John Lee wrote:
On 10/17/07, fredbaud@waterwiki.info fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Please don't republish personal attacks on other users.
[...] I guess we should lock up everyone who gathers evidence of personal attacks for evidence pages, since they've been linking to these by the shitload.
And this is a fine example of how I think the delete-all-links and do-not-speak-of approaches are at best self-defeating. And at worst eternal sources of arguments like this one.
One of our unifying characteristics is a big dose of "show me". Surprising claim? Show me the source. Hypothetical problem? Show me the actual problem. Someone's misbehaving? Show me where. It's a bedrock piece of our culture, and it's absolutely vital.
Those approaches systematically remove the community's ability to verify a problem. That means a continuous rolling argument about whether there indeed is a problem at all, and if so, how severe it is. Forever.
William