QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Tue 10th February 2009, 11:12am)
Not entirely unrelated to your main cause, you will find a lot of wiki-panhandlers here who could use a few well-seasoned ideas about what to do with their fires besides sautéing fryers in Jimbo's pot.
I've put some thought into this in the past, as over the last couple of years I've seen my problems with Wikipedia escalate from a defamatory biography about me to a full press attack on every article about activism in Ottawa. Before I ever got involved with panhandling issues, I spent years working as an anti-spam activist, and one of the lessons I learned from that is never to engage your enemies on their own turf.
Spammers use email and Usenet as their personal toilets. They have no respect for the medium, and they are careful to protect themselves carefully on whatever medium it is that they're spamming, knowing that most people will go no farther than trying to mailbomb them or writing them a nasty email. This is why, when I was lining up an attack on a spammer, I always did so offline. I used phone calls, I used letters, and once or twice I actually paid the spammers a visit in person. I went after them using their local Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and once in a while, in particularly evil cases, I'd sic the FTC or the tax man on them.
The sorts of people we're dealing with, the ones lording over the Great Nerd Kingdom of Wikipedia, are invulnerable inside Wikipedia. While it's possible to *defend* against them there (as one can take steps online to prevent spam from landing in your lap), attacking them is not feasible. These pimply sociopaths have built networks of support inside Wikipedia. Striking them where they're strong is pointless. What people need to do is find out where they're vulnerable. For the most part, these people are pasty, doughy, pimply, basement-dwelling shut-ins. The whole reason they're using Wikipedia is because they are so totally powerless and helpless in every other forum that the very concept of a place where their Asperger's and OCD and APD is an asset instead instead of a curse sends them totally out of control. It is for this reason that "outing" and legal threats are considered cardinal sins on Wikipedia. The Wikipedian Overlords know that outside their little demesne they are helpless.
QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Tue 10th February 2009, 5:43pm)
Obviously you have plenty of injustice to deal with in Ottawa,
but at least you can deal with Wiki-injustice without going outside
with a bullhorn.
(Um, maybe. A mob of angry people in front of the WMF office might do
a world of good. Don't know, because nobody's ever tried it.)
Actually, when they deleted the Panhandlers' Union article, I started organizing to do just that. I was in the process of talking to Wobblies closer to WMF's offices in Florida to see if I could get a picket line going at their door. I called it off when the OPU article was recreated, but it's always a possibility in the future. There was strong evidence that the RfD which got the article deleted was part of an organized campaign against the OPU, which included very public death threats against me, identity theft, and the collaboration of Ottawa City Hall and/or the Ottawa Police Services. Wobblies are not the sort of people who take this kind of harassment lightly or kindly. If WMF thinks it can be quietly complicit with this kind of attack and then sit back and wash its hands like Pontius Pilate, they have another think -- and a rowdy picket line -- coming.
QUOTE(luke @ Tue 10th February 2009, 12:16pm)
Permit me to award you our most prestigious
Barnstar - with oak leaf
Thanks, but you have the wrong team.
The Bolsheviks hated and feared the anarchists. They referred to us as "kulaks," a term which doesn't have a direct English translation, but means uppity peasant bandits who act above their station. Trostky, Lenin, and Stalin were so afraid of the anarchists that they wiped out the entire Makhnovshchina (the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno, which, with only 50,000 untrained and unequipped men, drove 600,000 German troops out of Ukraine) and then murdered 10 million Ukrainians to make sure it could never reform. They also assasinated Buenoventura Durruti, the general of the anarchist forces in Spain, thereby allowing Franco and his fascists to seize control.
Incidentally, our friend JzG attempted to delete WR's invitation on my user page. Rather presumptious, not to mention obnoxious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=269824063
JzG Blocks Editor, Then AfD's His Article, ...and posts message inviting him to comment.
Tue 10th February 2009, 5:16pm
Respec dude 
