Lomax v. WikiMedia Foundation, Inc. et al

[Graaf Statler]

The eventual blog post doesn't match up very well with the actual facts or judgment of the case, but I guess it's either not meant to be that accurate, or maybe they had an agenda that disagreed with the truth.

Exactament.

To reiterate.......written by Jacob Rogers, Senior Legal Counsel, and Allison Davenport, Technology Law and Policy Fellow.

This is really shocking.

not meant to be that accurate, or maybe they had an agenda that disagreed with the truth.

And this should be a professional legal team. But that Gerlach is a prutser too, I simple can't imagine the man is really a lawyer, just like the rest of the legal team. A Senior Legal Counsel who is writing sure a lot of nonsense, unbelievable.

[Abd]

Can we just take a minute remind people who think Abd is going to get crushed by the WMF's Legal Eagles, they are the same people who wrote this...

https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/04 ... hat-means/

That's written by Jacob Rogers, Senior Legal Counsel, and Allison Davenport, Technology Law and Policy Fellow.

In their learned opinion, it's fine for WMF servers to contain defamation in article histories because to remove it would somehow encourage people to go looking for it, and mean it was more likely someone would unwittingly reinsert the defamation.

Well, he made an argument that it would be worse, but surely that decision is up to the defamed person. I'd say that they would properly have oversighted that material on request. There are many possible functional responses to complaints like that, and the basis for not responding that way seems to be "we don't do things that way."

Let that sink in. Their argument is that they should not have to take proactive measures even in a case where a court has already found their activities to be defamatory, because somehow if they did so their cult's influence on the world is such that this would passively increase the chances of the defamation reoccurring. And they can think of no way around that. They see nothing in their power that they can do to stop it. It took a second court judgement to compel them to do the right thing.

We are the center of the universe, everything must revolve around us. They lost and they lost again. This was pure silliness. There would be ways that a sober publication could hand this, reporting the truth, without defamation. But they don't do that.

Note that they apparently wrote that blog post without having fully availed themselves of the actual facts of what happened, as in what was actually even on their servers.

These people would be incredibly easy to embarrass in front of a judge. This is almost enough evidence on its own, to show beyond a reasonable doubt that their institutional attitude to defamation is precisely the opposite of what it should be.

I have not followed the case and what their attitude is might or might not matter. With a cavalier attitude one might succeed in pissing off the judge, which rarely works out well for a lawyer who does that. Judges are trained to be neutral, but they are also human.

If any part of Abd's case argues the WMF makes decisions with legal implications on the victims of their cult from a position of ignorance, irresponsibility and even arrogance, well, who would be daft enough to argue he's going to lose, and lose badly?

My position: I don't know the future, but I trust reality. I don't know what will happen, but probably somewhere between winning $200,000 because somehow they are compleat idiots, to suffering a judgment for their costs, and these extremes are not enough to move me much. So I just go for what looks possible.

[Abd]

Excuse me one moment as I gloat.

Are we having fun yet, Dysklyver?
Running a blog is so much more fun than slogging through the Wikimuck.

In any case, were I going to republish libel, I would surround it with warnings, such that the republication was unconditionally true and verifiable, and such that it was not defamatory in context. Maybe even anti-defamatory, exculpatory. That all depends on details.

The concept of ameliorating harm is far, far from what the WMF does. It appears that they failed to remove libelous content immediately on request. A sane process would oversight first and ask questions later, because oversight can be undone. By failing to do that they lost their protection, that's how I interpret it, and became responsible for consequences.

There may be a similarity to my situation. They could immediately ameliorate the situation I have complained about with no risk to their users. But those solutions don't occur to them, they come from a different universe, as if the possibilities are written in Martian.

"We don't do things that way!"

If they had done this immediately, I doubt I would have filed, but maybe, because of the other defendants, though that would have been more difficult.

[Abd]

And that Graaf Staler? What a lier. What a troll. What a nitwit. What a fool. Our brave and skilled Arbitrage Commission will solve the problem Statler. And otherwise we still have our skilled Meta stewards to organise a fox hunting. Or our skilled cheeseburger expert James Alexander, even Hillary Clinton liked his twitter.

What is missing from most of the frigging community is human decency and respect.

