Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Wikipedia's Entry on Daniel Brandt  (View post)

Michael Fagan [PersonRank 3]

Saturday, October 29, 2005
18 years ago

I generally don't think things like these should be deleted, except to preserve someone's privacy, however looking at what you wrote, all of that information is available elsewhere on the web, such as his own website. So I'm not quite sure what his objection was...

Cow [PersonRank 2]

18 years ago #

Anyone who seeks publicity by starting a (obviously controversial) website, has to expect to have things written about them..

brandtwatch-googlewatch-watch.org [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Under no conditions should you have the right to have your Wikipedia entry deleted. This is especially true if you are someone loudly and vociferously participating in a public debate. Brandt should, however, have the right to insist that things which are factually untrue be removed.

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

[moved from second thread]

Let me turn the question around.

Does Philipp Lenssen have a right to start an entry on Daniel Brandt that is merely about him and Google Watch, when he knows nothing about my 38-year history of social activism? That’s the problem with Wikipedia – too many amateurs thinking that they have the right to describe things that they know little about.

Everything you mentioned about me is already mentioned elsewhere on Wikipedia. Most of it is under the Google-Watch article, including that tawdry link you love so much. The Googlebomb information is in the article about Googlebombs. Why repeat this stuff under an article for my name, when Google is only a minor part of my life?

I tried to work with SlimVirgin and gave her information and sources about my other activities. In the end, she wanted to repeat those two pro-Google, anti-Brandt links that were already listed under the Google-Watch article. Apart from those two links, the article on me was mutually satisfactory at that point. I’ve already been namebombed more than once by Google-lovers, and I felt that I should draw the line somewhere, so I objected to those links.

Then at the same time that those two links became an issue, I found other reasons why I should request a complete deletion. I discovered that SlimVirgin considered me politically objectionable in comments she had made about me months ago, which had nothing to do with Google. And finally, as I began learning about Wikipedia (I hadn’t explored it at all before this happened), I began to worry that if I let the article go forward, then every day someone like Farhad Manjoo or Chris Beasley or Aaron Wall would come along and add his two cents for personal or political reasons.

I told Jimmy Wales that the only way I could let it go forward is if we all agreed to a version, and then it was locked against changes or additions. He said this was "an impossible and absurd request." So now I’m claiming the right to delete it on the grounds that SlimVirgin is biased and should not have tried to start the article on me in the first place.

By the way, I have proof from at least one other Wikipedia administrator that they sometimes start an article on someone in order to punish them. Of course, they make it look like an encyclopedia article, but in reality it’s an ambush. All they need to start an article on someone is evidence that the person is noteworthy. This can be very slim evidence, if you are an anonymous administrator and you have anonymous cronies with admin privileges to back you up.

Now tell me, why should I consent to have the article run at all under these circumstances? What gives you more right to play with an article about me, than my right to insist that it remain deleted – given the fact that those with admin privileges are more likely to back you up than they are to back me up?

As I learn more about how Wikipedia works, it’s becoming a privacy issue for me.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Do I have the right to start off an article with incomplete information on Wikipedia? Absolutely – that’s what Wikipedia’s made for. Others will come and add information. Unless, of course, someone asks for the article to be deleted. You prevented to let the wisdom of crowds work – the wisdom of a crowd of amateurs, perhaps, but together they create much more than what you could call "amateurish."

I can see why you objected to SlimVirgin’s editing. But why did you ask for a complete removal then? The power of Wikipedia is not in a single editor, not in a single anybody... the power of each article will grow over time, if you let it grow. It doesn’t matter much who started it. If you ever added a stub on any topic you like, but would like to know more about perhaps, you’ll be amazed when you come back after a year to see how interesting it has grown.

> By the way, I have proof from at
> least one other Wikipedia administrator
> that they sometimes start an article on
> someone in order to punish them.

Share your proof here, if you can.

> What gives you more right to play with
> an article about me, than my right to
> insist that it remain deleted . . . ?

Good question. I don’t know the answer, that’s why I asked in my post. I’m curious about both the moral as well as the legal situation here. There’s freedom of speech, privacy, and slander laws to consider. We can shorten the question to: under freedom of speech laws, does any Encyclopedia have the right to publish an entry on a living person if that person objects?

