Scientolipedia - a temporary crisis October 2015!

Scientolipedia, a website for Fri-Scientologists, was taken down on Saturday, 31 October 2015. Update to the situation will be posted at the end of this article* and those who subscribe to the newsletter will be advised. This article concerns itself with the background to Scientolipedia, which was started in November 2011, and with communication more generally in the ex-Scientology context.

*November 11th: now online again. See end of article.

In the beginning of the 1980s there was a large-scale defection from the Church of Scientology. Independent Scientologists (a.k.a. Fri-Scientologists) became more numerous and bolder. Shortly afterwards Internet entered the scene and provided new and faster methods of communication between independent Scientologists.

Many sites were set up and different methods of communication on the Internet were tried out. There were and are sites devoted to one person's viewpoints (such as this one, Antology.info). There were others which allow discussion and different viewpoints and with these they varied a lot, perhaps one of the worst (in certain areas) is Ex Scientologist Message Board (see for example http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?40645-Scientolipedia-Org-received-a-DMCA-Takedown-Order-from-the-Church-of-Scientology&p=1068917&highlight=Scientolipedia#post1068917 where there are 25 pages with comments on this shutdown of the Scientolipedia site. There are positive sides to the ESMB. For example over a year I posted weekly major bits of The Pilot's posting to the Internet with very little interference. You can see this at http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?27983-The-Pilot-Excerpts-from-his-Writings . In this case the software is the same, but the tone of contributions is of a higher level -- knowing what you know of ARC, etc. can you see why there is this difference?

The Church of Scientology has a sort of reputation for not liking competition. They were and are not particularly pleased to have others Scientologist on the Internet and they have tried to take the sites down. Here is what Max Hauri stated to me in connection with the recent shutdown of the Scientolipedia site:

 " Obviously they have not done their "homework". Well, we are not hosted in the US, that would be the first big mistake. Second, we have chosen a host who does not back down, well my name is on the site with address (we pay good money for that.) We never heard anything but it seems that they tried several times to get our site down the same way as they did with Scientolipedia. From the moment we went online until they started to threaten us [indirectly] it took 13 month. I don't know what role it plays if it is "LRH copyrighted", I wonder if that is really relevant, maybe for a DMCA letter but in front of a real battle ... ?"

Max Hauri's site is at: http://ronsorg.ch/en/

The way the Church of Scientology has acted with Scientolipedia seems to me to be very covert and in that direction I'll digress a bit and tell you something that happened to me. I live in a block of flats and play the radio sometimes. One day I got a letter from a lawyer (the man who administers this block of flats) telling me that a neighbour had complained and if I continue to make such a noise I would be thrown out (he used legal terms!). The neighbour hadn't complained to me, and I can guess who he is but haven't been told. I regard that as low on the tone scale, associated with fear, he/she could have approached me first before going to the lawyer.

I asked the founder of Scientolipedia, Dave LeCroix, if the church contacted him about getting his site taken down. Here is what he replied:

About six weeks ago I received a call from a local, public Scientologist that I had known casually but hadn't talked to in over five years.
The call was surprising and I immediately knew he was calling on behalf of OSA. He rushed to get to the main point of his call - to meet me in person the next day at a local cigar store we both knew about. (These places offer large stocks of cigars in climate controlled rooms along with casual smoking areas - sort of a cigar pubs)
He made some lame comments about "My website" and alluded to his own personal LRH collectables and wanted to talk about that.
I refused to meet with him the following day and left it off on friendly terms.
Four days later, on a Wednesday night, he called again. (angling to get a Thursday stat for his handlers in OSA no doubt) This time he dropped the niceties and went straight to demanding we meet immediately and told me the website was breaking the law.
Again I remained friendly and declined his invitation.
That was the extent of it but was enough to alert me to the fact that Scientolipedia had stepped up a notch or two on the Church's priority list of targets and that I should increase my security precautions.

On Thursday evening 22 October Dave LeCroix received a letter by email from the firm which hosts the site Scientolipedia. Here it is in my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qv4csnr1hudekii/DMCA_letter_to_Scientolipedia_ISP.pdf?dl=0.

The Scientolipedia service provider (ISP) is called HostGator, so there is no direct communication from the church or even their lawyer to Dave LeCroix.

