[WikiEN-l] Re: A suicide note on the Wikipedia?????

Mon Feb 17 06:35:38 UTC 2003

On Saturday 15 February 2003 01:34 pm, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> I agree with Daniel on this one.  We should have acted faster.  As for
> me, when I saw it, it was already a few hours old and I assumed that
> something had been done, or it was too late.  In retrospect, I would
> have acted differently.
>
> So, what's the proper course of action in a case like this?  I mean,
> who should one call?  The police in that town?
>
> --Jimbo

Well in this case we did exactly the right thing but about two hours later 
than we should have. Like I said before, when we see something that looks 
like a suicide letter it is our moral obligation to track down the IP and 
inform the local authorities - we shouldn't waste much time at all debating 
whether or not the thing is legit (finding that out is the job of the cops). 

Everying crystallized once I asked if somebody had called the cops. So asking 
this question on the relevant talk page and then having a volunteer call the 
correct authorities is probably the best route. I made the mistake of 
emailing the school's webmaster (of all people) as my first action - which 
was dumb since it was 2 AM in Connecticut at the time. 

Hm. This might be one reason to forget my complex "hide the IP from sysops but 
allow them to block logged-in users" idea. It might be best to simply make 
this information readily available to sysops for cases like this (mouse-over 
text with the IP address is all that would be needed). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma
Added a bunch of events to [[February 8]]; updated all the year pages and many 
of the other articles linked from that page.