On 7/29/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
But is there anything to it? Or is it just nasty gossip? If you want to gossip, join the Navy.
There's a fine line to be trodden here. Certainly, we don't want or need to dignify wild rumors with any attention at all. But once a story "has legs" (and whether it deserves them or not), too-strenuous attempts to deny it only fuel the speculations that there *is* a cabal and a cover-up -- and those speculations can end up driving more long-term damage than the original, spurious accusation would have.
A single, simple statement on Slim's user or talk page, saying that the rumor is false, would be much better than all this rampant reverting by ElinorD, Jayjg, and Crum375. (And there may have been other reverters, sorry if I left you out, but evidently this issue has become so "serious" that [[User talk:SlimVirgin]] has had a bunch of its history deleted.)
There are some questions that remain, though. Like why would it be discussed on Wikipedia, along the lines of why discuss every lame hate site that ever put 'clopedia' after a grunt and spewed venom about some other race/religion or whatever on this list?
In what manner and for what purpose is it being discussed on Wikipedia? People's talk pages aren't their personal blogs. And article talk pages are to discuss articles. Is this news? What newspapers has it been reported in? Is it ever going to be real news?
Of course, Steve has an excellent point in that deleting every mention of it is drawing more attention to the incident than it merits. I don't even know what slashdot is, and now the need to delete it everywhere has piqued my curiosity.
Trying to shut people up often backfires, because those doing it can reach a point where they're not evaluating what is going on to the detriment of their success at stopping the topic. The idea behind shutting someone up is to stop the talk, and calling a greater amount of attention to your attempt to shut them up, than was ever given to the talkers, just increases the gossip, it doesn't stop anything.
KP