User talk:Ta bu shi da yu/Archive18

Jimbo Wales article...

... you removed both your own comment and my own. Could I ask why? - Ta bu shi da yu 03:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry -- I had no idea I was deleting anything but my own comments. I deleted those because I realized that that page is not where I should have put them; I then pasted them at User talk:Jimbo Wales. Michael Hardy 03:43, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Wiki break?

I notice that you are still editing (and it must be late at night in Sydney right now!) - are you perhaps one of these? ;o) CheekyMonkey 16:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

That's cool - but nothing's more important than one's health (I'll stop nannying now!) CheekyMonkey 16:24, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

OceanSplash

Hi Ta bu, if you can get through to him and help improve his editing, and above all his attitude to his fellow editors, you won't find me objecting. As things stand, he's sailing very close to the wind in terms of facing a long-term or indefinite block. Just about anyone who disagrees with him is accused of being a Muslim or Islamist. He's accused me of being both an Indonesian and Iranian Islamist Jihadist. He seems to have no understanding of WP:NOR, how to use sources, or how to judge whether a source is reliable. He sees no problem in quoting himself from his own website (where he also publishes anonymously), and said that the only reason I stopped him from doing so was "because the citation was not pleasing to [my] Islamic taste." [1] He's written on his website (from memory) that Muslims have evolved to have no conscience and that the Muslim editors in Wikipedia have a "pack mentality" and are "engaged in a Jihad of deciet [sic] ... while their borhers [sic] engage in terrorism." [2]

A crash course in the importance of WP:AGF is badly needed. Best of luck if you're prepared to give it a try! ;-) SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:06, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

About that thing

I've been looking into this silly "wikipedophilia" thing today, and I haven't found very much. This lack of results is interesting in itself. The source of these charges comes from the press release from "Parents for the Online Safety of Children," a group allegedly founded in 1997 by “an organization of concerned citizens.” A Google search for the name of this group reveals absolutely no results whatsoever, except for several references to their press release attacking Wikipedia; apparently this organization has never had any mention in any Web site, news service, Usenet newsgroup, or any mention anywhere before now. The sudden appearance of this group and its claims of “pedophiles” on Wikipedia suggests two possibilities: 1) The press release may be fake, one of many Internet-based trolls; or 2) it is a result of the recent edit war at the pedophilia entry. --Modemac 21:37, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Here's something interesting: a blogger did some detective work and put two and two together to come up with a [http://www.ridingsun.com/posts/1134805044.shtml possible reason for the bogus "wiki pedophile" press release. It might (emphasis on might) be some petty revenge for the QuakeAID scandal early this year that was exposed to the public, thanks to Wikipedia! --Modemac 03:09, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

4th Amendment and FISA

If Congress passed a statute allowing warrantless wiretapping, it would mean that any such action wouldn't violate the criminal provisions of FISA (or the OCCA). It would still violate the 4th Amendment (probably) but the Constitution is not self-enforcing. Anyway, your edit is fine, just thought I'd answer your question.

Hi

Great to see you online too. I saw the note on your user page. I hope everything's alright. Try to get some rest and feel better! 172 21:22, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Just saying Hi...

hope you are enjoying a restful wiki-break. User:Pedant66.245.205.97 07:33, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Re: Ummm...

I put my info on that page because WikiFanatic asked me to do so on IRC. If people take a dim view of it then that's up to them, I don't mind. I've since been nominated, and there's a link on the nomination to the page itself, so people can judge for themselves. I agree with you that adminship shouldn't be a big deal. I mainly wanted have access to the revert tools to help me in vandal fighting. Anyway, thanks for the comment. BTW, I was angry to see you accused in the stupid perverted-justice.com press release. Totally ridiculous. Jacoplane 13:07, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Happy & holy Christmas, Ta bu, from someone you helped earlier this year!

Posted by an anon - Ta bu shi da yu 14:27, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Anon! I appreciate it :-) Ta bu shi da yu 14:27, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I was trying to stay anonymous

It didn't work. Check out the talk page of the warrantless wiretapping conspiracy entry: AustinKnight traced by IP address and then threatened to report me to my (government) employer for "waste, fraud and abuse". I referred it to arbitration, at [3]. It's really sickening... I'll get back to you on your 4th Amend. question later - I'm really disgusted with wikipedia right now, because of what AustinKnight did...

On the Talk Page at [4], towards the bottom.

Thanks for your help... I really know nothing about the internet, I had assumed the opposite. Oh well, live and learn.