Cow [PersonRank 2]

18 years ago #

> What gives you more right to play with
> an article about me, than my right to
> insist that it remain deleted . . . ?

Two things:

Firstly: Wikipedia sometimes works through votes. If a majority decided that it was best to keep the article and have people add to it that would be justification.

Secondly: Wikipedians have the right to add stuff that they consider ito be helpful to the reader (if they can produce sources). Having an article about you is good for the reader, provided of course that it is factually correct and NPOV. If it is not that then Wikipedians must improve it to be so, they cannot do that if it is deleted.

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #


>> By the way, I have proof from at
>> least one other Wikipedia administrator
>> that they sometimes start an article on
>> someone in order to punish them.

> Share your proof here, if you can.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-October/031529.html

[WikiEN-l] Skyring edit history to date

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com

Thu Oct 27 09:14:53 UTC 2005

* Previous message: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

* Next message: [WikiEN-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.

* Messages sorted by: [ date] [ thread] [ subject] [ author]

Geoff Burling wrote:

> He's become a difficult problem, & all of the easy solutions have
> been tried & shown not to work. And he's gotten to the point
> where attacking Wikipedia has become his life: calling that
> "pathetic" doesn't properly do it justice.

Skyring's life is denial. If he's in this much denial about being the author of his own misfortunes on Wikipedia, he's well practiced in the art and will be in denial about lots of things. However, he's actually noteworthy enough to get an article (for his work on Bookcrossing – he's doing getting a metric shitload of press and media on it of late, check his blog, and his past involvements in politics). So who wants to start [[Peter Mackay]]? It would make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia by one useful article (on the guy who leads Bookcrossing in Canberra and other things). I figure an article with 110% verifiable and undeniable factual references detailing facts and establishing encyclopedic nature to a degree that not even a weasel like Skyring can wriggle out of would be a good thing..

- d.

Jamie [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

There's several issues here. The more general one is when does someone have the right to remove something about themselves from Wikipedia? Not speaking about Daniel here – I'm sure that there are a lot of people and other entities that would like to remove information from articles about them. For instance, the article on Microsoft: "Windows ME, [...] one of the most unstable operating systems Microsoft had ever produced". Steve Jobs: "[E]veryone had been terrorized by Steve Jobs at some point or another, and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist would be gone". Bill Clinton: "Clinton avoided the draft with a student deferment while studying abroad during the Vietnam War."

These negative points about each figure are only clips of course, and they don't completely illustrate my point – pick any entity on Wikipedia and you won't get their life story. You don't find out about how many trees Microsoft planted or how much money Steve Jobs gave to sick kids. The information you get is the information they are known for. Is there some guide for the percentage of good and bad that must be present, or the standard more common sense standard of requiring the information that's relevant?

The evidence you posted sounds less like vindictiveness and more like let's make a bulletproof article that is neutral and factual beyond dispute. As far as I can tell that level of neutrality and factuality is the goal of every article. In that case circumstances required that it be done right the first time. Conspiracy? There's always conspiracies but they don't generally happen on public mailing lists :)

Anyway, for now, your article is gone. Will it stay gone? Maybe. It probably should. On one side of the scale is the academic value of an article about you. On the other side is the effort of arguing with you about whether the article is neutral enough and has enough of your virtuous history. That's a pretty heavy load to counterbalance :)

Anyway, keep fighting the good fight, Daniel. And failing that, keep doing what you're doing. Raising a little hell never hurt anyone :)

Jamie [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

By the way – are you talking about yourself in third person on Wikipedia Watch? "[...]SlimVirgin had an agenda before she began the stub on Daniel Brandt." "[...]he praised her and scolded Brandt[...]" There are two other mentions of "Brandt" in the main text. This is an easy way to lose a lot of credibility the second someone notices the website was written by "Brandt".

Hope this constructive criticism helps

AJ [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Oh my goodness. Daniel, get a life. The answer to incomplete entries is to either wait for someone (ahem, not you) to fill in the blanks, or for you to augment or counter the entry on your own Web site.

You need to take off the tinfoil hat... just for a few minutes.

kaixo [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Hi Daniel,

What if someone starts a new entry on you or on your activities in "Wikipedia en español" for instance? Can you control the whole World?

