[WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote

> >From: Daniel R. Tobias 
> >The purpose of that list is to prevent spamming, such as the 
> >insertion of commercial links where they don't belong. It applies 
> >only to a very narrow category of sites that are being actively 
> >inserted irrelevantly and have no useful purpose, such as ads for 
> >"herbal Viagra". It is a gross abuse of the spam blacklist to 
> >include sites that are disliked for political or personal reasons and 
> >are not otherwise being spammed.
 
> That is not the basis on which sites are banned. They are banned because they scapegoat Wikipedia editors and administrators. SlimVirgin is not to blame for the imaginary failures of Wikipedia; she, and people like her are responsible for our real success. Scapegoating her gets us absolutely nowhere.

Let's try and clariy this. The spam blacklist is Meta business, with some sort of tweaked version that applies to enWP. I was looking at the pages on Meta. The guidelines could be described as terse; in fact, any terser and they'd be the smile on the Cheshire cat. There is a page on Meta for discussions of inclusions on the spamlist. Not very active, for a supposedly contentious area. 

Because this is on Meta, presumably, rather than on the over-heated pages of enWP, there seems to be a minimal process for additions. I don't see the basis of 'commercial' in what Daniel writes (unless spam is by definition 'commercial'). The policy, such as it is, seems directed against links for which hand removal would be too much work. I'm not sure in what sense Fred means 'banned' here, but let's assume this is some notion of enWP blacklist, regulated by the ArbCom. Now, are Fred and Daniel talking past each other, or is this an actual debate about policy? And if so, where is this policy located (which site)?

Charles

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