Another double standard:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_channel_quotes

But.... those have been censored for public consumption - the PR folks have had a look and removed lots of crap. It was designed to ensure any useful discussion was eliminated (not that that was hard to do, IRC is like myspace, next to useless)

That's bullshit, Mr. View. Read it again. Halfway down, there's a line that says "D_____ Brandt is the most common sexually transmitted disease after children."

And as if that isn't enough, there's stuff about "mammary intercourse," "terrifying penis spam," "fuck i need to beat my cat," and the line "all girls must be fucked up in their heads or something," too.

At the very bottom are the words "Anal hurts like a motherfucker"... Also uncensored, but based purely on what I've been told, at least that's fairly accurate!

IRC is just multiplayer notepad.

I think the criterion is simple: IRC logging is allowed for "funny quotes" but not to use as evidence, not without having identifiable information stripped out, and not for using against other users.

And frankly, while I'm sure this will piss a lot of people off, as long as you are doing the same thing WP is doing, Mr. Brandt , by showing off people's personal identifiable information, no one is really going to give a fuck about them bitching at you in IRC. There are lots of immature people involved in this thing, and lowering your own activity and thresholds for offense to their level is not going to get you what you want any more than editing your own article would. Just my two cents.

So what am I supposed to do? Remember, I did not start this thing. SlimVirgin started it, and now SlimVirgin apparently cannot stop it. Do you think that if I take down the hivemind page and the IRC logs that they will take down my bio? I already offered to do this in my email to SlimVirgin that I posted last month. My experience is that when I make offers like this, they turn around and accuse me of trying to blackmail them.

Resistance is futile -- that's what you are saying. What the hell am I supposed to do? And if you don't have a good answer, then please keep your two cents to yourself next time, because it's not even worth half of that.

Psychologists say that babies are often proud of what they do in their diapers.

Who would've thought that it could be the medium of a collective infartuation?

Happy Valentines' !!!

Jonny

Let's try to get something straight once and for all. Western Jurisprudence and English Common Law, as lately amended for New World consumption, preserve no Right Of Anonymous Defamation (ROAD). In short, there is no legal protection for ROAD killers, not in the long run, since the right to face ones accusers is a principle of Western Jurisprudence and English Common Law, as lately amended for New World consumption.

In particular, Daniel Brandt is not doing the same thing as his defamers, since what he asserts he asserts under the responsibility of his own name and reputation.

The right to privacy does not include the right to write whatever you damn well please about another person, not without being brought to stand in person behind your words, to defend them or eat them, as the case may come to be.

Jonny

This is exactly what I've been saying for the last 8 months, and it's just in one ear and out the other. It's like these people are thinking, "but wait! I'm not anonymous! I have a name and everything! My refusal to use it on the internet doesn't make any difference, does it? So I can say whatever I want and it's all covered under the First Amendment, right?"

Well, uh... no.

I admit that I've never been able to figure out what the hecque is going through these people's heads, but I guess your guess is as good as any that I've seen so far. It seems to be yet another variation on that "Going on diet, but eating my cake, and having my cake, and what's to stop me?" philosophy.

But the Rights Of Free Speech And Press (ROFSAP), that non-indigenous Americans took the trouble to write down as their first afterthought, do not give anybody the immunity to say anything they like about their products, whether offerred on a basis of "free", "donation solicited", or otherwise.

So what does this have to do with IRC? As a practical matter, nobody really cares what anybody says in IRC, just as nobody cares what anybody says on Usenet, because no claims are being made about the truth or even the sanity of anything that gets said there. The only reason that anybody is forced to care what goes on in Wikipedia-related IRC is that the Wikimedia Foundation makes claims that its product has some sort of positive relationship to knowledge. If the Wikimedia Foundation would quit calling its product an "encyclopedia", and begin to label it truthfully, then Google et al. would be forced to drop it back into the Internet Super-Sewer the same way that it has done with Usenet. Until that time, the real free press has a duty to dig up whatever company memos it can, just as it did with egregious polluters like whoever manufactured Virginia Slims.

Jonny

Part IV ( B ) -- "taking the matter further"


Unless it can be shown by SlimVirgins’s statement,
which she later added,The "NPOV" criticism of Berlet then was:This has been completely excised from the Chip Berlet article, now, thanks to the fact that SlimVirgin, after "taking the matter further", created the Daniel Brandt page whom she described as "not a credible source".

Today, 23 January 2007 20:14 UTC, much of the Rangerdude/Horowitz material, whom SlimVirgin alleged was "malicious" and may cause Wikipedia "a legal problem" (and was thinking of taking the matter further "for that reason"), constitutes much of the "NPOV criticism" subsection of the Chip Berlet article.

Part IV ( C ) -- Questionable sources

What I'm saying is if you're going to sue them, sue them. But spare us all the woe-is-me double standards over m:bash. I didn't say they were blameless, but I'm not saying you are either. The fact that some pedantic nitwit with the mental capacity of my houseshoes chose to insult you should bother you less than a bird crapping on your car. The bulk of these people can't even get jobs at McDonald's. While I understand you are upset about your article, your upset at m:bash merely ... amuses me.

