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I happened to notice you were writing to Nick-D about the Sydney hostage crisis. Are you okay? I think I trod on some toes with my edit (singular) to the related illridewithyou article. I've had 11 different people threaten me over a single edit! Wow! I am still trying to wrap my head around that, so was wondering if you could fill me in on your experiences. Maybe we can help each other out. KrampusC (talk) 14:11, 28 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Well. I added an edit which pointed out that the woman's facebook status about her offering a ride to a Muslim woman was not a factual story. She did not talk to the "Muslim" at all and didn't even know if that Muslim woman was indeed muslim, let alone knowing that the woman taking off the "hijab" due to fear. My edit had reference too. They just hated that I pointed out this fact, I guess. He is even completely ignoring me now.
I am quite disappointed. I realized the popular Wikipedia pages are essentially maintained by the same group of senior who don't care about others' opinions and like to throw threats around.
That's quite interesting.
My story was that I was trying to find information about the chocolate shop hostage crisis (which is what it is called here in Australia) and, as the crisis developed, people were more worried about people incorrectly referring to it as a terrorist attack and the possibility of that leading to racist violence than about the event itself. After all, we have dozens of hostage situations every year - indeed there was one in Sydney the very next day. The only reason that this made international news was because it involved an Arab Muslim. The guy who killed a friend then refused to give himself up for 24 hours, firing randomly at police as they beseiged his house made nationwide news, but not international. Calling this the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis is an absurd name for it. Chocolate shop hostage crisis, or Martin place siege, at least recognise what is unusual about it.
I only happened to find it on Wikipedia after I was curious about the origins of the related hashtag illridewithyou, which I had heard had been the reason why there was no race-related violence. I am not sure if it really was, but I was curious to see if it really had. There was a lot of commentary about whether or not we were going to get a repeat of the Cronulla riots and a lot of people claimed that that hashtag prevented that. I don't know if it really did, but it made sense. 1 million+ Google hits can't be wrong!
When I saw the article, I was curious to see that it was nominated for deletion. This seemed bizarre to me. Sure, it was only a hashtag, but it was so notable that long-term I expect it to be more notable than the siege itself. I for one wanted to know about whether or not it really stopped the rioting, and whether there was any political motivation to it. After all, Tony Abbott, Australia's Prime Minister, was the reason why we had so many people incorrectly thinking it was a terrorist attack. There was a lot of speculation that the hashtag had been started by a rival political party, like the Labor Party. I wanted to know if there was any truth to it.
Wikipedia, thankfully, wrote the name of the person who made the hashtag. I hadn't heard it in any newspaper or seen it on any news station, but I was glad that Wikipedia had that. That's what people come to Wikipedia for. They come here to see stuff that you don't see easily anywhere else. You come to learn things. So I learned the name of the person that created it. Awesome. But who is she?
If it had said "university student", I wouldn't care. But I was interested in a political affiliation. And it turned out that she does too. She is a member of the Greens Party. No, not Labor like you might expect, but Greens are often affiliated with Labor.
Now, I am a Labor voter with Greens tendencies, so I tend to support her, and I think that the hashtag was a great thing, whether it actually prevented any violence or not. But reading that she had made the whole thing up, or at least editorialised it, I thought was very important. Like you said, it is well referenced and she said it herself. It is not like some tabloid like the Herald Sun said it without reference. We aren't talking about some blog here. We are talking about the well respected The Australian newspaper, who don't get things wrong very often, and they quoted her own Facebook account, which not only can we see screen shots of, but we can also see it on Google cache.
So why isn't that in the Wikipedia article? I thought it should be. I double checked the BLP rules, to make sure that there was no rule about quoting someone word for word, and there wasn't. So, per WP:BOLD, I reverted it. It was so obviously NOT a BLP violation that I thought it should be reverted. I was very friendly in suggesting to the blocking admin, Nick-D, that he should unblock the person who he accidentally blocked for it, User:The Almightey Drill, and I thought that he'd get back to me with something like "Oh woops, my bad". I mean it was understandable that he thought it was a BLP violation. It would have been if it wasn't true. Saying that someone made something up would be bad if they didn't. But she admitted to making it up. So there is no problem.
I did question, though, whether it was okay to list her name at all, given that she is a private citizen. A number of newspapers that I read questioned whether it was okay to list her name on the newspapers at all, given that it was potentially an invasion of privacy. But the issue is that Wikipedia already listed her name, both on the illridewithyou hashtag page and even on the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis page. So if that isn't a BLP violation, then how on earth is it a BLP violation to quote her? Quoting her is much less of a BLP violation than mentioning her in the first place.
