[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[The Mangoe]

On 5/31/07, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/31/07, Blu Aardvark <jeffrey.latham at gmail.com> wrote:
> > jayjg wrote:
> > > The purpose of BADSITES was, in general, to ensure that any policy
> > > like BADSITES would never be passed, and in particular to insure that
> > > links to WR would not be removed from Wikipedia.

> > This is an interesting argument, which, although repeated numerous
> > times, has absolutely zero evidence to back it up. The argument seems to
> > go, "BADSITES didn't go the way we wanted it to, so it *must* have been
> > launched by a disruptive user with the intent to invoke the opposite
> > reaction."

> No that's the straw man version of the argument. You know the
> difference, so please stop doing that.

Well, it fits the history very well. At the time, the supporters of
bans to those links took the proposal seriously and defended it. When
it became clear that it wasn't going to reach consensus, the action
moved to NPA when someone suggested that a cut down version more
properly belonged there. Then SlimVirgin started asking about it in
RfAs. I don't see any real difference in what was proposed at each of
the steps along the way; the terms of the argument have remained about
the same.

The allegations about DennyColt, however, are an innovation. I'm
willing to believe that he was not a willing tool/puppet of SlimVirgin
et al., but nobody has presented anything more than weak supposition
that he might have created his essay/policy/proposal to be
provocative. It seems to me more likely that he was an independent
agent.

At any rate, the terms of the discussion in the large have also
remained essentially constant. Every argument that has been advanced
here against WR was advanced earlier in the discussion about the
failed proposal.