I dealt with a lot of crazy users, Graaf, and with a little respect, they and the project could be a lot happier, I proved it. But there were too few interested. Instead, it's all about "wiki," quick, and WP:NOTTHERAPY, and Ban Their Ass.

(There were actually initiatives to create structure for this, Esperanza and WP:AMA. Crushed ASAP. Zero patience, maximum contempt.)

I am not exaggerating.

I came across a vandal, or he looked like a vandal. Cross-wiki. Looking at the edits, I realized this was a child, very young. (He was actually seven). He was being blocked and he discovered he could reboot the modem, no problem.

I took what he was creating in mainspace on Wikiversity and moved it into what I called Playspace and then to his user space, and invited him to create whatever he wanted there, asking him not to work elsewhere yet. At first he was a bit suspicious, but he did start doing it. He made some mistakes, and I simply fixed them and guided him back to what I defined as "learning how to edit wikitext, and doing some creating writing, in his own user space" (and this kind of use of user space was fully approved on Wikiversity.)

He was globally locked because a certain wikignome really believed that he should be banned, but I convinced a steward to let him be. (And the steward recognized what I was doing and was very approving. But the WMF wikis have practically no institutional memory.

In a few years, he became possibly the youngest WMF sysop ever and still is one, because he was recognized, protected, and guided. And, of course, I was attacked in the early educational period for "enabling bad behavior." But that blew over (except that users with grudges did accumulate).

[ericbarbour]

What is missing from most of the frigging community is human decency and respect.

And despite most of the old "cabal there is no cabal" members being MIA as of 2019, the internal culture has not improved. Complete raving untrustworthy assholes like Smallbones, Drmies, Sitush, and Cirt (under whatever new sock-name he's using this month) continue to abuse other people. And Jimbo, now basically just an offsite figurehead, continues to approve of this rot. It might as well be the America-propped Shah of Iran or the Soviet Union, the corruption is baked all the way in.

I need to post something about the stupid and ruinous Katie Bouman AFD. It will be in the "News" section, because news websites are covering it.....

[Abd]

The trolls behind my SanFranBan showed up on Reddit, here are some threads. The pattern is that SPAs appear and post topics, then more SPAs comment, and, of course, link to my RationalWiki article. Most of these accounts are quickly deleted, but they don't care, because Reddit allows "throwaway accounts," which reminds me of why I mostly stay away from social media. In any case, here are the threads:
Lomax v. WikiMedia Foundation, Inc. et al
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation is a failure

Of course, they are also going after Dysklyver, a RatWiki tech, not merely a sysop. He is first sysop I've seen (after me) to actually acknowledge what has been happening. Dysklyver is also globally locked on WMF wikis (but not SanFran banned). Looking at that situation, he has a bad case of DGAFitude. Good for him! This young man will go far, I predict.
Globally banned Wikipedia user Arthur Kerensa Dysklyver

[ericbarbour]

The trolls behind my SanFranBan showed up on Reddit, here are some threads. The pattern is that SPAs appear and post topics, then more SPAs comment, and, of course, link to my RationalWiki article. Most of these accounts are quickly deleted, but they don't care, because Reddit allows "throwaway accounts," which reminds me of why I mostly stay away from social media. In any case, here are the threads:
Lomax v. WikiMedia Foundation, Inc. et al
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation is a failure

u/wikimandia is a pathetic excuse for a "critic". Spends most of his/her/whatever's time on Reddit babbling about TV shows.

And I will bet that u/johndoe784 is either Oliver Smith, or possibly David Gerard himself. Talks with that classic Gerardesque know-all arrogance, plus shows deep knowledge of the Wikipedia insider scene. The deleted account is probably Smith.

Bear in mind: the little shits HAVE to sock-abuse you on Reddit, because they don't have any real supporters on Reddit's staff. Congrats Abd, you might be getting thru to them....

[Abd]

What is missing from most of the frigging community is human decency and respect.

And despite most of the old "cabal there is no cabal" members being MIA as of 2019, the internal culture has not improved. Complete raving untrustworthy assholes like Smallbones, Drmies, Sitush, and Cirt (under whatever new sock-name he's using this month) continue to abuse other people.