So in my mind, and my understanding of the BLP rules, it should be either everything mentioning her name is deleted or else we put in the whole story. Picking and choosing which part of the story to include is a very bad thing to do. If we don't care that she is a private citizen, we shouldn't care about quoting her.
After I received 3 threats for that single edit, I then referred it to the BLP noticeboard, thinking that sensible Wikipedia people would recognise that he did nothing wrong, and that it wasn't a BLP violation, which it definitely wasn't. But I had 5 or 6 people there angrily state that there was something wrong, giving all sorts of nonsensical reasons for it. When I tried to get to the nitty gritty of it, the reason is because in the article itself she used the word "editorialised", while it was stated in the Wikipedia article as "made it up".
Now, for me, "editorialised" is the same thing as "made it up", and other newspaper articles came to the same conclusion. We aren't supposed to quote word for word, so surely it is okay to editorialise the article, by saying "made it up" instead of "editorialise".
But, fair call, if they insist on quoting, we can say "editorialise" or say something else that everyone agrees means the same thing. But the problem is that nobody was letting it be in there at all. And I got more threats over it. 11 people threatened me. Several of them went to my user talk page to harass me and threaten me. The blocking admin was one of the least threatening of them. All over 1 edit I made to revert back something that I am absolutely certain was reasonable to add.
As it stands, the article illridewithyou is 50/50 whether it will be kept or merged. And, on the point of speculation, perhaps it is fair enough. Who can guarantee that it is going to be notable 10 years down the track? I think it will be, but what if it isn't? The question, ultimately, is whether we leave it for a few weeks, or months, to see if it is still getting 1 million+ Google views, or whether we delete it now, but with the option to recreate it if it is still notable weeks, months, or years, down the track. It is a bit of a 50/50 thing and there is an argument either way. I hope that whoever closes the article's nomination takes note of that, and doesn't just outright delete it, especially given that nobody has decided to delete it.
I feel like I have been bullied in relation to this. I was accused of being a meatpuppet, and they assumed me to be the same person as the guy who I supported. I had 3 months of uncontroversial editing history before that, but suddenly I am the same person, or at least friends with, someone in another country, who himself has 3 years of uncontroversial editing history before that? It is just absurd. I had people refuse to assume good faith against me, and one guy decide that by telling him to calm down that it was a personal attack, and that by asking him to assume good faith that I was refusing to assume good faith! It is just absurd!!! Do these people even read what they are writing?
So my point in writing to you, and other people who have been more positive in their involvement, is to help to try to figure out what is going on.
I edited The Strain and its related articles happily several times per day for a couple of months and never had a single threat. There I was treated as an equal. So why, suddenly, am I being bullied and abused this badly in relation to a single edit on an article? Sure, the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis is controversial (because of the question of whether or not it is terrorism) but the article on the hashtag illridewithyou isn't. It certainly isn't controversial in the media. The only controversial aspect of it was the question as to whether it was politically motivated. And that is only a minor amount of controversy anyway, with most commentators agreeing that whether it was politically motivated or not, the end result is that there were no riots.
I just want to get some help with dealing with this. I don't want to keep getting harassment, bullying and abuse from these people, and I'd like to avoid such things in the future.
If that means just editing TV shows and cricketers, then that's what I'll do. But I'd just like some tips as to what has gone on. And I am asking you because you are not one of the people responsible for the abuse.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm not Australian -- I am an Asian immigrant to the United States. I probably have the least political/religious/racial affinity among all people who make edits to the page. And they still almost blocked me.
Think of it -- if you see a black stranger on the street and you immediately think of the crimes that blacks might commit (At least in America, the black population has significantly higher crime rates). Then you make up a whole story of how you witness this black guy attacking antoher person and post that on Facebook. You will be immediately be labeled as stereotyping/racial profiling/racist, you name it. But here, Rachel Jacobs make up the whole "Muslims are being persecuted in Australia" thing, and she is all of sudden hailed as a hero? Why is this different?
So that's my personal opinion regarding this whole thing. But I kept my personal opinion out of this edit. I merely present the fact, that she, like you said, "editorialize" or "make up" the whole story. I used completely neutral language, as you can see. I avoided any words that might have negative implication, such as "fabricate" or "made up", just so that the readers can reach their own opinion. I am merely providing the fact.
Given our experience, I believe the only reasonable explanation is that some senior users have hidden political agenda. They simply don't want the world to know about this. I am not sure what I can do with it.