If you want to donate towards getting this site up and running more permanently you can do so by going to: http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=2115c26efc03ae5448527ff7d&id=caedda2b95

A Broad Look

Communication is a Good Thing, but there are certain factors that are destructive to good communication. These are dealt with in the Scientology literature and three of the main destructive actions are:

• overloading a communication line,

• adding irrelevant information,

• adding entheta

Observing the 25 page example I gave you a link to earlier on, you will possibly see examples of all these in the first few pages. You will find other things which detract from the usability of those pages.

Destructive to communication actions can occur on Internet lists and Internet forums. They can be handled by moderation, the act of having someone, called a moderator, vetting all or some contributions and deleting them when violating one of these rules. Vetting contributions is a demanding task. People whose contributions you delete are seldom happy about it and you can also get trouble from spectators. I have some experience in this because for some years I ran a list we called Ivy-subscribers. It was limited to people who had paid a fair amount of money for the magazine International Viewpoints, and the fact the people had to pay did cut out some people who were what you might call spam-artists. We also had the rule that any subject was okay so long as it would be of interest to people who subscribe to the magazine International Viewpoints, so that ruled out the necessity to decide whether a specific thing was on topic or not (a problem many moderators have). I had some simple rules aim to cut out "negative" communications. These I rarely had to enforce but there was an occasion when I took Alan Walter off the list for a period (the only method I had with the technology of that time) because he made a rude remark about another member ("you are an idiot" sort of thing) after being warned not to do so. Since I was probably at fear that time it took good deal of courage to do! You can see some of the contributions made to that list at: http://articles.ivymag.org/articles.html.

But a better system is needed, for contributing is high on the Scientology Havingness Scale ("Contribute to" being third-down, junior to "Create" and "Responsible for (willing to control)" according to Scientology 0-8). It is therefore wise to let people contribute and discuss, and yet have an area which is positive, interesting, and attractive so that those interested in the subject feel encouraged to read and possibly contribute.

With the arrival of the Internet and the possibility of letting people contribute we have seen a very interesting change in encyclopedias. 

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a large and somewhat complex area. It has taken me a little while to get a glimmering of the inner workings of it, it's such a large thing. And it should be remembered that it is an encyclopaedia rather than a learned treatise on a single area. It's aimed at the general reader, not the reader interested in a specific subject.

Of course when I started looking at it my specific interest was the area of Scientology. What I found was interesting. There is an area devoted to Scientology. It's fairly large. I understand that it has had trouble with the Church of Scientology going in and changing everything (or at least a lot) so as to make it reflect Scientology's view of Scientology, so special steps were taken with regard to that.

If you do not know Wikipedia, here is a link to their main page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. They put a new featured article up there every day. In the search box in the upper right-hand corner you can put any subject you're interested in, and probably get a Wikipedia article on it.

I have a login to Wikipedia and have created my own user page (which I rather suspect nobody has seen!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AntonyAPhillips. If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Scientology/publicwatchlist you will find a list of articles in Wikipedia which in some way have something to do with Scientology. You can click on any name there and see the article and incidentally you will be able to see, if you press the item fairly near the top on the right View History you will be able to examine the changes that have been made to that article. If you press on the left the item marked Talk, you will be able to see comments people have made about the contribution and suggestions for changing it, etc.

Wikipedia is an interesting site. You can spend hours on it, if you have hours to spare, and find all sorts of interesting things. However it is an encyclopaedia, and intended for the general reader but it does contain a lot of data and is very helpful for education in various subjects, in that direction very useful for third world countries. For the use of people who have a deeper interest in Scientology particularly in studying it, especially the technical side and also the history again especially on the technical side something else is needed.

And something else has been provided, for the computer programming which has made Wikipedia possible has been adapted for use with smaller groups which may be differently oriented with regard to communication needs, so you have a number of different wikis available through the net. A list of a number of them can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis . In particular there is a group of wikis associated with the Scouting movement in different language areas.

Scientolipedia

Dave LeCroix saw this opportunity for giving independent Scientologists (and ex-Scientologists), this possibility, a few years ago and when he found out nobody else was working on it, he did. That's the site that the "Church" has got (coerced) the firm which hosts the site for Scientolipedia to remove.

We, ex- and Independent Scientologists, are a suppressed group. We have inherited from Ron Hubbard (or perhaps you could say via L. Ron Hubbard) a good deal of knowledge concerning therapy, personal betterment, group organisation and philosophy, and a somewhat suppressive group is impeding our communicating about it claiming it to be secret spiritual/religious Scriptures. Are we willing to tolerate this? Do your bit to resist this by donating to the fund to maintain Scientolipedia and keep it available as part of the independent Scientology communication network. Donate at: http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=2115c26efc03ae5448527ff7d&id=caedda2b95.