;)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I was wondering the same about http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
Why is it not signed with a name? That would add credibility. If it's not Daniel speaking, who is it? Do we have reason to assume it's Daniel speaking in 3rd person?

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

Maybe I had a staff member write it up. Maybe I plan on expanding the site and moving that page deeper inside, but for now I don't want the site to look like a blog.

Maybe I think it's hilarious that I'm complaining about anonymous admins at Wikipedia (I asked SlimVirgin for her real name three times), and my critics look at this page and all they can think about is that I might be writing in the third person.

There is a huge open letter on that page signed by me. There are quotes from SlimVirgin taken right from Wikipedia. The domain is registered to me and my organization. The rest of the page consists of facts about Wikipedia and Google that are verifiable, and some opinions.

As founder and president of that organization, you can safely assume that I approve of everything on that page, even if I didn't write it myself.

Maybe I should add the byline, "By FatWhore" so that you know who wrote it. Then you will see that I have a gripe against SlimVirgin, and you will now be able to fit this into a neat slot in your troubled brains.

I'm going to start looking for that Forbes piece on blogging. Perhaps it will have something intelligent to say about the phenomenon of anonymous blogging. I appreciate the fact that Philipp is not anonymous, but I cannot say as much for some of those who comment here.

Jamie [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

D'oh! Sorry about the anonymity. Let me give you all my information so you can add me to your database. Hehe, just kidding! Actually I don't really hide online, my information can probably be found in the search function of this forum and with a few Google (or Yahoo) searches subsequent to that. I do use my real information on my blog (but this isn't a blog). In case you haven't found the forbes piece yet, it's at http://www.forbes.com/home/forbes/2005/1114/128.html?_requestid=1899 . (I found it right on the front page.)

I'm sorry that you didn't get the response you sought in this forum. Looking at the archives, I think you'll find that while it's clearly not an anti-Google blog, this blog does cover the other side – questions about Google's privacy policies and ethics included. That explains why Philipp didn't call you a paranoid attention-whoring egomaniac. Really, he should be commended for avoiding the ad hominem attacks that even you sought when things went south. (Was: re: questioning our anonymity rather than the content of our argument.)

I hope we can still be friends anyway.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Jamie, and I meant it, too, when I said that Google-Watch.org does raise many issues worth of discussion. I guess that's why it's particularly sad the writing style, IMO, is often a little over-the-top/ conspiracy like.

For example, Daniel discusses the issues of people taking Wikipedia and stuffing ads on them, which often is spam. But then the article goes on to say that "It is primarily Google's fault," and "Google doesn't care." And these accusations I find unreasonable without proof. We don't even have to assume Google is ethical in their actions. Even if we'd assume all they want is to make money, then fighting search engine spam is absolutely crucial – it's the base they stand on, and if it rots, so do their other services as people move to a different neighborhood (like, Yahoo, MSN, and others).
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/

Also, an introduction to an interview with Sergey Brin that starts with "Lies, damned lies, and Brin spin" and ends with "blah, blah, blah .." take away credibility on articles on important issues like the Google/ China relationship and censorship issue. Why would I want to trust someone to give me an objective view on Google if seemingly he has an axe to grind?
http://www.google-watch.org/china.html

An article on the Google toolbar starts off with "It's always been evil." Again the article makes a good point – Google lists URLs even if the server disallowed them via robots.txt – but it gets lost to anyone but those who already hate Google anyway.
http://www.google-watch.org/toolbar.html

Andries [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Daniel, Wikipedia is a social community intended to write encyclopedic information. There is nothing sinister or hidden there, except the real names of some editors. If a person is noteworthy, like Daniel Brandt then this justifies an entry and you can submit it for AFD (Article For Deletion) but if it is voted to keep then there is nothing you can do to get it deleted. Many have tried to beat and disrupt the Wikipedia system but all have failed.

Please, understand that most users in Wikipedia are sincere in their attempt to provide balanced neutral information about a variety of subjects. Of course, they are sometimes biased and misinformed, like all other human beings.

And please do not waste your time trying to find conspiracies behind Wikipedia, because there is none and you will only make a fool of yourself. Also please do not abuse other editors because that will work in most cases counterproductive.

I do not oppose to a Wikipedia watch website but Wikipedia is huge and it has many editors with very diverse points of views and it would be a full time task for more than one person.

