For the last week, gossip web site Valleywag has been dressing down Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, about his previous essays and thoughts about — and let’s use the most ‘neutral’ term we can for this — “child sexuality.” The “Wag” links to his postings of yesteryear on his own web site and the tech/Internet discussion site Kuro5hin. The inventory of their headlines is vintage Valleywag:

• Erik Möller, No. 2 at Wikipedia, a defender of pedophilia
• Wikipedia leader Erik Möller: “Children are pornography”
• Wikipedia’s porn-loving No. 2 and his abiding concern for the children
• Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!

Among the sentences that has caused the most buzz is the one from Erik’s essay “Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect,” where he states:

“But if there was any doubt, yes, I am defending that children can have sex with each other. Not only adolescents, but also children of earlier ages — whenever they want to.”

One should read the whole thing in context to understand his larger argument through the prism of his libertarian stylings. Erik’s is an intellectual argument, in a style familiar to the user-created “diaries” of the nearly forgotten Kuro5hin tech community. (People today may know a site that was inspired by the same diary model and Scoop software — DailyKOS.)

Some Wikipedians have expressed deep concern about the nature of Erik’s writings and the lack of discussion about this in a normally open community. Others think that simply because the story broke in Valleywag, it should be discounted altogether.
My view? As they say in basketball, “Play the ball, not the man.” Nevermind your feelings about Valleywag’s style, if the links show it, deal with it.

To be fair, it is nearly impossible to publicly discuss the topic without quickly degenerating into a bitter emotional exchange. The mailing lists for Wikipedia have withered in terms of traffic and usefulness. And we’ve seen recently there has been a tendency to pull the “moderation” trigger on lists such as Foundation-L. Even with mandatory moderation lifted, the standing threat is still there, putting a lid on any dialogue that goes outside the mainstream. And we thought self-censorship was a only a problem in China.

Instead, the places it’s being discussed are personal blogs such as with Ben Yates, Danny Wool and Ben McIlwain (Cydeweys), and their comment threads. Yes, trollish banter from anonymous commenters are inevitable, but you will see there is also honest dialogue and true concern for the plight of Wikipedia.

These blogs are now being picked up upon by sites with more sway than Valleywag. Mashable, the influential tech blog covering Web 2.0, has now published about this and did not hold back:

So long as you’re desired profession is underwater basketweaving, fry cook at McDonald’s or tomato picker at country farm, I doubt your employers are going to do much of a reputation search to see what sort of objectionable positions you’ll go at great lengths to play devil’s advocate for on the web.

The only question that remains is how long Wikimedia will fail to go through and do these sorts of reputation background checks. For a company in the public eye, these things do matter (particularly when they have to do with your second in command). Given the predilictions for the directors at Wikimedia though, I get the impression that such background checks that look for shady behavior might be a case of pot, kettle and black.

This is going to be an ongoing PR problem for Wikipedia if it does not respond. It’s already under fire for hosting “pornographic” images, if you believe WorldNetDaily which you normally should take with great skepticism. This only makes the issue of public trust even more pressing.

So while Valleywag does bring up an issue worth reviewing, it also has its flaws.

Just today, it got a story all wrong about Erik’s past edits. In their juicy headline, “Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!” Valleywag claims that he was responsible for introducing text into the article [[Child sexual abuse]] that started with

Pederasty in ancient Greece took on mystical significance…

It went on to attribute this to Erik:

Since the practice was so widespread in ancient Greece, and there is no indication of any detractors at the time, many do not consider this an example of child sexual abuse (see moral relativism)

The problem is, it’s not Erik’s edit.

The link they provide [diff] shows nothing of the sort, and instead displays what changed between Erik’s edit in 2003 and today’s version. An analysis of the article’s edit history shows that the text in question was added by an anonymous IP user [1] on June 1 2002 and elaborated upon by User:Gretchen [2] two weeks later. This was one full year before Erik’s first edit to that article.

Valleywag needs to retract that post.

I’ve been watching the fallout of this story via Valleywag, blogs, personal mails, Twitter and IMs over the last week. Taste and preference notwithstanding, Erik’s comments butt up right against the line of generally accepted views in Western society regarding relations between minors and with adults. Does it cross the line? I can’t tell you, but I can help navigate the field of evidence and people’s views.

The community should have a say in what this means for projects that Erik has been involved with, such as WikiYouth or Wikimedia Youth Camp. It’s what’s demanded when volunteers make up the project. Ultimately, though, it’s the board and the executive director that have the final decision as to what implications this has. And it behooves them to be mindful of the sense of the community.

