posted by mistake

Loathe as I am to defend Ms. Dunin, I'm afraid this version, to which your link refers…

http://www.kimtragedy.info/wikipedia/

is one of the most palpably biased hit pieces I've ever seen.

Durova in a position to teach other people how to act? That's just funny given that practically everyone associated with Wikipedia knows what she is like due to all the news...

posted by mistake

That's not as hypocritical as Britney Spears is going to write a book teaching people how to be a good parent. After that Jamie Lynn Spears (Britney's recently pregnant 16 year old sister) is going to write her own book on parenting, too.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Br...on+parenting%22

Hopefully that URL didn't have as s, col or, etc. in it

Correction: Britney Spears's mother.

Hmm I heard rumors of the kids, too.

Well anyway, google says the mother put the book on hold after her 16 year old daughter got pregnant and decided to keep the baby. If you're 16 and pregnant, you can sweep it under a rug with an abortion and your mother will still look like she did a good job, but instead of you decide to have it then your mother looks like she did a terrible job.

Hmmm... some cultures say abortion is bad because it kills and other cultures say it's much worse to dishonor your parents.

Posted by mistake

Well, it was about analogies to the Durova thing.

We're lucky she didn't use the word "training" instead... (That's Durova, I mean, not Britney Spears or her mom.)

Well your point is pretty obvious Durova shouldn't mediate. The next step is to figure out exactly how bad it'll turn out.

Maybe like when SlimVirgin/Crum375/Jayjg makes an article to them "NPOV" ?

Looks like Pwok picked up his marbles and went home.

You've clearly deeply offended Pwok by not acting as he wishes. Refactor please.

Pwok, if it is really upsetting to you when people move
off from your point, then be aware that the moderators
of this board have the ability to move off posts into
different threads. You could ask them to do this.

Also, please understand that 'off-topic' doesn't have
much meaning to some of us... well, it doesn't have
much meaning to me, at least. If any two things are
no more than six degrees of separation apart, then
is there really such a thing as 'off-topic'?

So live with it and just ask the moderators to move
the posts. Or do what Jonny does and start a new
thread, quoting the posts from the old one which are
'on-topic' by your definition.

I'm climbing off the ceiling. Sorry. They pissed me off when they turned this into a conversation about Britney Spears. It's bad enough to have to see that kind of crap on CNN. But I probably overreacted.

That's okay, we love you anyway. {{{Pwok}}}

Anyway, if this sort of thing really bothers you, you could
just ask the moderators to move the Britney Spears posts
over to the lounge. Alternatively, you could start a new
thread entitled 'Durova offers "mentoring" services, the
non-celebrity discussion', quoting whatever you want to
keep from this thread.

Both of these are probably easier than trying to explain
to people like me why you think Britney Spears is
off-topic.

Have a yuk on me, Pwok.

Durova proposed to mentor me after a recent Kafkaesque purge and pogrom. Mercury thought that would be a good idea.

The Pogrom Managers did not agree.

You are probably lucky, Moulton. Getting mentored by Durova would probably
be worse than being banned. Durova is the sort of person who will get a kid
kicked out of school, ruining his career dreams, and accuse you of harassment
and threaten to throw you in jail if you peaceably and privately protest to her
about it.

If you want a mentor, try Tony Sidaway or Daniel. SlimVirgin even. Much nicer
people.

(I know SlimVirgin is controversial, but I actually do think she might be a good
mentor for some. Anyway, I like her, at least.)

Actually, the idea of having a mentor at all (let alone Durova) struck me as rather odd for an enterprise that had as its goal to write a respectable encyclopedia.

But having a mentor makes perfectly good sense if one views Wikipedia as an MMPORG.

And whether she was any good at it or not, Durova did fancy herself as an expert on gaming the system. She even wrote blog articles about it.

Oh, she's fantastic at gaming the system. She can harass a person
and get them blocked for harassment. Absolutely brilliant!

But is that really what you want to learn from a mentor?

No, me neither.

Oh, I had no interest in learning to game the system. I was more interested in the purported objective of the site, which was to craft encyclopedic articles that rose to respectable journalistic standards of accuracy, excellence, and ethics on online media.

Alas, I discovered (much to my chagrin) that those playing the game had no interest in that objective.

Now my objective is to understand how Wikipedia managed to morph into an MMPORG of the sort that the Durovas of the world spend their lives learning to manipulate for fun and profit.

Uhm.. Tony Sidaway, a mentor? I don't exactly have fond memories of him.

That was my point with the Spears analogy.


Although, how does Durova harass a person and get them blocked for harassment?

I have a theory about how that might be done.

When I was engaged in an otherwise congenial e-mail exchange with Durova, she suddenly and unexpectedly declared that she no longer wished to continue our conversation, indicating that she would consider any further traffic to be harrassment. That stance left no room for an expression of perplexity as to what had triggered her dramatic and unexplained reversal.

Something similar to that happened in my E-Mail conversation with Jim62sch.

British law disagrees. Sexual content can be harassment. Threats of
physical harm can be harassment. Obscenely offencive material -
as in, calling someone a Nazi, not just comparing them to a Nazi, but
actually saying they are a Nazi - can be harassment. But there is a
right of peaceful protest. Peaceful protest is not harassment.

Durova was basically threatening you with defamation. It is obscenely
offencive, it my view, for her to accuse you of harassment when she
is the one making the threats.

Actually, calling you a harasser probably is obscenely offencive, and
therefore harassment according to British law... if I can just find a case
to confirm....

