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:



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:



Can Wikipedia get more hypocritical, arrogant and obnoxious?

EDIT: More on David Gerard here.

I assume Mr. Gerard will be dancing to the tune "Let's Do the Time Wrap Again."

Well let's face it, the whole thing was a big cock-up on the IWF's part.

Getting entangled in Wikipedia's ridiculous editing circus is a cock-up on everyone's part - whether they are doing so in good faith or not. In the end, Wikipedia dances on everyone's skulls, including yours Alex.

I'm not sure you can equate Gerard to all of Wikipedia. I, for instance, refuse to dance, even upon the skulls of my enemies.

Alex is right that the IWF did screw up pretty badly in not blocking the image itself, instead blocking the Image: page and the Virgin Killer article. And the ISPs not forwarding the actual IP addresses through the proxy was a big screw up as well. Hopefully they'll both learn from this so that these technical issues can be avoided the next time they block a Wikipedia article. They'll fare much better in the PR department if they do.

Hopefully, Gerard in his capacity as "spokesman" will be doing some of his gloating in front of the media. Anything to give these ignorant media types more incentive to uncover all that wiki-porn out there (which is not really that hard to find). Then I daresay his "dancing" will become much more entertaining.

Why doesn't Wikipedia change its "technical issues"? Starting from the fact that it could easily carry a drop down box to cover extreme images at the very least?

Why must it always be everyone else's cock-up?

Why must everyone who gets entangled in Wikipedia's ridiculous editing circus be subject to the rabid lunatic drama-fest that surrounds that place? To the point where people like David Gerard are "dancing on the skulls of the IWF"?

Hopefully someone will think to contrast the "Oh, actually I get the problem" response from Jimbo (not a quick thinker but he got there in the end) with Gerard - who went for a high risk strategy and won the battle but has now raised the public's awareness that Wikipedia is a place where they don't like their pornographic images to be censored. Eventually, someone will twig that they don't like that more than some watchdog. In the UK we like to have people we can complain to and when things go wrong we expect someone to take responsibility.

Something sort of like Template:Hidden on extreme images isn't a bad idea. It wouldn't technically change whether or not viewing the page is illegal, I don't believe, but it'd certainly be nice to not have the images suddenly in your face while browsing.

A "mature content filter" or other similar feature is also doable, though it would take a software update. The way I'm imagining it the filter would automatically hide anything that's been flagged as mature content, but could be manually overridden on a per-view basis or turned off in the user preferences (not available for those without accounts, possibly limited to autoconfirmed or higher).

If a website is hosting child pornography, what moral right do the website administration have to know the IP addresses?

Hmm, point. While it was an issue here it's certainly a good thing overall. My brains need some non-Wiki-thinking time, it seems.

David Gerard is now notable by Wikipedia's standards. Lol.

So fire up that BLP.

Information wants to be free, not censored.

Sticky Parkin asks about creating a Biography on David Gerard.



It's a tricky one

But I'm with David Gerard. There shouldn't be an article on him, as he formally wishes to WP:OPT-OUT, and there is no established encyclopedia biography of Gerard already out there. Meaning he escapes under clause two of our proposed BLP policy. (WP:OPT-OUT / WP:NO ORIGINAL BIOGRAPHIES / WP:DEAD TREE SOURCES Subject can opt-out if not covered by dead tree biographies).

However, this policy hasn't been implemented on Wikipedia. And when deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Erik Moeller posted to our site a while ago under the moniker Eloquence he stated:



Also, Gerard participated with Phil Sandifer in the now deleted smear article on Judd Bagley, described as "an attack piece" and sourced largely to smears orchestrated by a Wikipedia insider who appeared in various guises in the deletion debate. Bagley angered Gerard and leading Wikipedians including Jimbo by identifying Mantanmoreland and others as being the source of the public smears. Gerard censored a whole region of Utah to prevent Bagley broadcasting his findings on WP.

According to Gerard:

Gerard concluded:

Heh. In that case, Mr. Gerard can personally remove the next instance of one of his drones recreating the Daniel Brandt bio.


Same old hypocrisy. Always amazes me how earnest and straight-faced these guys are, when inserting various feet into their mouths. (Or other body parts.....)

That's pretty offensive whatever way you look at it

Pride goeth before a fall, David. Less of the 'gleeful dancing', please

Indeed.

In his blog post, the Australian resident of the UK, Gerard, encourages punters to make bogus complaints to the IWF to undermine their capacity to act on British complaints about Child Abuse images. Gerard does this despite being a name on WMF UK's commitment to work with Children's charities.

