On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, David Gerard wrote:
My concern
(which is a general one, not just specifically for this
case) is about the danger of taking things stated in a short sentence
as a principle in a specific arbitration case as being a complete and
full interpretation of the entirety of Wikipedia policy on that issue,
disallowing any nuance or complexity of interpretation.
The word for this is
"excuse." It's quite difficult in ArbCom rulings
not to accidentally craft a handy stick for the foolish to wield.
It's being done. How do we stop it?
It's now moved to [[Wikipedia:No_personal_attacks]]. There's quite a
lot of bizarreness there; for instance, the current policy quotes the
problematic ArbCom decision even though ArbCom can't make policy--and the
opposite ArbCom decision saying that the remove personal attacks guideline is
controversial has been described as if it only refers to on-wiki attacks,
with the implication that removing links to on-wiki attacks is still
controversial but removing links to attack sites is not.
Worse yet, this version of the page has been protected.
What can be done? We seem to have a case where a couple of users, including at
least one admin, are insisting that there is consensus for removing links
to attack sites unconditionally and regardless of any other circumstances.
The lack of nuance or complexity of interpretation is exactly the problem
here, and these people are so persistent that it is impossible to stop them
without edit warring.