The best Wikipedians burned out long ago. The system might as well have been designed to efficiently burn out anyone with sanity. TINC was a straightforward lie, Jimbo, creating the admin system, called it the "cabal." What ArbCom did was to decide that to be a cabal, they had to have secret meetings and probably a handshake, the natural cabal of effectively coordinated watchlists and activities didn't count.

If it did not violate policy, it was not a cabal and could not possibly be a problem.

Cert actually collided with me on Wikiversity. I think I blew his mind. Instead of fighting him, I invited full collaboration and it worked. Later, because he trusted me, I was able to negotiate resolution of a nasty situation on Wikisource. Yea, Cirt was a number. But it was possible to work with him. Wikipedians in general don't develop those skills, the structure encourages conflict.

JzG, I've noticed, is still off in a snit. Or maybe travelling, but the timing was that he was reprimanded for the usual and disappeared promptly.

And Jimbo, now basically just an offsite figurehead, continues to approve of this rot. It might as well be the America-propped Shah of Iran or the Soviet Union, the corruption is baked all the way in.

I need to post something about the stupid and ruinous Katie Bouman AFD. It will be in the "News" section, because news websites are covering it.....

Ah, that is particularly hilarious. The AfD was more or less ordinary wikignoming, and wikignomes are often clueless about social considerations. I'm generically suspicious of those who focus on filing AfDs. The whole deletionist mess was unnecessary, caused by some very poor decisions early on. I proposed a junkyard space where material that might possibly be useful later would go to be recycled. So instead of deletion, an article would be moved to junkyard space (which doesn't mean "bad," junkyards were places were materials of possible use were placed for recycling). Far less conflict, and only actually offensive or illegal material would require deletion. But the community never valued efficiency and reduction of conflict.

One vote is, for me, particularly funny:

Delete per WP:1E. Prominent coverage is primarily due to a facebook photo that went viral. --mikeu talk 20:30, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

A certain astronomer, no less. Lots of hair but short on wisdom, and vicious. Heh!

[Abd]

u/wikimandia is a pathetic excuse for a "critic". Spends most of his/her/whatever's time on Reddit babbling about TV shows.

Well at least he/she/it/they/ is a regular, but on social media that mostly means "someone with no life but lots of opinions."

And I will bet that u/johndoe784 is either Oliver Smith, or possibly David Gerard himself. Talks with that classic Gerardesque know-all arrogance, plus shows deep knowledge of the Wikipedia insider scene. The deleted account is probably Smith.

One of the [deleted]s was probably Oliver. (there have been quite a few) You miss Darryl, who is actually the more vicious of the brothers. Oliver is batshit crazy, literally, spills the beans. Darryl is far more discreet, but is likely the one who creates so many sock puppets and impersonation socks. What those socks played was a very familiar tape, most arguments heavily repeated from before. Unlikely to be Gerard, who appears to have been backing off from supporting Oliver lately, it's become far too obvious. Gerard is definitely an arrogant asshole, but that's in a different realm from the Smiths.

Bear in mind: the little shits HAVE to sock-abuse you on Reddit, because they don't have any real supporters on Reddit's staff. Congrats Abd, you might be getting thru to them....

Well, I've thought that before. They do get desperate at times, and desperate, they make mistakes and more is revealed. Oliver tried to get some of his articles deleted because he's being hauled into court (not by me, not yet), and as part of that revealed many articles he'd created, which, of course, confirmed many names (where, before then, they were claiming it was all lies, no socks, no sirree, "RationalWiki Smith brothers conspiracy theory." But they are denying that Darryl edits RatWiki. Yeah, right. The evidence is actually as strong or stronger than for Oliver, but requires more study.
Jimbo called a Darryl sock a "POV-pushing name changer" in December, but seems to not have noticed that until this sock pushed just a little harder, he fit right in, in a community of POV-pushers who use a userbox based on a Jimbo saying about resisting the POV-Pushing of Lunatic Charlatans. So much for neutrality. Fuck neutrality. TRUTH! SCIENCE! And burn the heretics.

