Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.


If they surprise us and do well, the best we can hope for will still resemble a high-school student council meeting.

Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.


If they surprise us and do well, the best we can hope for will still resemble a high-school student council meeting.

Yeah, but usually high school councils have no power and only exist to advise the principal.

Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.

…unless a 23-year-old is now classified as a child.

Considering they say that a human is at their prime in around their 20s, ...

Any insurance agency or student financial aid office will be happy to answer that question for you.

And, as I'm sure you're fully aware, it's possible to be an undergrad at any age.

Undergrad Hersfold lives in a residence hall on campus.

All I'm saying is that if the data were available to make it possible to compute the mean and median age of all arbitrators, and also the the mean and median age of all banned users, which group would be older? I bet that the banned users are older. And wiser.

Go figure.

Unless the definition of child changed overnight, it seems I am completely correct as usual.

Brandt comes off as a crotchety old geezer...

Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.

if the data were available to make it possible to compute the mean and median age of all arbitrators, and also the the mean and median age of all banned users, which group would be older? I bet that the banned users are older. And wiser.

I'm not seeing the connection to Lord of the Flies - unless a 23-year-old is now classified as a child. And, as I'm sure you're fully aware, it's possible to be an undergrad at any age.

Considering they say that a human is at their prime in around their 20s, I'm not seeing the problem here. So what if they're younger than you? Aren't most people here?

Then again, we have Risker, Rlevse, FloNight, Newyorkbrad etc who aren't children.

Considering they say that a human is at their prime in around their 20s, I'm not seeing the problem here.

This whole thread is nothing but ageism... Brandt comes off as a crotchety old geezer whining about how the kids today have no morals. At least when the "kids on Wikipedia" WR meme pertains to actual legal minors, it has a point to it, but when it's just to go on about how people in their 20s have no business having any actual power, it's just being an old grouch. Brandt should get a time machine and try telling his '60s student activist self how young people should be seen and not heard.

Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.

Here, you express concern that several members of the Arbitration Committee are relatively young and still in school. Awhile ago, you opined that, as an older person with life experience, I was risking my career by editing Wikipedia and should certainly have nothing to do with its Arbitration Committee. These positions are mutually exclusive.

Here, you express concern that several members of the Arbitration Committee are relatively young and still in school. Awhile ago, you opined that, as an older person with life experience, I was risking my career by editing Wikipedia and should certainly have nothing to do with its Arbitration Committee. These positions are mutually exclusive.

Then again, we have Risker, Rlevse, FloNight, Newyorkbrad etc who aren't children.

I would probably be more disturbed if I didn't realize that, for example, some of KnightLago's classmates will be basically writing law on federal courts of appeal next year. These drafters, unlike Wikiarbitrators, won't even sign pseudonyms to the opinions they write.

Frankly, comparing clerking for a federal judge to serving on Wikipedia's kangaroo court suggests a rather severe lack of perspective. It's a bit like comparing judging a grade school art contest with sitting on a federal court of appeals.

I wanna hear how Brandt stopped the draft again.

It is, and always has been, a means for Brandt to extract favors and concessions. There are no deeper principles at work here. People are listed or not depending on whether Brandt feels that he has enough control over the subjects. It is, and always has been, a power trip.

Here, you express concern that several members of the Arbitration Committee are relatively young and still in school. Awhile ago, you opined that, as an older person with life experience, I was risking my career by editing Wikipedia and should certainly have nothing to do with its Arbitration Committee. These positions are mutually exclusive.

Circa April 23, 2006, Brandt sets up and promotes his Hivemind page.

By April 27, he had struck a deal with an admin to remove his entry in exchange for favorable edits to Brandt's biography, which led to the admin's desysop. This set the tone for hivemind--Brandt has publicly and privately offered bargains and threats to add or retain entries unless his conditions are met. This is widely known.

There's certainly a small gain in transparency from this site, but the objective has everything to do with Brandt, and very little to do with the "public good."

Wikipedia should have deleted Brandt's stuff a long time ago, and I understand that he was defending himself. Brandt should keep up the criticism, but if he doesn't want to use hivemind in a principled way, it discredits him.

Frankly, it pisses me off that the critics of Wikipedia have to play Master Web Sleuth in order to get anywhere with our critique of Wikipedia. I wish I had the time back that I spent trying to identify Essjay, for example, or SlimVirgin. This is an absurd state of affairs, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who claims to be contributing to an encyclopedia, and at the same time claims that this is dangerous undercover work that requires a screen name.

If you don't want to be identified, then stop pretending to be an editor of an encyclopedia. Find some other role-playing game that doesn't have social consequences.

Anyone who promises to leave Wikipedia forever, and notifies me of their promise, will be purged from all pages on Wikipedia-Watch.org. Anyone who doesn't is fair game. That goes double for administrators, and triple for arbitrators and above.