To be fair, he only predicted a flood of bogus complaints, he technically didn't encourage them. Of course, like most of his predictions, this one will end up being wrong. The other "Top Ten Websites" actually do tend to act positively and err on the side of social responsibility when responding to reports of child-porn that they're hosting. Wikipedia is the odd duck in that regard...

So, another Wikipedia lesson learnt: porn OK, hypocrisy OK, gloating OK; acting in the interests of kids (along with the usual stuff like correcting erroneous information that has written about you or pointing out incidents of administrative malfeasance), not OK.

Forces of censorship and oppression always claim to be doing it for great motives like "protecting the children". The world isn't generally fully of comic-book or Saturday-morning-TV villains who call themselves by handy names like "Dr. Evil". Some of you seem to be saying that everybody else needs to immediately fold whenever the "Kiddie Card" is played.

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Now playing: Jane Child - Don't Let It Get To You
via FoxyTunes

(Though, if I were putting myself forward as a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, I'd try to use more tactful language than Gerard did.)

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Now playing: Lily Allen - Smile (Radio Edit)
via FoxyTunes

No, the kiddie card is just one trump card, against which others may be played. It is disingenuous to suggest that Protect the Children protests are... disingenuous. The basis is simple: it has long been recognised by society that children are vulnerable and it is the role of society to be protective of children. What is unusual is the suggestion that an instinctive reaction of protection is improper and the appropriate solution of ignoring the issue as it will magically all come right is a counter-intuitive one - one that is offered with no evidence, just an assurance of arrogant righteousness.

Residents in the UK are aware that such emotive approaches can be overused, and we often have a good laugh about the mixed up American society which cannot marry up its freedom ideals and its oppressive approach of the moral majority which have carried repressive ideologies into the White House itself. However, it would be foolish to assume that any society had got the dilemma solved.

They probably won't like their pornographic images to be censored until it is their own child being posted up and published and exploited. Unless of course, they like to exploit their own children.

Certainly not immediately, and (at the risk of being seen to agree with you yet again ) there's no question that there's a lot of political opportunism, unwarranted alarmism, and hypocrisy in the way the US deals with child porn - IMO it really isn't as serious a problem as it's made out to be by our sensationalist media.

One thing I would say, though, is that this looks like yet another example of inappropriately applying real-world approaches (I wouldn't call them "solutions") to interweb-based issues.

Here's what I mean. When you see a report on the TV news, or even in a newspaper or magazine, about a child pornographer who's just been arrested, what do you actually see? Really, all you see is a mugshot of the perp, or else a really ugly dude being frog-marched into a police car, courtroom, or prison cell. But if you hear about it on the interwebs, how far away are you, really, from seeing the actual child porn itself, assuming one or more websites are implicated? (Also assuming you want to see it, of course? ) The nature of the web makes it pathetically easy to find and view that stuff, and if you can do it, your kids can too. Ultimately, it's just another version of the ever-popular "Streisand Effect."

And there's an additional effect, which is sometimes called "moral erosion" in reality-land. The Wikiland version really should have a different name, because it's a different problem, but what happens is that WP users who are inclined towards a conservative, "protect the kids at all costs" approach to pornography (not just child porn) begin to fear that their personal association with Wikipedia will become tainted by the increasing desire of the community to carry pornographic content. This contributes to the fear of losing one's anonymity, divisiveness among established users/admins, and frustration with the system in general. That causes increased attrition, which ultimately brings on the lockdown phase. So maybe the name for it should be "moral attrition."

They could fix that by compromising, and even if the compromise is a simple form of "adult-content" filtering in the software, it would be better than the alternatives. But they can't compromise, because a compromise would have to be agreed on by "the community" - something they're rarely capable of doing these days, if ever.

So, again, this is how the system destroys itself. It's just unfortunate that it won't happen soon enough to save many of the few remaining publishers of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed reference materials.

Of course. Any morality worth considering will spend a large amount of time agonizing over how to deal with children. These are not easy questions at all.

You can try to claim sensationalism. I wonder if you would change that thought if your own child was exploited on Wikipedia.

If you don't have a logical argument, it never hurts to try an emotional appeal.

Weren't you going to write something up on what exactly your grievance with Wikipedia is? What ever happened to that?

Indeed. The general "problem of how to deal with the incompetent" (of which the problem of children and age-of-majority is but a subset), is the bugbear of a great deal of libertarian political discussion. The problem being that "incompetence" is a totally relative state, and we're all incompetent in many ways by comparison with the average, and in almost all ways by comparison with experts. So, now what? (Notice that Wikipedia has not escaped its own version of the very same problem, as regards editing).