(Actually, of course, they will raise the banner of VERIFIABILITY. Which means that if they want to slander you, they find somebody somewhere in some yellow journal -- and they have managed to get blogs declared reliable source, like Quackwatch -- who has said you are a Quack and they report it. Do they a report other blogs saying you are the Savior of Humanity? No, of course not! Everyone knows so-and-so is a quack, and anyone saying anything otherwise is obviously a true believer and biased. I wish this was an exaggeration, but it is not. They actually can call MDs quacks on talk pages and nobody thinks twice.)

In any case, the Smiths have a history of filing complaints with admins and they have done it on Reddit. One was allegedly filed on me. It was preposterous, but what I've seen is that there is a certain percentage of preposterous admin requests that get granted, because admins generally are overworked and make mistakes. I've been warned or blocked on Quora for utterly preposterous reasons. It's pretty well-known there, that if you are very active, you are likely to be blocked for anything that might possibly look bad, so experienced users learn to avoid appearances,, not just actual violations.
However, they do respond to appeals, and it is recommended to appeal if there really was no basis, because warnings pile up unless reversed.

Quora is far more fun than the wikis ever were. Some truly spectacular writers are active, and a community of people who are fantastic to work with , and the system is set up that there is no necessity to deal with the other side, usually. I do not have to allow comments on my Answers, I can delete any comment I please. What experienced users learn is to downvote trolling, delete it, or report it without comment. It is quite satisfying to get the "We acted on a report from you, last week." The old internet macho tradition was also to dish out what came in. Not on Quora. Focus on self expression, not domination or winning, and let the readers decide what to read and upvote.

People actually appreciate detailed Answers, which is pretty nice after so many years of assholes quoting a long post, with only tl;dr at the end. Don't like it? Don't read it!

The Trolls are getting no traction on that subreddit. But they really don't care. There is no easy proof connecting them to the accounts, except the duck test, and to understand the duck test one needs experience, and few have the experience. Reddit accounts can be tracked, but they delete most of them.

[Graaf Statler]

And that Graaf Staler? What a lier. What a troll. What a nitwit. What a fool. Our brave and skilled Arbitrage Commission will solve the problem Statler. And otherwise we still have our skilled Meta stewards to organise a fox hunting. Or our skilled cheeseburger expert James Alexander, even Hillary Clinton liked his twitter.

What is missing from most of the frigging community is human decency and respect.

I dealt with a lot of crazy users, Graaf, and with a little respect, they and the project could be a lot happier, I proved it. But there were too few interested. Instead, it's all about "wiki," quick, and WP:NOTTHERAPY, and Ban Their Ass.

(There were actually initiatives to create structure for this, Esperanza and WP:AMA. Crushed ASAP. Zero patience, maximum contempt.)

I am not exaggerating

You are not exaggerating. I found out on the Dutch wikipedia most of the users in the field had a mental defect. Because special people with autism are attracted to wikipedia, but they lose complete track in the Wikipedia surrounding. Even if they are intelligent, have a good position, have a good family life they lose track. They are not able to make a difference between Wikipedia rules and laws made by governments, they don't recognise other autistic user how are messing up anything and they don't recognise trolls. And this create a extreem toxic surrounding.

See how long it took for the Dutch wikipedia to understood what was really going on. In 2009 in I started to warn there was something with the copyright of Wikipedia-NL. After this they started to ruin my name and reputation. Here they made a complete U turn. in 2018, 9 years later.

I came across a vandal, or he looked like a vandal. Cross-wiki. Looking at the edits, I realized this was a child, very young. (He was actually seven). He was being blocked and he discovered he could reboot the modem, no problem.

I took what he was creating in mainspace on Wikiversity and moved it into what I called Playspace and then to his user space, and invited him to create whatever he wanted there, asking him not to work elsewhere yet. At first he was a bit suspicious, but he did start doing it. He made some mistakes, and I simply fixed them and guided him back to what I defined as "learning how to edit wikitext, and doing some creating writing, in his own user space" (and this kind of use of user space was fully approved on Wikiversity.)

He was globally locked because a certain wikignome really believed that he should be banned, but I convinced a steward to let him be. (And the steward recognized what I was doing and was very approving. But the WMF wikis have practically no institutional memory.

In a few years, he became possibly the youngest WMF sysop ever and still is one, because he was recognized, protected, and guided. And, of course, I was attacked in the early educational period for "enabling bad behavior." But that blew over (except that users with grudges did accumulate).

