Over on the WikiEN-l list, a post by MacGyverMagic seems to reinforce the trend that people truly believe that privacy among editors/admins is important, because it will help protect them from physical threats and occupational persecution:



I am still looking for the actual evidence of anyone ever losing a job or failing a job interview because of their constructive involvement on Wikipedia. That is, other than Brian Chase or Ryan Jordan, who really brought on their own troubles through deliberately counter-productive claims and edits. I would also like to know who was ever visited by the police, other than our recent friend the Turkish professor, because of the defamatory acts of vandals on his BLP page.

Mgm suggested to me that I search the WikiEN-l archives for terms like "job interview", "supervisor" and similar job-related terms. He said, "Sorry I can't provide you with more detail." Why are WikiEN-l notables making such sweeping statements about privacy concerns if they "can't provide more detail"?

My search of WikiEN-l archives produced only a situation where Stan Shebs had been in a job interview and the subject of a heated Usenet debate of his came up. Fortunately, the interviewer sided with Stan's position, so that was probably a net positive outcome. David Gerard has said that he's had to talk about Wikipedia on a job interview, and again, it was a net positive experience (at least it was in 2004).

Where is the evidence? May I see the actual dates and names of real people who have been actually harmed in the real world, thanks primarily to Wikipedia (other than, of course, the "victims" of BLP's)? Until we see this evidence, this whole line of reasoning/excuses/justification falls very far short in my book.

Greg

I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the ArbCom as being harassed for their editing on Wikipedia and who nevertheless are being harassed now.

Yes, I paraphrased Sen. McCarthy.

Given that the WikiLeadership has about the same respect for truth as the late Wisconsin senator, it works...

I believe that probably a rather large number of "Wikipedian" have lost their jobs due to the destructive and addictive need to edit WP to the detriment of their employment responsibilities. By persisting in providing social approval and rewards for excessive edit counts WP shows a callous disregard for the well being of its own users. Those 'Wikiaholic" UBXs are really all that funny. WP leaves an excellent audit trail for human resource professionals. It is only a matter of time before they get even better at detecting workplace abuse.

"Hello my name is WikiWhileYouWork(talk/contribs), I have been editing for 6 months and have 20,000 edits. I proudly accept this nomination to be an administrator."

The ultimate example is Gator1, who - in an extraordinary step - not only had his user and user talk pages, but also his Requests for adminship page deleted (RFA pages are almost never deleted). Details are kind of sketchy, but he apparently got into a lot of trouble for editing. TShilo12's comment on the Wikipedia:Admins willing to make difficult blocks page indicates that part of the problem was that Gator1 was editing from work.

Our good friend Blu Aardvark seems to have raised some interesting points.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikie...ril/068729.html

There's always the case of User:MusicalLinguist, who in this diff points out that her being physically stalked by someone was due to that person obtaining information about her from Wikipedia itself, whereas in this one she seems to imply that the information came from here, which appears to be contradictory. I don't believe the information came from here at all, at least not originally.

It's true that this user was one of the targets of User:AMorrow (who apparently was not the physical stalker in question), who was also a member here (since banned)... At one point, Amorrow tried to write a BLP article about MusicalLinguist's father (since deleted), which she interpreted as a form of harassment against her (and to be fair, it probably was, sort of). Amorrow also posted some identifying info about her on his own website (since 404'd) and there were links to it here for a while (since excised), but the more serious attacks on her came from a site called "doubleblue.info," not this one... They essentially accused her of being the leader of a so-called "Christian Cabal" of WP admins and editors who were, and presumably still are, actively removing "anti-Christian" content from WP articles about Christianity.

MusicalLinguist claims, rather vaguely, that take-down requests were made either to this site, or else to Wikipedia-Watch, that were ignored. We've received no such requests since I've been an admin here, however. (It should be noted that she used her real name as an account name for several months before becoming an admin.) I myself did remove some (non-identifying) stuff that I felt was inappropriate, but again, nearly all of the factual info was originally from her own WP user page (since deleted/restored with limited revision history), and there's a fine line between protecting someone's privacy, and protecting someone who abuses his or her administrative privileges (to protect a favored POV or article version) from criticism.