With adults, the best thing we've been able to come up with (in my opinion), is to require many kinds of "competency exams" before we allow certain kinds of socially-sanctioned (sometimes formally licensed) behavior. Thus, my best answer to the question of majority, is that we should be doing more of that same kind of individual testing with the older-children/younger-adults (perhaps losing the binary labels at the same time). We actually do a bit of that in the concept of "emancipated minor," and it probably needs to be expanded. The problem is that it's expensive, and nobody really wants to pay for it. It's easier just say "no." But licensure fees were invented for this problem, and they could in theory be applied to young people, also. Parents would object, but everyone knows that parents' views on giving up control are often semi-irrational anyway. And so universal that this has probably prevented a lot of progress in the area from happening.

And what, post it up on Wikipedia? Where they demonstrate how willing and easily to revert/censor such an addition? Yet, Wikipediens would fight (even kick someone in the mouth) to continue to exploit a child or not censor indecency.

I don't think you have been paying attention at all.

Of course, despite being on the internet, I am not a complete libertarian (and I am no Libertarian). But it is worse there than anywhere (which aggravates the problem on the internet).

There are a scant few examples of this in real life I can think of (gun licenses, driving licenses), but in a smaller community it ought to be simpler. I have "half-joked" in the past that you should get one vote in an election for each question you can successfully answer about the candidate's platform, too.

In Wikipedia's case, that children and comparatively young people are involved in the decision making processes complicate things enormously. It is easy enough for the 40-somethings to 60-somethings to idealize under 18s this way and that - it is substantially different for those of use who are teenagers, or 20-somethings to do so. In the Virgin Killer case, its not surprising the younger people are not as worried as some predicted. It is remarkable how much people can forget what it was like to be young as they age.

Silvered tongued David Gerard, Wikimedia Foundation UK Spokesman, now tells the Tech media:

Way to pay the tech press back for their yeoman's service to Wikipedia on the "Virgin Killer"matter, Skull Dancer. I can see the depth of interpersonal skills that has made him an official Wikipedia spooks person.

He truly is a master of building relationships.

If you've ever read through his various blogs, you may conclude he is good at building some types of relationships. Most of those, though, are with people as odd or odder than he is.

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.

Can anyone tell me what the last sentence of DG's rant means; "They can’t work computers, but anything you can’t explain in a difficult-to-corrupt soundbite you can’t explain." I take it his finger/mind/girdle slipped somewhere, but I don't have a clue what it is he was attempting to convey.

I understand it (although I don't agree with it) – Wikipedese -> English translation:
Glad to be of service

All it will take is someone with deep pockets--Google, Yahoo, whatever--deciding that they want to outdo Wikipedia, by creating an even better encyclopedia-web-thing. By micropaying people to edit, using an AdSense-like model.

Would you edit WP for free, if there was someone offering you MONEY to do it on their own site?

If that ever happens, Gerard will look extremely foolish. And WP will die off.

I have to admit up-front, with the economy going in the toilet, a for-pay encyclopedia is becoming a long shot.

Hmmm... Thanks, but I'm not so sure, myself. This was the full quote:

I suspect the way he wants you to interpret that has little to do with how well mainstream journalists understand systems as opposed to tech-press journalists. He wants to impart the notion that tech-press journalists aren't "real journalists," and that they "corrupt" lengthy explanations of things after specifically asking people like Dave to provide such explanations.

Of course, Dave's problem isn't that the explanations are being "corrupted." He's either not very good at explaining things, or more likely, the systems (or whatever) he's trying to explain have distinct flaws and weaknesses that either can't be accounted for, or that are noticeable by someone who knows something about systems. Their insertion of critical material into Dave's explanation of how Wikipedia (or whatever) "works" is seen by him as a "corruption" of his explanation.

This is why he prefers the mainstream media - they don't ask for such explanations, because they either don't have the space to include them, or because they assume their readers aren't likely to understand anything that can't be encapsulated into a single sentence.

In essence, this is just another way of saying that Wikipedia thrives on ignorance of its flaws. That could be said of almost any system, of course - Dave just happens to be the one complaining at the moment.

That's only part of it. Despite being a seriously deluded twit, Gerard is going around challenging bloggers who have the temerity to criticize WP. I stumbled across an example of this yesterday. Guess he doesn't sleep.
(Neither does Moulton. He posted a comment too. )

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.

Somey, has anyone told you lately that you are brilliant?