Social ethics is not rocket science. I spent three years in grad school studing social ethics and political philosophy, and I find that this whole Wikipedia thing insults my common sense and wastes my time.

Civilization will also do just fine without any more ugly wars like the one in Vietnam.

...if you don't like my website, then leave Wikipedia forever and your name will disappear from my site.

You still have editors who have left Wikipedia on Hivemind, so I don't believe this at all.

"Anyone who promises to leave Wikipedia forever, and notifies me of their promise, will be purged from all pages on Wikipedia-Watch.org."

None that have notified me that they promise to leave forever. Nerd, I wish you would learn how to read.

Remember, it's not as if I wrote my own bio, and then didn't like it when Wikipediots began mucking around with it. SlimVirgin started it without notifying me, and I discovered it by accident at a time when I barely knew that Wikipedia even existed. After working with SlimVirgin (who is a brilliant editor and can seem very professional), I realized in about a week that I did not have any rights on Wikipedia with respect to my bio, and requested that it be deleted. Slim backed off, Jimbo did a "Jimbo" and backed up Slim over my wishes, and that left the door open to get the bio immediately reinstated by some faceless admin. Now I didn't even have Slim to reason with, as she was apparently uninvolved (who knows what was really happening behind the scenes?).

Just a tiny correction (the same one I always have to make). You asked that it be deleted and I *did* delete it. You then asked Jimbo to guarantee that it would stay deleted, and of course he couldn't.

You further asked that I not be involved anymore -- even though Jimbo told you that wasn't a good idea, because I'd likely be able to help, and indeed would have helped -- and you continued discussing the issue on blogs. Inevitably, one of the blog owners recreated the article from scratch.

So what? Again, have neither you or Jimbo ever heard of WP:SALT?

Daniel,

If you look at the sequence of events that transpired with the Wikipedia Bio on George William Herbert, you can see that they already have in place what pretends to be an automatic process for dealing with this very issue — If & When & For Whom they really want to.

Jonny

Daniel asked that I not be involved, so there was nothing I could do at that point. You're right that Jimbo could have deleted it, but remember, there was nothing inherently problematic about Brandt's bio (except that he didn't want it), and when Jimbo had tried to salt bios that clearly *were* problematic (e.g. Brian Peppers), he got shit for it -- and in fact that case triggered the creation of Wikitruth. I wonder why I never saw criticism of Wikitruth on this site, given that they were reposting deleted BLPs.)

If Daniel had kept quiet after the first deletion, it would almost certainly have stayed deleted. But it was recreated amid a giant fuss, and it was the fuss that made it hard to delete again.

Daniel asked that I not be involved, so there was nothing I could do at that point. You're right that Jimbo could have deleted it, but remember, there was nothing inherently problematic about Brandt's bio (except that he didn't want it), and when Jimbo had tried to salt bios that clearly *were* problematic (e.g. Brian Peppers), he got shit for it -- and in fact that case triggered the creation of Wikitruth. I'm wondering why I never saw criticism of Wikitruth on this site, given that they were reposting deleted BLPs.)

When Wikitruth was most active, BLP concerns were a secondary issue (at best) on this forum.

On a side note, the fact that Wikitruth has a Wikipedia article is really a remarkable thing. Something can be reported in newspapers across the world and it can't have an article, but Wikitruth has an article even though it only has one reference to an external source. Funny.

If Daniel had kept quiet after the first deletion, it would almost certainly have stayed deleted. But it was recreated amid a giant fuss, and it was the fuss that made it hard to delete again.

Initially the article was deleted because SlimVirgin, the administrator who created the stub on September 28, and I agreed to a speedy deletion, after we worked together on the piece for several days. That was my initial request when I first complained to SlimVirgin — either delete the whole thing or lose those two biased links on me. We finally agreed to this deletion when I discovered that she was previously biased against me, based on independent evidence going back months that had nothing to do with Google. She also refused in the end to relent on one of the two links. Jimmy Wales was made aware that we had deleted the article, but he declined to intervene. He did defend SlimVirgin as one of his best editors, and scolded me for reverting two links on Google-Watch, and restored them, and said, "Don't do that again." SlimVirgin warned me that she didn't have the power to keep the article on me deleted if another administrator decided to resurrect it.

Then Mr. Philipp Lenssen waltzes into the picture. He is not a neutral party, as the link that I objected to most has been happily cited by him on his blog more than once. I consider him to be a "Google-lapdog blogger." SlimVirgin has properly recused herself from any editing on the resurrected version of the article, which is quite different from the one that she and I abandoned. It is much more amateurish, by an order of magnitude. I'll say one thing in SlimVirgin's favor — she's a brilliant editor and writer when she is truly neutral.