ID

Looks good. Nice work. Maybe that section could stand to be distilled and pruned, too. FeloniousMonk 02:49, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Structure? Design by committee. I didn't choose the structure. FeloniousMonk 02:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Aren't design by committee and intelligent mutually exclusive concepts? HTH! El_C 02:57, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Ha, lurker. Of course you're right... FeloniousMonk 03:10, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Take good care of your health

Hello there. Read your comments on businessweek's website about accuracy of Wikipedia. Then got here and saw the few lines about your health. My suggestion: take a long break (like half a year). You'll get a fresh prospective on life. There is so much else to do. I took half a year off my job. Now coming up with fresh ideas and fresh ways of looking at life. Wish you the same. Take care and be careful with your health. www.kinderspirit.org

heads up

Hey, I see you're at work on the ID article. I thought you'd want to see what I wrote on the talk page in case it's relevant to what you're about to do. Talk:Intelligent_design#This_article_is_very_good... Keep up the good work. Dave (talk) 07:36, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

RfAr for AustinKnight

Your input would be appreciated.[5]Cognos 14:58, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your words of support, I'll try to stress less. I'm not really concerned *at all* about my job, I'm just absolutely appaled that he would do that - someone else could have been sincerely afraid after his threats. As for him *tracking me down*, etc. - well, if someone really tried to do that, I'd talk to my friends in the courthouse, otherwise known as the United States Marshals Service.

I do appreciate your help, since this behavior is far beyond the pale of civility. I'm going to ignore the controversy for the time being and let the Arb. C'ttee do there job.

Thanks again!Cognos 16:29, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

For the record

Well, here are my achievements:

• I got Daniel Brandt unbanned.
• Brandt's two greatest wiki-enemies, User:Linuxbeak and User:SlimVirgin both apologised to him. Linuxbeak did it directly because of me.
• Brandt (briefly) removed Hivemind entirely, stating that it was because of Linuxbeak/SlimVirgin's apology.
• I successfully demonstrated to people where Brandt was coming from, to present him as a reasonable, rational person with a certain point of view, that is prevalent by such facts (not theories, these are proven facts) such as the fact that Google does have long-lived cookies, they do advertise on pages using AdSense, people can use Wikipedia to manipulate PageRank, the Central Intelligence Agency really is interested in intelligence and almost certainly do use Wikipedia, and pointed out why he would believe that CIA have infiltrated Wikipedia. I pointed out that his list of users is not a list of people who he is trying to out, rather it is his list of people who he suspects to be CIA members. He believes that perhaps 1 or 2 of them are, and he believes that CIA agents would act in that way as they would be trying o manipulate people (he has all of this on his web page). But the problem is that he doesn't know who is a CIA agent. Thus he thinks that the CIA agents are the ones that don't give their real names - so it is the John Does who he thinks are CIA agents. Maybe a little bit paranoid, and probably wrong (I honestly don't think that CIA would stoop to such levels to manipulate intelligence) but that's basically his motivation. People understood when I explained it like that. To help their understanding, I agreed with them that it was quite reasonable to call him a crackpot, however suggested that virtually all activists are considered to be crackpots - including famous ones like Nelson Mandella et al.
• I explained to people the relevance of the "hoaxer" who attacked Brandt, which got most people to realise that what the "hoaxer" had done was not exposing Brandt for anything other than being a nice guy, and that it in fact exposed the "hoaxer" to potential legal problems. This was agreed by pretty much everyone who heard the argument and was pushed forward by a lot of anti-Brandt people who said that such attacks should stop.

I don't support that sort of hoaxing in any way (it was basically disrupting Brandt's site to prove a point, the same thing that's banned when done to this site (WP:POINT); if we want to do unto other Web sites as we'd like to be done unto ours, we shouldn't do that sort of thing. Nevertheless, it did succeed in proving its point, which was not that Brandt is a "nice guy"; it's that Wikipedia is not the only site where malicious hoaxers can get bad information inserted; it's unfair to single it out for criticism on that regard, when other sites, even Brandt's own, can fall victim to the same thing (and may even be harder to fix when they do). *Dan T.* 01:32, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

• Jimbo Wales himself acknowledged that the Denial of Service attack against Brandt was unreasonable.

Agreed; it was a terrible tactic. Don't attribute the actions of one person to all of the Wikipedians who opposed Brandt here. *Dan T.* 01:32, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

• I asked Brandt to remove the personal info, although he didn't just do it. Instead, he used it as a bargaining chip. My rationale, by the way, was that it was the only thing that they had on him, and that he didn't really need it. I also explained to him my view that general internet etiquette is that screen names and first names are okay - anything more than that for non-public figures is not okay.
• Brandt eventually removed the info, although this was apparently after a further agreement. He didn't credit me with this at all.
• I got Brandt to change the bit about "outing" as requested by the guy who wrote it.

