On 4/25/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
I was being "unnecessarily inflammatory" according to Steve Bennett for saying that some people have a problem with people linking to sites they don't like. A couple of others have already referred to the big WP:BADSITES debate, including the edit warring, threats, accusations of WP:POINT, and so on that attended the addition and removal of links to sites used to illustrate why sometimes linking to such sites makes sense. Now, yet another conflict has broken out along those lines.
This week, Wikipedia Signpost has an article about the latest developments in the Daniel Brandt flap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-04- 23/Brandt_unblock
The original version, by Michael Snow, included a link to Brandt's Wikipedia Watch site, which was relevant to the article because it was in fact being discussed there.
Michaelas10 then removed the link, using "Attack site" as his edit summary.
Then, SqueakBox reinstated it, saying that [[WP:BADSITES]] is not policy.
Musical Linguist then reverted that, and there was one more round of edit warring by these last two users, before it settled to its current state of not having the link.
Musical Linguist also left a warning message threatening to block SqueakBox, which he deleted from his talk page.
Some of the commentary referred to "enforcing the MONGO ArbCom decision", and it's a perfect example of why I consider that decision, at least the part of it that imposed a ban on linking to "attack sites", was a bad idea.
I am honestly speechless. Since when was it permissible to enforce a proposed policy? In any other day and age, those responsible would have been ticked off appropriately. It seems that the Mongo judgment may be being stretched a little here; perhaps it would be appropriate for the Arbcom to clarify their judgment?
Johnleemk