I don't think that's going to qualify as a "good answer"...



We've been over this multiple times, Elara - if he's going to sue them, he has to establish malicious intent, as well as show evidence that he's made some effort to inform them that he objects to whatever it is they happen to be doing - in this case, posting IRC logs containing libelous material. If that comes off as self-pity, or an attempt to impose a double-standard, then too bad. The longer this goes on, the more bad things they do, and the stronger the case becomes.

Also, we don't even know if Brandt has ever received a formal take-down request regarding the HiveMind pages from the Wikimedia Foundation, do we? I'd even hazard to guess that no such request has been made, because they want to distance themselves from what happens on Wikipedia as much as they possibly can.

Somey is correct. The Wikimedia Foundation ignores me. I sent this fax to Danny Wool on August 1, informing him that I was prepared to "publish" the IRC logs since I was already being accused of this. He never responded. Now the number of files, and the entries in the hostmask file, are almost double compared to the numbers cited in the fax, and they're also available through Google and Yahoo.

I have given the Foundation every opportunity to do the right thing and take down my bio. They don't dare respond to me. I think it's because Brad is worried that by responding to me in a professional manner, it will set a precedent that will undermine their position that the Wikimedia Foundation is not a "publisher," but only a "service provider." If that happens, they cannot maintain their claim of immunity as easily in court.

So it just keeps escalating. It's not me, it's them.

Well, I guess the forum didn't transmit my very very sarcastic tone of voice at all. That line was intended to be a joke....

Well, here's a bit for you to chuckle over. Once you have made any part of the logs public, you have voluntarily given up one of the arguments that you might have used to claim that they are private communications.

Jonny

Ah, sorry! Alas, this particular subject tends to be seen as "no laughing matter" around here. In fact, I suspect that of the users here who have been banned from WP, at least half of them probably assume that there was at least some behind-the-scenes chatting that led to it happening...

We probably need better emoticons, too!

I don't believe I've ever argued as such, personally I don't like the hostmasks being made public (not like that information can track anyone anyways). My big beef w/ IRC is the lack of verifability to real usernames. ANYONE could take any nick and chances are nobody would have a clue that it wasn't the person they thought it was.

Now, i'm sure what you really want to know about is the "lol" channel also known as wikipedia-en-admins. I personally haven't seen much there that doesn't look like a myspace page, but maybe that's just my quick glance w/o really reading what goes on. I have better things to spend my time on than reading "lol" or "funny" or "pokemon" 50 trillion lines.

Sorry, but entities writing under the anonym "a view from the hive" have already relinquished the possibility of making sense when they apply words like "personally" to their views.

But I, of course, was using the word "you" in the generic or collective sense -- the sort of thing you'd think'd be second nurture to an entity writing under the anonym "a view from the hive", but never mind (or hive-mind) that now.

In other words, I'm saying that A Person In General (APIG) has voluntarily given up one of the arguments that said APIG might have used to claim that said IRCsome bits are private communications.

But thanks for not "seeing" just how funny your own joke is, not to mention "raising" it with the far bigger howler, "Lack Of Verifability To Real Usernames" (LOVTRU).

That's the trouble with banning all yer intelligent users -- the hive just gets stoopider and stoopider as time goes by.

Now that's funny ...

Jonny

As indeed have entities writing under the anonym 'Jonny Cache'. We still welcome their inputs.

In all fairness to Mr. View, that wasn't his first choice for a member name. I thought his first choice was too generic-sounding, so this was something of a compromise...

Whether or not he was joking about the IRC logs being censored/innocuous/ultimately worthless is mostly immaterial, of course... But the point about them not being "private communications" is not. The fact is that Wikipedia has no legal basis on which to forbid publication of IRC logs - they don't even own the servers on which the conversations take place. They do, of course, have the right to kick people out of the channel for any reason they want, but that's not the same thing.

The point is that there was never any issue regarding the privacy of the IRC logs to begin with. Any such claims made by WP'ers are completely spurious, and always have been. There must be a dozen conversations on various talk pages and project pages where someone (including User:SlimVirgin, at least once) asked someone else for a legal citation that would support such claims, and none was forthcoming.

Still, IRC is more "open" than Instant Messaging or Skype conference calling, which is what the so-called "cabalists" are likely to switch to if the various IRC channels start getting too heavily scrutinized. To some extent, we should probably encourage them to keep using it!

Let me try to make this point one more time. Being a Free Speecher from WayBak, I don't care what sorts of jokes or funny costumes people swap in the privacy of their own homes and phones. But a member of Congress who makes a racist or sexist joke when he or she thinks the mike is off is fair game for a public out®age. By the same token, if you'll recuse the xpression, the only logical reason -- not of necessity legal reason -- why we care what's on the back channels of Wikipedia, to ½wit, stuff that makes no claim to our respect, is its connection to what's on the front pages and admin adversions thereof, to the other ½wit, stuff that does, for the hopefully transient moment, make its unearned claims to our respect.

When those claims have been e-ploded, as justly they will be, no one will have any rational reason, beyond the passing emusement, to care what's on either channel, front or back.

A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished ...

Jonny