The same happend with Ymnes, the guy what started to accuse me of copyvio, copyright infringement what was a false claim what let to a Global Lock and later to a office ban. Only because I wanted complete according the rules to finish my work on Wikiquote, a project Whaledad and I had cleaned up. This was so wrong, because a Global lock is never personal. Ymnes must be a very young person, because in the past Woudloper, a Arb, told Ymnes he was too young to become a Arb when Ymnes was a candidate for arbcom. Woudloper always was a fine guy, just like Whaledad. Integer. I really don't know why they have all let happend what happend, both I always consider as friends. I got friendly emails from them after that medical incident, but I have still the feeling they let me down. Although Whaledad still takes very good care about Wikiquote, our project.

Much later Ymnes got a very strict arbcom message and was even ordered was even by arbcom ordered to follow a course Effectief online samenwerken. And it was absolute clear he also edited the MoiraMoira account, so it is a sock puppet player.

Besluit
Op grond van het voorstaande komt de Arbitragecommissie tot de volgende uitspraak:
De Commissie legt Ymnes een interactieverbod op richting The Banner;
De Commissie legt The Banner een interactieverbod op richting Ymnes;
Dit interactieverbod houdt in dat het niet is toegestaan om:
elkaars gebruikers- en/of overlegpagina te wijzigen;
naar elkaar te reageren in discussies;
te verwijzen naar en/of commentaar te leveren op elkaar op Wikipedia, direct of indirect;
elkaars wijzigingen ongedaan te maken op welke pagina van Wikipedia dan ook, of dit nu gebeurt met de terugdraaifunctie of anderszins;
gebruik te maken van de bedankknop waar het een wijziging van de ander betreft.
De Commissie verbiedt Ymnes het doen van aanvragen van blokkades en sokpoponderzoeken. Dit behelst onder meer het bewerken van de pagina's Regblok, IPBlok en Sokpoppen. Een uitzondering geldt hier voor het inhoudelijk reageren op aanvragen van blokkades tegen zijn persoon.
De Commissie legt Ymnes het volgen van de cursus Effectief online samenwerken op. Indien Ymnes deze cursus niet aantoonbaar binnen twee maanden na het publiceren van deze uitspraak met succes doorlopen heeft, dient Ymnes voor onbepaalde tijd geblokkeerd te worden, waarbij zijn overlegpagina en mail-functie beschikbaar blijven om de cursus te kunnen voltooien en het resultaat door te geven. Nadat Ymnes alsnog aangetoond heeft deze cursus met succes doorlopen te hebben, zal deze blokkade worden opgeheven. Ymnes dient deze cursus onder zijn gebruikersnaam te volgen. Indien dit niet mogelijk is, dient hij bij aanvang van de cursus de gekozen gebruikersnaam aan de Arbitragecommissie door te geven.
Omdat overtredingen van deze uitspraak, met uitzondering van het laatste punt, als projectverstoring gezien worden, dienen deze te resulteren in een blokkade van een week. Verhoging wegens herhaling is naar het oordeel van de Commissie niet nodig, maar mocht er sprake zijn van een zeer ernstige verstoring, dan kan een langere maatregel worden opgelegd.

De Arbitragecommissie, 7 aug 2018 01:03 (CEST)

Source

Ymnes turned himself against me because I criticised his work. I reported Ymnes to the coordinator copyright Josq on his talk page and Ymnes took in this way revenge, with dramatical consequence. Because I was the one who was warning for years for the copyright problems on Wikipedia-NL and special for Romaine's intumescence. Romaine was just a pirate who was obsessed by collecting "knowledge" but he complete ignored Jimbo his message. I think Whaledad made a mistake with Ten onrechte toegeschreven, because all the sources are there.

Romaine was all the time sabotaging together with De Wikischim, clearly a sock account on Wikiquote. Kolonel Zeiksnor, a other victim of MoiraMoira collected several quotes about this trolls. And that Vinvlugt, a Dutch Arb is just a total nitwit, he never wrote one single article in his whole career.

Beste De Wikischim, hoe vaak moet ik uitleggen dat ik nul komma nul ambitie heb om hier inhoudelijk bij te dragen?

My god, what a idiot!