As a small aside, in the last 10 years I have not heard of the church (so-called) taking action in a similar way (or perhaps more overtly) to this action against Independents quietly going about their business using the legacy that L Ron Hubbard left us. It looks like they find Scientolipedia to be a large threat to the monopoly which they try to make. I don't by any means try to follow everything going on in the free field, so if you have heard of anything of this nature, especially so severe, I'd appreciate it if you would let me know at: ant.phillips@post8.tele.dk .

The following was written by David LeCroix in the Facebook Scientolipedia group, on third of November 2015.

The Virtual Global Org

I was recently asked "when was Scientolipedia first started?" and so I shared a link from 2010 where I first outlined the idea. 

At that time I hoped others would see how brilliant the idea was and run with it. haha

It languished for a year with no one stepping forward to do it so I created this group on FB to generate some interest and then started mocking up the website.

The website was originally named "The Virtual Global Org" at virtualglobalorg.com (defunct)
I quickly realized the name did not communicate what the site was about and since it was unlikely the "Indies", being RTC/OSA/SO, would promote an idea they didn't think of or control, it's growth would have to be a grass-roots action and a name people would instantly relate to was critical.(some might even remember a survey I conducted for a name)
So I scrapped the work on the VGO website and started building 

I quickly realized the name did not communicate what the site was about and since it was unlikely the "Indies", being RTC/OSA/SO, would promote an idea they didn't think of or control, it's growth would have to be a grass-roots action and a name people would instantly relate to was critical.(some might even remember a survey I conducted for a name)

So I scrapped the work on the VGO website and started building Scientolipedia.org. (a bit of a tongue-twister but communicates better nonetheless)

The real point of this post is that from the very beginning I recognized the Scientology field would benefit from a very diverse and flexible web platform.

Knowing enough about web technologies to be dangerous, I decided on the semantic wiki as the best solution.

Never mind that it was a solution to problems few were aware existed or if they were, hadn't put forth any proposals to address them - just another in a long list of challenges we faced.

The biggest problem was to get people to contribute to the thing even though Internet applications were foreign and incomprehensible to them to a large degree.

The majority of our "field" did not grow up using the Internet and for many of them, using email was just starting to feel comfortable...let alone creating and editing pages on a wiki. lol

I see people make suggestions about things we aught to do to "organize" the field or "get admin in" or "create an online org" or "set up training over Skype" or, or, or, or....

But the thing that is always omitted is the pesky detail of exactly HOW does one do those things?

Some seem to expect it will be as easy as posting a comment on a blog or in a Facebook group without having any idea about the massive amount of work that goes into creating a versatile web application such as we've created with Scientolipedia.org.

The bottom line is that we do have some amazing web technologies available that can and should be adapted towards better dissemination, training and expansion of the "field"

The Virtual Global Org/Scientolipedia.org project has demonstrated some great possibilities in that direction - with much, much more yet to be done

The following site is quoted by Dave on the Facebook page: http://freeheber.com/index.php?title=Break_the_Monopoly

Scientolipedia is alive again. For the moment it is on "read-only" mode in order to facilitate some reorganisation.

Update

On November 9, 2015, Scientolipedia's web host notified the site owner(s):

"The 10 business days required by the DMCA have elapsed and we have yet to receive notice of a filed injunction against the restoration of this content. The restrictions on this domain have been removed at this time. We will notify you should this change."

Update on November 12, 2015

The site is now open to contributions (editable) and I am just adding: 

Dianetics: Fifty Years Later,

an article by now deceased Don Maier

 

 The Web page is at: http://scientolipedia.org/info/Main_Page

The above article is at:http://scientolipedia.org/info/Dianetics:_Fifty_Years_Later 

Update on November 29, 2015

Scientolipedia is now located physically outside of the USA.

Comment from Ant: so far as I know, and I have checked a little though I am not very up in all that happens on the Internet, this is the only example in recent years of the church attempting to take down a site, and it looks pretty weak! The church has been very vicious in the past, perhaps it still is when a large number of people breakaway, as happened in South Africa. My suspicion is that its reputation of viciousness depends on rumour and past events still recorded on the Internet. When you see something about its viciousness on the Internet my advice would be to check out when it was.