I was really upset that he didn't say "thanks" at all. Instead, he told me that I got my facts wrong and that I had ruined everything by "prematurely ejaculating" over such things as the Denial of Service attacks - even though we discussed this on Wikipedia talk in what was our only wikipedia discussion on anything, and I also sent him an e-mail discussing my intentions (I wrote a lot of stuff in that e-mail). And even though it had a successful result, he still thinks that I did the wrong thing. I mean, yes, he is right, I did get my facts wrong - because I am not him and don't know his intimate details. But I was right that what was presented was wrong - he didn't start Google Watch because he wanted to get more hits, he started it because of concerns about privacy. But so what. If he won't tell us what we should include or not then what are we supposed to do?

And you know, through doing this, I had a variety of people accuse me of being Brandt, one guy accuse me of trolling, another of harassment, and I had a variety of nasty messages on talk pages AFDs and what not, including nasty edit summaries. The guy who wrote "Outing" has enough evidence to go to ArbCom over, what with his 15RRs in a 24 hour period (if I am correct in interpreting it that if he continues to include content that has been deemed by consensus to be inappropriate - and was reverted 15 times in 24 hours). The guy then launched personal attacks against me galore. Then he called me a liar for doing precisely what he asked me to do - asking Brandt to change his outing bit about him, and Brandt even changed it for him. This guy made so many outlandish accusations, and wrote me 4 abusive messages in my talk page, and then wikistalked me in to other people's talk pages so as to harass me there. Yet all the while he accused me of harassment for offering to help him out. Incredible stuff.

I thought about doing an RfC/ArbCom thing on him, but you know, the thing is that as I was thinking that, Brandt stabbed me in the back, and I think that really if I did something on this obviously abusive user, it would just act as me supporting Brandt, which I don't want to do anymore. I still support him in principle, but I just think that he was disrespectful towards me. It would have been nice if he'd acknowledged some of the work that I did to help him, which also greatly improved his reputation in the Wikipedia community, which was the thing he desired the most. But instead he just had criticism for me, and didn't say that I had anything to do with anything. I thought it was a bit rude.

Anyway, I think that the "outing" user will likely get banned soon anyway, as he seems to cause problems with everyone, so I don't see the need to do anything to him. I'd rather just stay out of it and go back to helping newbies, which is the thing I like doing the most on here. Zordrac (talk) Wishy Washy Darwikinian Eventualist 16:55, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, you should ask him yourself, and also why he doesn't say outright "I think that one or more of these users might be CIA agents - please help me find out who", but his interest in the CIA, and his phrases on Wikipedia Watch which talk about CIA infiltrating Wikipedia's structure to manipulate people make this a pretty obvious interpretation. From what I can gather, he thinks that 1 or 2 people only are CIA agents. Based on his evidence, lets see. I'll go over who he probably thinks are CIA agents. Okay, most likely ones: User:Splash, User:SlimVirgin, User:Gamaliel, User:Linuxbeak, User:Antaeus_Feldspar, User:Jeffrey_O._Gustafson and User:Vilerage. The reason why I am suggesting these ones is because they have influenced others about what to think about Brandt. But I'd say that his top ones would be User:Splash and User:Gamaliel. Since he seems to suggest just a few, I reckon 2 is his expected number, so he likely thinks that those 2 are the CIA agents. Splash probably the most likely given that the anonymous "hoaxer" falsely gave him Splash's name. But Gamaliel is the biggest POV pusher, going both ways in a very discreet way, and also writing everywhere else, so it might be Gamaliel. Of course, I am putting words in to his mouth, and he'd kill me for suggesting these ones. He earlier seemed to think SlimVirgin and Linuxbeak as the 2, but then wiped them. I note that they are back up now. So he may well think that those 2 are most likely. Of course, I am basically betraying Brandt by telling you this, since he seems to want to keep his investigations a secret, but that basically seems to be what he would think based on what people said. Perhaps even User:Linuxbeak and User:Gamaliel even, as they seem to be the most active people in discussions about him. If Linuxbeak was a good spy, he would try to get trust as well, such as apologising to Brandt and then have that apology not work. So I don't know. Of course, I wonder if he thinks that I am a CIA agent too. After all, I went to a lot of effort for apparently no reason, which he likely thinks makes me suspicious. He didn't write back to me and clearly doesn't trust me. I suspect that the reason is because he thinks that I might be the CIA agent. I don't know.