Andries (user Andries at Wikipedia and my real name)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

The article got restored now.

L Baines [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Reading the edit history and this thread it looks like Wikipedia is a place for Wikipedia supporters to smear Wikipedia critics.

Philipp, you should revert and recuse yourself from future edits. You are doing a lot of harm to Wikipedia.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

L Baines, what in my entry on Daniel Brandt makes you think I want to "smear a Wikipedia critic"? If you want to continue this discussion with me, please post under your full name.

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

Someone at interactive.usc.edu picked up on Wikipedia Watch controversy and I emailed him the following, and asked him to post it as a comment (I couldn't register because it's apparently a member-only thing). He did so. This is the University I attended, and the "Daily Trojan" is the student newspaper there. Here is a copy of my comments:

My objection to Wikipedia began because I discovered that an anonymous admin had started an article stub on me. She had contact information for me, but I was not notified that this stub had been started. I discovered it by accident. Furthermore, it turned out that she was pursuing an agenda against me. This became clear a few days after we began working on the article. At that point I reconsidered my position, and I decided that to let this article proceed at all on Wikipedia, amounted to a violation of my privacy.

I took it up with Jimmy Wales, and he supported his anonymous administrator. Two weeks later it is becoming clear that there is nothing I can do to get the article deleted.

Now my fate is in the hands of anonymous amateurs who not only know little about me, but are not inclined to pursue any serious research. For example, the article currently is trying to figure out if I really was an activist at USC. This is what they report: "In interviews Brandt describes himself as having been an antiwar activist at the University of Southern California during the Vietnam War era. He claims to have resisted the draft and to have been prosecuted for so doing."

Contrast this to the Daily Trojan, January 12, 1971: "On Dec. 4, 1970, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of a lower court and found Daniel L. Brandt, a former USC student, innocent on charges of failing to report for physical examination and refusal to submit to induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.... Dan Brandt was the editor and creator of Prevert, a monthly student activist newspaper, and the de facto leader of the student activist movement at this university in the late '60's."

Rather amateurish reporting from the Daily Trojan, but still miles ahead of Wikipedia. Why should I have to put up with Wikipedia? Is your right to read amateurish reporting greater than my right to privacy? Remember, a Wikipedia article on me will very likely outrank all other links that mention my name, and this will be true on all the major search engines, a few months from now when the new ranking cycle kicks in. It will be there for the next 100 years, and everyone and anyone can come along and play anonymous editor, unless some other anonymous editor with more privileges overrules them.

That bothers me, because anonymous editors at Wikipedia seem to feel that I have no right to shape the article, and certainly no right to get it deleted. There's no worthwhile appeal process. If I request a vote on deletion, I will easily get outvoted by a whole host of anonymous Wikipedia cultists.

I recommend that everyone read the current Forbes Magazine cover story on blogging. The same problems that this story describes with anonymous bloggers are also present at Wikipedia in the form of anonymous administrators and editors.

Are their any lawyers out there who would like to help me out on this?

Anon [PersonRank 7]

18 years ago #

There is such a thing as a "public person". I'm not sure where the threshold is to be set. I'm certain that President Bush is one, while I'm not. Public persons have to give up a certain amount of privacy – they have to live with articles being written about them, revealing information on them.

I'm not sure whether D. Brandt is such a person. I doubt it.

With regard to Wikipedia, there the additional point of relevancy. Is a person sufficiently relevant to be covered? All Brandt does is publish information on the Web, like millions of people do these days. The German version of Wikipedia has a long list of properties making a person "worth" to be included. The criteria are, from my experience, much more rigorous than in the English Wikipedia. I think Brandt wouldn't be considered relevant in the German version. For the English version, I can't seem to find the relevancy criteria.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Daniel, if you feel your privacy is being violated, why do you (or someone else at your site) write on people like Aaron Wall, Matt Cutts and Chris Beasley in your blog? You (or someone on your site) writes:

- "Chris Beasley makes six figures a year from his computer in East Lansing, Michigan. He's not a blogger, but rather a "template spammer" who generates affiliate sites using multiple domains"

- "Aaron Matthew Wall, by his own description, is a "SEO junkie." . . . Mr. Wall is a small-time cowboy who discovered the Internet only two years ago."

