>Wow, did everybody here just blame the victim? “If you had done x this 
>wouldn't have happened.” No. This is exactly the point that keeps women from 
>participating in everything, incluiding being visible in Wikipedia and talking 
>openly about their interests! 

>It was inappropriate of the guy to stalk you and inappropriate of the church 
>to confirm your number without your consent. It's not inappropriate to be 
>visible as a woman!

I should add that such stalking is not limited to women. I don’t deny it’s more 
likely, but I have been stalked as well. The acolytes of a notable banned user, 
a film producer who had at that point long been trying through a variety of 
ways, mostly disruptive, to get the article on himself deleted, tried to come 
after me when not only did I block one of his socks, I traced the IP to a 
prominent production company and referred his misuse of their network to 
security there, which apparently took it seriously (at the time, it would never 
have occurred to me that someone would constantly add material to an article 
about themselves accusing themselves of child molestation as a way (they 
thought) of getting the article deleted) ... I really thought I was being 
helpful).

Needless to say, he took umbrage at my going above and beyond our usual 
procedures (not usual for me, however ... I believe any egregious misuse of an 
entity’s computer systems to maliciously edit Wikipedia, use that usually 
violates terms of service, should be reported to the responsible personnel at 
those entities, and there are students at school districts throughout the US 
and Canada who’ve been disciplined as a result of reports I’ve made to the 
appropriate administrators). He complained about this on a forum thread at his 
website, and one of his acolytes apparently took it on himself to post a 
version of my home address (easily findable online since I use my real name and 
the region I live in on my userpage, and in any event a close examination of my 
edits would probably narrow down the community I live in, since I have heavily 
edited and expanded the article, and it remains on my watchlist)  that was just 
incorrect enough to not be findable on Google. That person, or another, created 
a username with that address and, using it, inserted themselves into a 
talk-page discussion I was participating in. I later blocked the account and 
redacted the edits from the page. I can’t say I wasn’t a little unnerved by all 
this.

Daniel Case

P.S. I do think the real failure here was the church. They just gave out your 
phone number to some stranger who called? Without any apparent need for said 
stranger to use any [[social engineering]] skills? I would bring this up with 
the board of trustees or elders or whatever ... especially with this incident 
already having occurred, the church has serious liability exposure if it 
doesn’t make any policy changes before, say, this happens in the case of a 
stalker with much more malevolent intentions.
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