgentleman's proposal to include authentic cases, even though it meant that members of IDCab would come swooping in to trash the project. What that did was to put the integrity of Wikiversity to the test, as a venue of authentic scholarly inquiry. As you know, Wikiversity then crashed and burned, as Cary and Jimbo both came in to totally kibosh the Ethics Project and to declare such studies as "beyond the scope" of WMF-sponsored projects.

In doing so, Jimbo clearly swept away any presumption of Section 230 Immunity and dramatically breached the promise set forth in the WMF Mission Statement to bring the "sum of all human knowledge" to the Internet public. In the wake of his unprecedented intervention, half a dozen adolescent WV Custodians dutifully donned their Jimbonic jackboots and followed his lead, thus revealing what Jimbo was teaching impressionable 21st Century youth under the umbrella of WMF's tax-exempt educational mission.

I would have preferred that Wikiversity had demonstrated the integrity of WMF's professed commitment to educational enterprise. But given the remarkable breach of that expectation, I'd rather have Jimbo personally breach it in the dramatic fashion he did than to have some minor official undermine it in a marginal sideshow that not even Kato bothers to take notice of.

[zvook]

Moulton: What's your relationship to John Schmidt?