- "Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since January 2000, used to work for the National Security Agency and has a top-secret clearance"

So you are afraid the Wikipedia article might turn up in Google? Your *own* article on Aaron Wall is in the Google top 10 at this moment. Your *own* article on Chris Beasley is in the Google top 20 for his name. And as opposed to Wikipedia, here visitors who disagree don't have the chance to edit your statements.

Do as I say, don't do as I do?

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

It's really a question of who is being offensive and who is being defensive. I'm trying to defend myself. They started it, and I'm trying to end it.

As you well know, Aaron Wall namebombed me over a year ago, and when I sent him an email, he thought my objections were funny and did it some more. For the last year he has had 140,000 *external* backlinks into his blog, by Yahoo's count, although recently it's been about half that. I can't match him at his game, and he's had number-one spots on my name for a year, while my page barely makes it into the top ten for his name. There was a long thread on namebombing at SEW to which Aaron and I contributed. Aaron is the father of namebombing. He recommends using the names of prominent people for use as AdWords triggers, so that the traffic can be diverted to your site. He warned that some people might object to this. Yeah, I guess they might!

Chris Beasley is another spammer. When I explained to Chris that Farhad Manjoo misquoted me and that Chris's description of what Manjoo reported I said was complete fiction, Chris ignored me. That was back in 2003 when he put up his watch-watch site. Chris has almost 100 cookie-cutter template domains full of affiliate pages and ads, and they all rank rather well. No wonder he loves Google.

The information on Matt Cutts came from his resume that was posted on his web page at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fair game.

Philipp Lenssen might become a problem someday. He has mentioned Beasley and watch-watch four times on his site. And Philipp isn't even a spammer or SEO or marketer, as far as I can tell, just a Google-lover. So I don't even bother with him yet.

And I hate blogs, which is why I don't run one.

Jack Fresco [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

interesting fellow this brant.

tip: search his bankrupcy records. you will find that very interesting

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

"Fair game" if the information was public? Then you surely can't have anything against your entry on Wikipedia, which is also using public sources.

But, the more I try to reason with you, the more I realize I might as well be talking to a troll (or, possibly, am). You talk about privacy, yet you publish details of others on your site; you say you don't like google-gaming, yet you yourself at one time released a Googlebomb; you equal mentioning Google-Watch-Watch to being a Google-lover, yet you mention that site on yours as well. And the best argument you brought forth against this so far is "they started first!"

Maybe paranoia can truly cloud someone's perception, even when people give that someone the benefit of a doubt. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; if someone accuses everyone of opposing one, then slowly people will indeed oppose one – because they don't like to be wrongly accused.

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

Hey, Fresco Troll, there are no bankruptcy records on me anywhere on the planet, because I've never declared bankruptcy, or been bankrupt, or even known anyone who went bankrupt. Trolls should at least learn how to spell. Now you know why I hate blogs.

Philipp, I mentioned Beasley for the first time ever on my site less than two weeks ago. The reason I did it is because SlimVirgin at Wikipedia was fond of that link, and I suddenly realized that I should have mentioned it two years ago. You have to nip the trolls in the bud, or they keep percolating around the web. Someday there will be laws, but until then I've decided to be more vigilant. When I mention Beasley (or Wall), you should notice that I do not link to them.

What you say about a self-fulfilling prophecy applies in reverse on the web. If someone accuses you of something, and it goes unanswered, and they have plenty of link juice behind them, then whatever they say becomes self-fulfilling because perception is more important on the web than substance.

Cow [PersonRank 2]

18 years ago #

You still haven't refuted what Philipp said about "fair game".

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

One's right to privacy is inversely proportional to the power that they have to violate the privacy of others.

Matt Cutts, aka GoogleGuy, works for a company that many consider to be the biggest threat to privacy in a long time. If I come across information about Cutts that he posted on his own website, for the benefit of anyone who is interested in his career, then this information is fair game. This is particularly true if it shows a connection between Cutts and the National Security Agency, which is currently the biggest privacy invader in the world. It would be irresponsible of me, as a social activist and privacy advocate, to fail to make this connection.

It would be different if I posted my resume, because I don't work for a $100-billion corporation that collects massive amounts of information. Even so, I have never objected to people pulling stuff from my websites about me, when they find it. What I object to on Wikipedia is editors grabbing stuff from webmasters who heard stuff about me, who heard it from someone else, and then slapping this on Wikipedia. It's done in an extremely amateurish way.

