Fred Bauder wrote:
However, John, including this link on our mailing
list,
or linking to it from within Wikipedia is quite mischievous.
On the one hand, yes, he's beating a dead horse. [1] But on the
other hand, he's making a perfectly valid point, so if you want
to call him mischievous for doing so, I guess I have to call you,
I don't know, churlish for doing so.
Do you believe that pile of crap? Or feel drawing
attention to
it somehow aids Wikipedia?
Fred, you're a smart guy, so I can't understand why you keep
beating your same dead horse and willfully missing the point.
The point is not that it is or isn't a steaming pile of crap.
The point is not that mentioning it "draws attention" to it.
The point *is* that the steaming piles of crap are out there
and that they don't go away if we ignore them. The point is
that protecting our editors from harm is impossible (or is
self-defeating if we insist on trying) if we hold that editors
are harmed by mere mentions of steaming piles of crap that (a)
are out there and (b) everybody else knows about. The point is
that the knee-jerk "attack sites bad, bans on attack sites good"
argument is not nearly so clear-cut as its proponents would like
to make it.
[1. John's beaten horse is not dead because it's wrong -- I for
one agree with it wholeheartedly -- but rather because something
functionally equivalent to BADSITES still has enough support
among people who matter that it's going to be around, in some
form, for the foreseeable future. I console myself with the
knowledge that "the foreseeable future" on Wikipedia is not very
long.]