[WikiEN-l] Another conflict regarding linking to "attack sites"

[Slim Virgin]

On 4/26/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/25/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Two of the arbitrators involved in that decision (Fred and Jay)
> > confirmed during a recent request for clarification that the rulings
> > applied to any attack site, not just to ED ...

> In my personal view, things in the 'Principles' or 'Findings of fact'
> sections in an arbitration case are not remedies.  I am uncomfortable
> with people taking things said in that section as commands from the
> arbitration committee to do anything.  If we wanted to explicitly rule
> that something should be done, it would be in 'Remedies' or
> 'Enforcement'.
>
> In a sense, what we are saying there is that we believe that existing
> policy, precedent and/or common sense already contain those things.
> In this case, six Arbitrators considered not linking to attack sites
> as already covered by de facto policy.
>
> The arbcom is a bad way to make new policy, since there are only a
> small number of us.  We attempt to interpret existing policy for
> circumstances not explicitly considered by those policies, however.
>
I agree, but in this case, as you say, the removal of links to attack
sites was seen by the ArbCom, and by many if not most administrators,
as de facto policy, so I see no harm in creating a policy page to
reflect that. Policy is supposed to reflect best practise.

Having said that, the BADSITES proposal was probably unnecessary, and
it attracted the attention of editors who want to be able to link to
those sites because they post on them, which led to a lot of pointless
fighting. I think it's a better idea to have a sentence or two about
attack sites in NPA or the blocking policy.

Sarah