Criticisms of HypertWiki

Relevant dialogue with JERS

2006-07-24 JERS to Woozle

PS I Googled tirCysP and got this. Why do you put this private stuff up on the web???

http://wiki.hypertwins.org/index.php?title=User:Woozle_To-Do&printable=yes

2006-07-24 Woozle to JERS

I googled for [redacted] and got [redacted].com, followed by 2.5 pages (listed as 5 pages, but upon actually paging through them, there were only 3, with the last one being very short) of unrelated stuff. Not sure where you got wiki.hypertwins.org from in all that.

N.

2006-07-24 JERS to Woozle

What I meant was: I wouldn't want anything but the public pages of PC accessible to random googlers. (And do you really want [name redacted] -- who seems to spend many hours on the internet -- trawling through your personal info?) D

2006-07-24 Woozle to JERS

> What I meant was: I wouldn't want anything but the public pages of PC
> accessible to random googlers. 

I'm not sure what you mean about this... PC has no non-public pages.

> (And do you really want [name redacted] -- who 
> seems to spend many hours on the internet -- trawling through your
> personal info?)  D

She already does trawl through it, from various reports I've had. I can't easily stop her while leaving the info available to the world at large, which is what's important. Besides, there isn't much I'd really consider terribly personal on that site yet, and certainly not on a level with the former hidden site she somehow found a few years ago and immediately discussed with everyone except me.

There was nothing on that site that I would have objected to her knowing about (in fact, I *thought* she already did know about the particular issues she chose to fuss about). I didn't even object to the people she told about it knowing about it, though the timing could certainly have been better.

The problem arises when she uses the information to create a furor. If I make all the information public and easily accessible, then anything she "reveals" isn't new or privileged information which only she knows how to find. If I go the opposite direction and remove whatever information she has decided to make a fuss over, she has gained effective censorship control over my writing, which is probably what she wants -- to be able to stop me from discussing things that bother her, without having to confront those things on a rational level.

...not that it's ever clear which specific information she's bothered by; she seems mainly to want me to stop posting anything at all. If I were to take down the Hypertwins wiki, for example, her next target would be how awful and tacky vbz.net is, and so on. There's no point in trying to reach compromise when the other party won't enter the discussion.

N.

2006-07-25 JERS responds

I just got the URL I sent you from Google...As for the world at large, I'm not sure what to say. If there are people you want to keep informed, why not send them a collective email? If you just put everything on the web, God knows what the world will make of it!