Lenssen got one of the secret-police Wikipedia administrators to undelete the piece. This secret policeman is named Canderson7. I asked him for his real name and he scolded me for making a legal threat, citing one of the alphabet-soup of Wikipedia acronyms that pointed to some paragraph on implicit legal threats. All I did was politely ask for his real name and location "for legal reasons." Anyway, Canderson7 did his thing and went away. Now Lenssen and other editors (everyone except me, of course) are free to violate my privacy and play games with the facts.

Believe it or not, Lenssen's position is that I don't have the right to touch any articles that mention me, but he has the right to spin like crazy, and add gratuitous links that defame me, and generally turn the whole article into an unfortunate joke. This piece of crap will be number one on all engines within a few months in a search for my name. It will follow me for the rest of my life.

I want it deleted, and I need your support. Even if SlimVirgin and I had arrived at an agreement, the entire structure of Wikipedia, with which I am now somewhat familiar for the first time, means that any Tom, Dick and Philipp can come along and pervert the piece. That's why I want a complete deletion. That's the most important thing for me.

Along the way, I'd also like accountability for the anonymous editors and administrators who lurk at Wikipedia. I should be able to know who SlimVirgin and Canderson7 are, for example. I don't think even Jimmy knows who most of his anonymous administrators are. This opens up Wikipedia to infiltration by agents of corporations, governments, or cults. It's a flaw in the structure.

And finally, I believe that articles on living persons should be generated in such a way that the person is notified, if at all possible, that the article is under development, and has the right to demand minimal standards of evidence to back up assertions made in the article. SlimVirgin had contact information for me but did not notify me of the initial stub she started — I found out by accident.

Wikipedia has a NPOV (neutral point of view) policy that simply means you should have a footnote handy. But that's all — any footnote from any blogger or forum anywhere on the web is all you need. No one expects anyone at Wikipedia to dig deeper.

Wikipedia is fine if you like trivia. It's great for things that no one cares about. But it goes too far when it sets amateur editors and anonymous administrators loose on the reputations of others.

Slim, I'm not trying to be evasive. The chain of events was posted on the original home page of wikipedia-watch.org, the relevant portions of which I've quoted below. I did indeed post a description on a site that was frequently critical of Google. That site was owned by Nathan Weinberg, a journalist. An owner of a different site, Philipp Lenssen, caught wind of the situation and took action.

What you are basically saying, Slim, is that I should have kept my mouth shut and tiptoed around once it was deleted. I object to this. In the first place, I had the right to describe my experience with Wikipedia somewhere on the web. Secondly, Lenssen would have nailed me sooner or later in any event.

If you'd simply requested deletion -- from admins, Jimbo, Foundation, via newspapers, and so on, for as long as it took -- I think you'd have achieved the same thing, possibly faster. The position you took -- that borderline notable people shouldn't have to spend the rest of their lives checking that anons haven't added nonsense about them -- was clearly a righteous one. You didn't need all the other stuff.

I am doing this in a principled way. Here is a statement of my principle. I posted it in a hidden forum on this site three days ago, and had a couple of requests to repost it on a public forum, so here goes:

When Wikitruth was most active, BLP concerns were a secondary issue (at best) on this forum.

Daniel asked that I not be involved, so there was nothing I could do at that point. You're right that Jimbo could have deleted it, but remember, there was nothing inherently problematic about Brandt's bio (except that he didn't want it), and when Jimbo had tried to salt bios that clearly *were* problematic (e.g. Brian Peppers), he got shit for it -- and in fact that case triggered the creation of Wikitruth. I'm wondering why I never saw criticism of Wikitruth on this site, given that they were reposting deleted BLPs.)

If Daniel had kept quiet after the first deletion, it would almost certainly have stayed deleted. But it was recreated amid a giant fuss, and it was the fuss that made it hard to delete again.

Is he always right? No. Is he always nice? No. Is he always friendly? No. Does Wikipedia hate him? Oh, yes.
So much so that even though he has asked his biography page to be deleted a dozen times, nobody listens to him. They call him notable. They call him worthwhile. They do it to fuck with him, basically. And so, quite naturally, Brandt Fucks Back.

When Wikitruth was most active, BLP concerns were a secondary issue (at best) on this forum.

On a side note, the fact that Wikitruth has a Wikipedia article is really a remarkable thing. Something can be reported in newspapers across the world and it can't have an article, but Wikitruth has an article even though it only has one reference to an external source. Funny.

Arbcom is beginning to look like that island in Lord of the Flies. KnightLago is a third-year law student (maybe age 23), Mailer_diablo is about 21, Fritzpoll is a grad student, Hersfold is an undergrad.

If they surprise us and do well, the best we can hope for will still resemble a high-school student council meeting.