The latest target of the badsites pogrom is Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog. In this case the instigator is one "Will Beback", who I gather has some bad blood with her. She made a blog post on 5 May washing her hands of Wikipedia, and among the many many comments she linked to ED's identification of WBb. This is now grinding through AN/I under the guise of an incident against JulesH, who has been reverting all of WBb's erasures.

I have one degree of separation from TNH; she's someone of importance in the SF publishing field, and it's hard to imagine that she's going to back down meekly. OTOH she may also shrug them off. But she is very smart and does not suffer fools gladly, to say the least.

I think that the future of this whole bit of Wikipediot nonsense is fairly easy to predict.

Wikipedia is just now beginning to have a noticeable effect on a world that serious-minded folks care about. In the real world, any person or pseudo-person that has a noticeable effect on a noticeable effect becomes a subject of the normal sorts of inquiry. People who are accustomed to real world practices are not going to block their investigations of these effects based on Wikipediot pretensions of policy that do not already make sense to them. All of which means that more and more resources of real world journalism and scholarship are going to be classed as BADSITES by Wikipuritan fanatics.

Jonny

The attack stuff is hard to find, burried in the blog's comments.

I think she may not even want her bio on Wikipedia anymore.

It's funny how there's over a thousand admins and yet only about 1% of them are noticed. Their names pop up all the time.

Here's a link to the most recent saved version of the discussion.

Will Beback is best known as a meat puppet of SlimVirgin, and also, according to ED, as the inventor of Wikistalking. Whether he is the actual inventor is debatable, but few have taken it to the obsessive-compulsive extremes that WBb has.

He has been "outed" in a variety of locations, and I won't re-out him here (I notice that his entry on the Hivemind page omitted some of the possibly embarassing stuff.) But one detail that I find funny is that he was the "outings chair" for a well-known nature-hiking organization.

I have to hand it to Will. Unlike what most admins there would have done, he instead has shown the restraint of not blocking anyone at all who has linked to her site even after he removed it.


I also notice in the blog comments, a "Todd Larsen" http://molelog.molehill.org/ said (post 200 I believe):




I'd be curious to see links to those.

This may be because the primary person he is berating is none other than Cory Doctorow, one of the more famous of a new generation of SF authors. Ban Doctorow and the proverbial feces-storm would likely rain down on his poor, beknighted ass from every Wikipedia editor who is also a reader of current SF.

Here is a comment by Doctorow. You can decide for yourself which one is the "restrained" one.

Believe it or not, the great majority of admins are conscientious and not absurdly POV. Obviously, we are focused on the minority.

They are also total wikiweenies when it comes to con-trolling that 1%.

Which is why it's not worth the time talking about them.

Jonny

It's getting to the point where any website that doesn't get defined as an attack site by Musical Slim and crew, is a website that has no business wasting bandwidth on the web, and wasting the time of those who have any interest at all in what goes on at Wikipedia.

I'm starting to feel ashamed that hivemind is down. Oh well, if y'all will forgive me, I'll let it stay down for another few weeks or so, just to see if the Foundation Board of Trustees deletes my biography. There's almost zero chance that they will take up the case, and then hivemind will go back up.

(Hive2, the one with admins only, will go up. I'll rename it hivemind, and I'll add the portion of the IRC search engine that checks the hostmask file — 18,000 hostmasks — for those interested in further research. The IRC logs themselves will stay down, and the search engines won't be able to grab the hostmask file because it will be accessible only by my search engine.)

I've put in too much work on the hivemind stuff and the IRC stuff to just throw it away because Musical Slim and crew don't approve of me! It's reached the point by now where the "attack sites" meme pushed by Musical Slim and crew is actually damaging Wikipedia much more than it's helping Wikipedia.

Damage to Wikipedia, when committed by admins on Wikipedia who think they're defending some sacred Wikipedia right of theirs that doesn't exist in the real world, is something that's pure and elegant.

One shouldn't tamper with anything that's pure and elegant; it's bad for your karma.

Yep, the ban-width jes keeps getting wider and wider every day ...

Jonny

I just added Ms. Nielsen-Hayden's blog to my RSS reader. Thoughtful and thought-provoking stuff.

No wonder the WikiMob is howling for her scalp.

Are we allowed to know the url of this blog?

It was linked from some of the original diffs, but so you don't have to go hunting...

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight

Enjoy.

Wikipedia adminship is like a microcosm of world history. If you accept the metaphor of admins being kings, queens, and rulers in general of various nations, many of them are effective champions who generally help the cause. Our most-mentioned admin that get forums and such here about them are like a hundred little Napoleons and Ghengis Khans, without the balancing force of being spread out across time and space from each other. When you have Richard Longshanks, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Edward the Conqueror, and Jack the Ripper all teaming together due to likemindedness, no amount of Queen Elizabeth II's, Pierre Trudeaus and Bill Clintons can help assuage the tide of tyranny.

Along this line of thought, perhaps we should have our own Bastille Day. I'll be Fidel Castro. (I'd be Guy Fawkes, but he DIED. Great moustache, though!)

Fidel Castro helped storm the Bastille in 1789? Damn, he's even older than I thought.

Wait a minute, you've been reading his Wikipedia bio, haven't you? You're not supposed to use that as a scholarly reference!

OK. We gotta pick what color flags to assign to each team. Orange seems to be popular at present. How about Puce, Fuchsia, and Chartreuse for the enemy combatants?