We will be discussing this issue in this week’s Wikipedia Weekly podcast in a fair, balanced, responsible manner that is fact-based and non-sensational.

It may be our toughest show to produce yet.

Billionaire Warren Buffet at his annual shareholder’s meeting this week warned about getting too sanctimonious in criticizing China. Via The Standard (HK).

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett issued strong support for the Beijing Olympics saying any effort to boycott the games would be “a terrible mistake.”

“The United States had a similar history of human rights trouble. A black man’s vote once counted as only of a white man’s vote and women were not allowed to vote at all, but in the end those issues were resolved,” he told a crowd of 31,000 in Nebraska.

Good for Buffett, one of the few folks putting things in historical perspective, something news outlets in the States fail to do.

Vice-chairman Charlie Munger via the Wall Street Journal was even more emphatic:

[Munger] didn’t pull any punches. For critics of China, “ask yourself the question: Is China more or less imperfect as the decades have gone by?” Mr. Munger, a professed admirer of Asian cultures, said. “The answer is that China is moving in the right direction. I think it’s the worst thing to pick on something about somebody you don’t like and obsess about it.”

From behind South China Morning Post’s paid firewall, here’s an article about a university student’s Facebook account mysteriously being shut down. No firm proof yet about why it was disabled but it may be related to organizing protests in Hong Kong ahead of the torch arriving on Friday.

Facebook cuts protester’s accounts

Jimmy Cheung
Apr 29, 2008

The university student who plans to protest with Tibetan flags during the Olympic torch relay on Friday says her Facebook account has been disabled for “persistent misuse of the site”.

Christina Chan Hau-man, 21, said she had received a warning from Facebook that her message volume had approached its limit a few days ago.

“I wrote back and explained that I had to respond to those who wanted to join my action,” she said. “Some 60 people have said they will join.”

Ms Chan said her account had been disabled on Sunday “for persistent misuse of the site” and information related to the protest had been deleted.

“It may be political censorship. But I don’t know what is happening exactly.”

Ms Chan said she would continue with her plan but believed fewer people would join because she could no longer reach her supporters via Facebook.

Facebook was not available for comment yesterday. Its rules say users should not disseminate content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offence, violate the rights of any party, or otherwise create liability or violate any law.

League of Social Democrats chairman Wong Yuk-man said his Facebook account, which carried anti-Beijing content, had been disabled last Tuesday, without any reason being given.

Earlier today on Twitter I commented about the “insanity” that is Robert Scoble following 21,000+ people on the group messaging and microblogging service. Since his bot (software robot) monitors everything on Twitter for mentions of his name, he saw my comment and challenged me.

Scobleizer @fuzheado thinks he knows the point of Twitter and says I don’t. This might be interesting. Might.

Twitter limits you to 140 characters per post, so I had to be succinct:

Twitter is a modern digital commons - nonhierarchical, transparent, open, human-speed. Once bots inhabit it, tragedy perhaps.

Earlier that day I was thinking about what Twitter “was” before the Scoble tweet.

Twitter’s model is simple but powerful — complete transparency. Anyone in the Twitterverse can see what you’re receiving, who you are following and who’s following you. It creates a continually changing set of readers and writers, allowing peer discovery faster than any other SNS. Some other features help.

“Retweeting” an interesting post to your followers effectively bridges two disconnected cliques. The directed “@user” messages send an exploratory “Tweet” to make contact with new peers. It’s great in its simplicity, and the Twitter API furthers extendibility and usability.

The Internet had a lot of naysayers in the 1990s — people complained it was a peer-to-peer system that created ghettos. Terms like narrowcasting, personalized media, customized front pages and the Daily Me all implied compartmentalized lonely existences. Twitter does the opposite, by embracing radical transparency to support serendipitous discovery and social mixing. Perhaps it’s why a number of Twitterers have been noticing they spend a lot less time on Facebook. They’ve hit a wall with their “trusted” network of friends. They’ve tagged photos, thrown sheep, played 100 games of Scrabulous and reunited with old classmates. But they didn’t really broaden their horizons.

For English-language China-oriented bloggers, Twitter has fostered a nimble community whether it’s about Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, business, arts, pop culture, academic, Olympics, you name it. Suddenly a disparate set of folks are discovering each other, trading 140-character info nuggets faster than ever before. And with recent Olympic torch dramas and Carrefour boycotts, it’s been the only info stream that can keep up with breaking events.

Elliott Ng at CNReviews.com has a metric-heavy analysis of who’s who in this sphere, based on the list created by Christine Lu (the ultimate “connector” in Tipping Point parlance). It’s like a celebrity who’s in and who’s out list.