Sounds like a frightening experience for MusicalLinguist. I wonder what the outcome was of her contacting the police, who presumably could have helped to trace the origin of any e-mails (through an ISP search) or the Caller ID source of the telephone calls to her workplace? Or, were the authorities never notified?

I think my concern with this particular aspect of Wikipedia is that true victims unfortunately are responding to real threats with oblique solutions that aren't really solutions, such as quitting the project, or censorship of external web domains. I would have imagined that the best way to deal with these types of stalking threats is to turn them over to the proper authorities, no? If there are widespread cases of this type of activity proliferating, at some point the authorities are going to recognize that Wikipedia is itself an attractive target for sickos. Then they might be able to implement some sort of organized plan to help counteract this kind of harrassment.

What I suspect is happening, as happens in some forms of family-centric or community (church?) abuse, is that the victim doesn't want to bring harm, ridicule, or unwanted attention to the family or the community/church, and so therefore outside agents of authority are never contacted. Instead, they hope that either (1) the problem will go away if ignored, or (2) the family/community/church heirarchy can address the problem with internally-exercised countermeasures.

I hope that people like Gator1 and MusicalLinguist are exercising their own rights to seek the assistance of law enforcement when they feel they're being stalked; however (so far), I'm not hearing that this is actually happening.

I once received over 60 duplicate e-mails from someone using my web contact form who wished to inform me that my Wikipedia Review idea was "stupid". I have the IP address of the sender. But because I didn't see this repetitive message as a real threat, and he or she stopped after about an hour, I didn't do anything about it. But, once one's personal safety or livelihood is threatened, that's when you must -- MUST -- call on law enforcement.

Greg

I believe MusicalLinguist lives in Ireland, and I don't know what the anti-stalking laws are like in Ireland... or if there even are any.

However, it does strike me that there's a general feeling among many people that the police are "useless" against this sort of thing, at least in the early stages, and that they won't get involved until there's something much more conclusive or "real" than just an e-mail... a phone call might not even do it, especially if it isn't recorded.

It's also a good point that for someone like her to have called the police in on something like that would make Wikipedia look pretty bad, if reporters got hold of it somehow. Even if WP did handle those situations effectively, or even properly, it's just not the sort of thing they want to advertise, at least not until recently. She also might have risked having reporters try to figure out why the stalker was targeting her specifically, which obviously would have made things much worse from her perspective.

I certainly would never blame her for being upset about the whole thing, nor would I dare to suggest that it didn't actually happen. But for her to both completely ignore the fact of her own contributory (i.e., abusive-admin) behavior, and also to foist the blame off on others for simply repeating or linking to information that she herself exposed first, is at best disingenuous - and at worst, well... you can just imagine.

Just for the educational benefit of anyone at WP who has been seriously stalked IRL and might have wandered over to WR: In many jurisdictions a form of injunctive relief, commonly called "Personal Protection Orders" might be of some help. These may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and they derive from domestic relations so in some places they only apply to married/divorce/living together/boyfriend/girlfriend situations. But recent trend has been to expand the relief to apply to any stalker. Sometime they even relax venue requirements. "What good is a court order to someone who might be willing to hurt me" you ask? The benefit is they make otherwise lawful behavior, like hanging out near someone or making phone calls, illegal. They are useful because they allow police to intervene early in the escalation cycle. It might be amusing to see a state trial court judge wrestle with anon IP addresses and such during a motion docket. If resources are scarce a local legal aid society might be able to help.

Thank you for pointing out that fact.

Good ol' search engines...

http://www.harassment-law.co.uk/stalk.htm

Section 10: Harassment

So I suppose it would depend on how broadly you wanted to interpret this (in particular, the word "seriously" and the term "reasonable excuse"), but if you interpret it broadly enough to include identifying information posted on anonymous websites that was all gleaned from data originally supplied by the person himself or herself, directly or indirectly, then... why hasn't the Daniel Brandt article been deleted yet?

I think what she is trying to say is that she put revealing information about herself on Wikipedia and then it was reproduced here in an "intimidating matter." (paraphrase)

as an aside, i get the feeling that a lot that are demonizing WR have either never visited the site or have visited one or two threads that they were directed to.

Has it dawned on anyone on Wikipedia why editors and especially admins would want to hide their identities from the outside world? That being a Wikipedia editor or admin might be detrimental rather than helpful to a persons professional reputation?