For example, there's a quote from me right now on Wikipedia that came from this thread. That's fine. But in that quote from me, some Wikipedia editor put a link under two words in the quote. One is the word "ambush." It leads to a description of something completely irrelevant. It's harmless and stupid, and the only point I'm trying to make is that there are zero standards at Wikipedia, and the entire project is an embarrassment as often as it proves helpful. If you are going to quote someone, you don't link words in the quote to other places. That's Google's job with AutoLink.

Another problem is that citations for Wikipedia articles only cite the top layer of the rumor chain. They don't dig deeper in most cases. At least borrowing information from Cutts's own resume is pretty good sourcing.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> One’s right to privacy is inversely proportional
> to the power that they have to violate the
> privacy of others.

By that moral standard, this would give me the right to violate your privacy, because you violate the privacy of others. But you know what, I don't believe my moral standards should change depending on who they're applied to. I'm sure there are people out there who think so – e.g. those who believe in the moral right to execute a death penalty ("he took away someone else's life, so he lost his own right to live, and this gives me the right to take away his life") – but I'm not one of them.

> But in that quote from me, some Wikipedia editor put
> a link under two words in the quote. One is the
> word "ambush." It leads to a description of
> something completely irrelevant.

I removed the link. That's how Wikipedia works – things change.

> At least borrowing information from Cutts’s
> own resume is pretty good sourcing.

Nowhere on http://www.google-watch.org/jobad.html where you talk about Matt Cutts do you state what your source is. If you are talking about journalistic standards, then why don't you?

> [Wikipedia] is an embarrassment as often
> as it proves helpful

So then how often did you help improve Wikipedia? As you know, it's a community-driven project relying on people like you and me. Judging from the list of edits at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Daniel_Brandt&offset=0&limit=250 , you never contributed to anything outside of the entries for Google-Watch and Daniel Brandt (which Wikipedia asks you to not edit in the first place, because of the objectiveness factor). Do you think the world – and the web – can improve by us complaining without helping? Now I'm not saying you don't fight for what you believe, I'm sure you do, but certainly you didn't "get" the idea of Wikipedia yet, and I'm trying to help you understand the paradoxy in your words.

Daniel Brandt [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

Philipp, does this mean that I am not allowed to address mistakes, oversights, or violations of privacy in the article about me, except through you? Who gave you this right? Is that "how Wikipedia works," in use your words?

You should recuse yourself from any further editing on that article about me. SlimVirgin started this whole mess, and I can demonstrate that she did so while biased against me. She has properly stepped aside from further edits on this resurrected version of that article.

I can also demonstrate that you resurrected this article because you are biased against me. I request and recommend that you step aside and contribute no further edits.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> Philipp, does this mean that I am
> not allowed to address mistakes,
> oversights, or violations of privacy
> in the article about me, except
> through you?

No, Daniel, don't do the edits through me. Click the "Edit" button on Wikipedia pages that cover topics of interest to you and on which you think you can be objective. I don't have any special right at all, in fact, I'm not even a Wikipedia admin (and my domain was actually banned on all of Wikipedia's pages for a while – those who read along remember the Nigritude Ultramarine Wiki Sandbox incident).

> I can also demonstrate that you
> resurrected this article because
> you are biased against me.

Funny thing is, about the only positive sentence in my draft got removed – but not by me. So it seems I'm not biased against you, but biased *for* you. If you have any proof or argument, step forward, and if "you mentioned Google-watch-watch in your blog several times" is your best argument, well, we've heard that and people can make up their minds if that is valid.

Cow [PersonRank 2]

18 years ago #

Mr. Brandt you DO have "the right to demand minimal standards of evidence to back up assertions made in the article".

Just ask on the talk page and your views will be considered and generally the appropriate sources will be added or the sentences removed...

Mr. Smideywerbermanjansen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Brandt, get over it. The article (as of the day I posted this) is fine. [Minor cursing removed. -Ed.]

robert bruce [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Brandt is right. STOP BEING MUGS.

Brian M. [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

>>It’s done in an extremely amateurish way.

I hope you can see the irony in this.

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!