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

[Fred Bauder]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Slim Virgin [mailto:slimvirgin at gmail.com]
>Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 01:13 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Another conflict regarding linking to "attack sites"
>
>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

I think the whole thing was phony. It served as a platform for them, so they could argue their points.

Fred