On 17 Oct 2007 at 10:26:47 -0400, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu wrote:
Quoting John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com>om>:
I'm very worried that this means I can't
link to an attack site to make fun
of it, as I did with Brandft's hive mind. (I was listed on it, so I thought
it'd make a good userbox joke - gosh, I feel so old.) This makes no
distinction between intent and actual action - [[mens rea]] for the legal
nerds out there. In real life, the law sometimes cannot draw a good
distinction between intent and the act itself, but in Wikipedia, we usually
can. We should be banning the usage of links for the express purpose of
harassing or outing editors; not banning links which *might* conceivably be
used in a context to harass editors simply because of their content.
I'm inclined to agree. I forgot also that we had fun little threads
occasionally
when people got stuck on Hivemind. JzG announced his placement on Hivemind.
However, an occasional humorous thread being curtailed seems like a
minor price
to pay.
That, in fact, is how I got dragged into the whole BADSITES issue in
the first place, since I was one of those who liked to make fun of
the silly stuff that got said in those sites, with links, and I also
at one point was featured in both Brandt's Hivemind and Merkey's
MerkeyLaw, and proudly linked to them on my user page for it. I
resented a policy that told me I couldn't do what I regarded as
harmless diversion.
In the greater scheme of things, this is probably a "minor price to
pay" as noted above, but in terms of the harm done to the general
culture of Wikipedia (by not only BADSITES itself, but by the entire
mindset behind it and all its other manifestations), where the entire
field of discussion gets riddled with landmines, tripwires, and
political third rails that one must avoid, the harm is more than
minor in my opinion. It's similar to the pernicious harm to academia
caused by the Political Correctness movement, where students and
faculty are afraid to speak freely for fear of offending some
minority group.
--
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