Oh, I disagree with Durova, Jim62sch, and the others as well. I am inclined to believe they are merely misinformed and misguided, rather than pathologically misanthropic mendactors of misjudgment.

I had hoped that Sheffield Steel would get his wish, but that was not to be (at least not in the original venue of the soap opera).

Durova has gotten a kid kicked out of school, ruining his career dreams.
Rather than have any remorse, she considers this to be experience that
makes her qualified to deal with similar situations in the future. If you
try to explain to her that she hurts people, she will call you
condescending, then charge you with spam and harassment.

Now, tell me, how do you interpret that as merely misguided? To me,
that proves she has absolutely no conscience, no ethics, no basic
sense of decency.

I believe this happens shortly after the point that they discover you are their intellectual equal or superior. At that point, their power position is untenable, so they abort the conversation and disengage in a way that suggests any further action on your part will be equated with that of a socially-maladjusted derelict.

I got this type of feedback once from Charles Matthews, after I e-mailed him with a reasoned comment that suggested his stubbornly incorrect interpretation of the facts surrounding the Arch Coal fiasco was "some form of mental problem bordering on sociopathy."

He replied: "I want to hear nothing more from you. Clear?"

End of debate between intellectual equals, I guess.




Refresh me on that story with a link, please?

Greg

Remorse is an interesting emotion -- one that is relatively uncommon in our culture.

My theory about why remorse is so rare is because we have adopted a popular cultural practice that displaces remorse.

The popular cultural practice of shaming and blaming tends to make people defensive rather than contrite, mainly because judgments of guilt are usually accompanied by sanctions and punishments.

Many of the characters in the Wikipedia soap opera are Snape-like in their glee at meting out sanctions and punishments. Perhaps that is the unhealthy culture they were steeped in during their most impressionable formative years.

Fantastic news!

I've been on pin-&-needles waiting for the next Cody Banks sequel. This one should be a riot.

Jonny

Durova does this as a standard practice. She did it with Kohs, and I've seen her do it at least two other times. Which given I dont see everything she does all the live long day indicates that she probably does this as a standard modus operandi.

And Moulton, your analysis is spot-on. She seeks to annihilate anyone who is her intellectual equal. Anyone less, isn't worth the vitriol.



Oh sweet mother of G-d let this not be true. Does anyone know who this poor soul is?

This besides losing Tim H. his post as cong. press office? Sullying his good name?



Yes, yes, yes. A thousand times yes.




I agree.

In the interests of accuracy in attribution, that was Greg's analysis, not mine. Nonetheless, I have known other instances of that remarkable character trait, which evidently traces back to Cain's jealousy of his more accomplished brother.

Hm³, the way I remember the story, it wasn't so much that Abel was more able, per se, merely that he was more favoured by an arbitrary, capricious, and inscrutable authority who didn't like having his caprices questioned.

Jonny

I was gonna edit accomplished to distinguished, but then I would have had to further edit distinguished to extinguished.

Jes doin' my part for the Underdog, Ma …

Jonny

You mean ... they had Wikipedia even then?

Apparently they had sheep, and keepers of sheep, so I guess that's pretty much the same thing, right?

I mean, one might easily interpret Genesis as meaning that God was basically a carnivore, and didn't want to eat vegetables, so when he showed (or "shew") a clear preference for Abel's sheep offering over Cain's vegetable offering, the result was completely predictable. Cain, feeling horribly ripped off, took out his anger on his brother, because God himself could not be effectively attacked. He is (or was), after all, God.

Now, admittedly, Cain probably overreacted, but remember, there were only four people in the whole world at that point, so how hard would it have been for God to have given Cain at least some DAP, even if it wasn't all that sincere? Not hard, right? It's not like He had billions of people to show respect to or anything like that. So He was clearly being, well, kind of a jerk.

Now, one might ask, what does this have to do with Wikipedia? Or, more specifically, Durova's "mentoring services"? That's the real question here. In a general sense, one might view Cain's reaction to being dissed as similar to that of the WP user who loses an edit war - you have two sides fighting for territory, and more often than not some admin comes along and makes a decision that unfairly favors one side over the other. The losing side is angry, but can't do anything about the admin, who has banning authority, so the next best thing is to attack the other side and try to bring the other user(s) into disrepute, so that they eventually get banned.

Durova's intentions by "mentoring" people are, in effect, to prevent them from obtaining what they would consider to be a fair resolution of whatever issue concerns them. Since the only effective means of getting justice on Wikipedia is by sneak attack, following Durova's prescribed behavioral plan (i.e., always be civil, calmly discuss the problem on the talk page, and so on), simply results in further frustration. But from WP's perspective, that's useful because it spreads out the frustration reaction over time, rather than have it all happen in one big flaming incident.

I'm rambling, aren't I?

Actually, you are doing remarkably well for someone who is not a diploma carrying graduate of the Post-Apocalyptic Seminary of Neuro-Mathematical Systems Theology.

I thought that was Joshua Zelinsky.


Then I'm sure the next month or so of news about her sister Jamie Lynn's pregnancy will upset you a whole lot? I saw it as one of the top 12 hits on Google News today.

Snape seems more bitter than gleeful (and the final book of the series gives a lot of backstory to his position). Umbridge is the one who really seems to get gleeful about being punitive.

Durova's way of expressiing glee is telling an allegorical tale of criminals found, criminals punished, and redemption for her as the savior of the Wiki way. She's very hoity toity about it, so it doesn't seem gleeful, but it sure as heck is.

There is definitely some kind of fixation on reprising the Crime and Punishment Regulatory Model.

I'd love to get Dostoevsky's take on Wikipedia disciplinary practices.