On Wed, 30 May 2007, Slim Virgin wrote:
The problem with that, Joe, is that some members of the "community" who've been particularly vocal on the linking issue are regular posters to Wikipedia Review. Mango, for example, posts as Papaya. Should the people who keep these sites going be the ones to decide our policy on linking to them?
Well, that makes about as much sense as rhetorically asking whether the people whom these sites criticize should be deciding our policy on linking to them.
I'm not THAT willing to defend WR. It's not all that good, a lot of the time, but it also isn't as bad as various people keep claiming. But nobody has come up with a formula that hasn't been an open invitation to erase links to all manner of criticism, because there's always someone for whom "criticism" = "personal attack". Now Encyclopedia Dramatica: I can see just semi-mechanically deleting links to it. But it's a matter of degree.