But as Twitter grows, there is the risk the signal may not keep up with the noise. Spam, bots and scalability are always a problem to new digital commons spaces. There is a very good chance Twitter, a “faddish web app“, could be the CB radio of Web 2.0 if it can’t find a way to scale with its new-found fame.

Let’s hope we don’t refer to it as the PointCast of 2008 and wake up with a bad hangover.

Kaiser Kuo has a good writeup on his Twitter conversion. For China-based users it’s been a particularly useful application the last few weeks:

Pick the right folks to follow and there’s real value: They link to interesting reads — this is to me probably the most useful thing about Twitter — and make trenchant, sometimes insightful comments. During the recent troubles in Western China, I was following Twitter feeds from people on the scene, providing first-hand perspective that was nearly impossible to find in the press.

This is a great example of the power of citizen blogging/microblogging being not just a frivolous act (ie. tweeting: “Sitting here watching paint dry”)

With the rising tensions over the Olympic torch relay in Europe, the boycott of Carrefour, the roughing up of an American English teacher by a mob in Hunan and the takedown of Web sites by pro-China hackers, Twitter has been ahead of the curve by assembling an ad hoc community of folks across different cities, pointing to blog posts, first hand accounts from the ground and  BBS postings reflecting local sentiment. It’s something that all China-oriented reporters should check out and experience first-hand.

I’ll be addressing the Hong Kong Journalists Association next week about China’s Internet and will absolutely talk about Twitter and its China-based counterparts.

Not sure where Narus.com gets their info, but they seem to have the scoop on the details of the CNN DDOS attack last week.

Multiple sites of CNN (www.cnn.com, www4.cnn.com, edition.cnn.com) were the target of these attacks. NarusInsight Secure Suite (NSS) reported 2 different kinds of attacks going towards CNN - ICMP flood attacks and TCP SYN flood attacks. Interestingly the attacks had very similar signatures, e.g. an instance of a SYN flood involved the attacker distributing his packets across multiple source ports while sending exactly the same number of packets per source port). This can be expected given that the hacker group had made it easy for the novice who could download a script to launch the attack. The highest bandwidth attack seen by NSS was an 80 Mbps SYN flood attack, while the others were much less than that.

They seem to think that the DDOS attack was not successful, saying, “Fortunately, there were no large scale attacks and CNN.com was very much up and running.”

However there was widespread news of flakiness for a whole day, with China and US users finding timeouts and unreachable servers.

You have to give China’s citizens credit — when they’re unleashed (no pun intended) and able to express their dismay, they can get creative. Over at Shanghaiist, they have the latest sign to make the rounds, declaring on the taxicab: “refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs.”

Of course all good moviegoers and Bruce Lee fans will recognize this as a nod to the film “Fist of Fury” where Lee kicks down the hated sign, “No dogs and Chinese allowed.”

Roland Soong of ESWN did a good post in helping to decipher whether this sign was authentic or not. Though given the current climate, accuracy isn’t exactly first on peoples’ list of priorities.

An ominous message showed up early Sunday on the Web site of The Sports Network (TSN), one of the more popular sports news destinations in the US:

Please Note

The Sports Network website and other major news sites have been hacked by a political entity from China, and as a result are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sports Network Management

Reached by phone at TSN’s main office in Pennsylvania, statistician Bob Nelson said the site was hacked “by a group out of China” early Sunday morning around 2 a.m. EST. It was after the Mets-Phillies game where the public site and the data TSN sends to clients were affected.

Staff took down the public website after it had been vandalized with the message, “Tibet was, is and always will be a part of China.” It’s not clear what “political entity” the site outage message refers to.
TSN was working to get the site back up sometime Monday.

For a snapshot of The Sports Network site in normal operation, please see the Google cache.

How did things get so bad?

This is not going to end well.

ABC News is getting roundly criticized about the way it produced the Obama-Clinton debates yesterday. It’s was so bad, there are over 12,000 comments on the ABC News site related to the debate. A sample:

I am disgusted with ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson. The “Debate” was nothing more than tabloid journalism. It was a disgrace. There were two hours to ask questions that would showcase the candidates’ policies and approaches to some of “THE” toughest challenges this country has ever faced and you chose to spend most of the time on nonsense. From snipers to Jeremiah Wright to lapel pins. Do you think that’s what we care about? ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson you owe Americans a profound apology for this wasted opportunity and their sensationalism of non issues.

This appears to be more than typical “astroturfing.” These are folks who actually took the time to write angry grafs like the above, rather than simply pressing a “vote” button.
Perhaps more to the point was this from Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Touche.