Oh by the way, it looks like http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html has people's full names again - and has a couple of new names too. I basically think that his using it as a "bargaining chip" are pretty close to blackmail. Well, not blackmail in the strict term, but its really emotional blackmail. He should have deleted it on principle, because its wrong, and because it makes him look bad. I never suggested him to delete it as a favour - IMO that's the wrong way to go about it. You know, like his article was fixed up, but then got messed up thanks to a couple of POV pushers sadly, but it at least had hope, and at one stage was looking good. Actually, right before Linuxbeak interfered with redirecting it etc, it was in good shape. After that, POV pushers made it a very biased article again. Not good. It almost seemed like revenge of sorts by some people. I don't know. Zordrac (talk) Wishy Washy Darwikinian Eventualist 17:23, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

I dunno. When I first read http://www.google-watch.org/, I thought it was nonsense. Like I mean he was making a big deal about everlasting cookies, and I could not possibly see how that court hurt anyone. After all, like the government has so much personal info on me anyway (through social security etc), and then advertisers etc have more, that I just don't see the problem. Even IF Google was trying to spy on us by using these cookies, then why does it matter? Like what are they going to do? Get my computer name and find out what files I have on my computer? Big freaking deal. Microsoft apparently does that anyway. My computer has been spied on by hackers using trojans and it never did me too much damage. I don't have any secrets really. I just have things that I prefer only to tell certain people. And why should we care? I mean privacy is about stopping people from watching you having sex, or seeing you in the nude or something, and then its more about misinterpretation than anything. If the reality of who you are is criminal, then you are a criminal and have no right to privacy. If you are just being misinterpreted, then if anything being more public makes you safer. Thus privacy can really only work in limited context. For example, I am not going to give my real name to anyone over the internet, but I will give it to everyone IRL - and if my real name gets out, oh well. The only reason why I would be upset with my real name getting out is if its attached to slanderous information. So if someone quoted me, well, that's fine. But if they put up a big web site accusing me of being a paedophile (which happened once a few years ago), THEN I have problems.

But at the same time, like after I'd dismissed it as irrelevant, then came the stuff about people manipulating PageRank. I thought nothing of it, and even thought that maybe his detractors were right - maybe he was doing it for attention. But he kept harping on this - it is used for advertising. In other words, making money out of privacy invasions, seemed to be what he was getting at. But then again, so what? So what if people make money from advertising? Where is the crime?

But at each stage, like if you listen to the guy talk and you see the arguments, well, he presents them really well, and you start to believe him. Imagine you'd never read Google, and you go to look at Google Watch - you'd believe him. Same with Wikipedia Watch. He puts up good arguments.

So I don't believe him, but you know, I am not going to call him a liar. He might be right. I just don't know. Probably not to the extent that he thinks, but there's a good chance that it's partially true.

Who is to say that Google and Wikipedia don't have a mutual advertising agreement? Who is to say that Wikipedia doesn't get a share of the scrapings that Google gets from Wikipedia and its mirrors? Who is to say that Wikipedia doesn't get a big cheque at the end of every month from Google to say "thank you for helping us to make ads"? Sure, there's a big fund raiser, but who is to say that there isn't some money changing hands? Its quite possible that there is.

But then, I guess the thing is that its missing a punch line. Like even if he is right, SO WHAT? You know? Like okay, so CIA is in here tricking Wikipedians to all agree with each other and ban CIA's opponents and cover things up. Like um you can still write on a blog or something. So what? And so what if Google is making money? What's wrong with that? Its not like those ads are annoying. They don't pop up or anything - you just see them at the top. And so what if Wikipedia makes for misleading search engines?

The whole thing is like "Big deal". So what? He is at minimum 75% right, and might even be 100% right. And that doesn't qualify him for a crackpot in my book - most of what he is saying is verifiable fact. Just a tiny amount of assumptions.

I guess that's it. I mean, I know that the CIA gets up to some stupid stuff, but seriously, why would they bother over this? What's the big agenda? He hasn't put up a big theory for what they are trying to do. Why is it scary? Why is there anything to fear? You know? Like just having a computer, and worse having the internet is a security risk. But why does Google and Wikipedia make things worse?

That's my issue. I wouldn't call him a crack pot. I just think that's he's making mountains out of molehills. Zordrac (talk) Wishy Washy Darwikinian Eventualist 17:48, 21 December 2005 (UTC)