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Comment by zapdrive | Hacker News Reader

I think the least highlighted part of the story, and the one being totally ignored on HN, is the alleged secret romantic relationship between a foundation member and the alleged female complainant. That puts a lot in perspective for me. What's even more interesting is that the alleged complainant was mostly active on pages related to women athletes, women's rights, abortion rights etc., so it's not a far stretch to assume she's a feminist. And from her perspective she was being stalked and harassed by a privileged white male, who in fact was just doing his job of correcting her grammar, deleting stubs etc. Also his rude behavior wouldn't have helped. So she went ahead and did what any radical feminist in power would do, abuse her power.

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I wish you would delete this comment and make it again without the loaded overtones that are going to cause it to get killed.

You're expressing an interesting observation but then ruining it with an overly politicized generalization that reflects poorly on you and your position.

Even if he would remove the vitriol in his comment, arguably it is still a pretty bad comment: Each sentence has no factual basis but is purely based on far-flung allegations and they still manage to make massive leaps of logic between each sentence.

Do you have any source for this (that isn't just rampant speculation)? If these things are going on and actually impacting editorial work within Wikipedia itself, it sounds like we are due for a nice little Wikipediagate...

It's right there in the article. Conclusions are mine, but the allegations are right there.

There is no factual basis to these allegations though. And besides your first sentence and the first half of the second sentence, the rest is completely unsubstantiated. Your comment on feminism and her perspective has no bearing in reality

If the foundation would release the complaint, we wouldn't have to go digging into Fram's history to find the source of this conflict. So don't put this on me. Yes, these allegations could be wrong, but this is as close as we can get to the facts without the foundation releasing the original complaint.

Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy?

There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.

FWIW, "release the complaint" could simply mean releasing the details privately to the arbcom, which regularly handles privileged private data under non-disclosure.

I've seen no explanation in the article or in any of the discussion which would justify keeping the arbcom in the dark here. It's quite surprising, but not the first recent incident of WMF doing this.

Wow, I don't even know where to start. You are right that the alleged relationship is actually the most interesting part of the story. Because it shows what's so wrong about the user base's reaction: Without any merit - reminiscent of GamerGate (see my other comment) - a secret relationship is alleged that of course biases every actor involved. The community piles onto one user without any good reason, except that she is a woman. And her behavior, writing about topics that counteract certain problems in the community (and are thus almost an act of resistance), is disdained by the insecure, predominantly male, user base that feels attacked by the implicit political act in her presence and writing focus.

Every single sentence in your comment is without a factual base - and you still manage to make massive leaps of logic between them. It is clear that you are motivated by an anti-feminist standpoint that has little connection with actual reality or contemporary feminist thought. And for some reason, you deem it justified to harass users for it. If a substantial portion of Wikipedia's user base is like you, then that's pretty unhealthy.

One the lines in my comment was "this puts a lot in perspective for me". So it goes without saying that I'm reaching all those conclusions from my perspective. Am I misogynist? Hell no. Am I against equal rights for women? Not at all. But I'm against equal rights that come without equal responsibilities. And over the years in my life I have seen multiple women not being held accountable of their actions, just because of their gender. They get to make false allegations and totally ruin other people's lives and get no punishment even when these allegations are proved totally wrong. This only promotes these kinds of false allegations. And that's why I'm assuming the foundation is hiding the complaint in a shroud of secrecy, because it won't stand any ground in public. And, of course, even if the allegations against Fram are proven to be false, there will be zero consequences for the complainant. Only encouraging more women to file such complaints against other admins until all the well minded people start leaving the project and radical feminists gain control of it and start attempting to change the history.

What's going on is that the complainant xirself is indirectly letting us know that xir complaint didn't have any ground to stand on. Xey went straight to the Foundation precisely as a ploy to bypass the community's well-established due process, knowing full well that any bureaucracy of that sort would naturally "hid[e] the complaint in a shroud of secrecy"! It's not so much about xem being a woman - though that certainly can't hurt xem, I guess - and more about the political games that xey're overty playing. Quite disgraceful, all around.

Added: I'm not sure that we can know why the Foundation chose to act on this basis. It could have been personal in the way you imply, but this was a controversial editor who had strongly opposed Foundation initiatives before (Media view, Visual Editor, "next-gen" discussion platform to replace wiki-like talk pages, etc.) So I'd rather not speculate - the Foundation didn't need anything more than a flimsy pretext, and a formal complaint could certainly serve that purpose.

Thank you for articulating that better than me. This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Now the question is why would anyone in the foundation take a drastic action on the bases of a flimsy complaint? My life experience has taught me that these kinds of things are usually done by men in power out of love for a woman. Or by women who know they will face zero consequences in case this blows over. I'm ready to eat my hat, if we ever get the whole picture and we find out that a feminist was not involved (either the complainant or the foundation member who took action).

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