On 8/27/07, Frank Bellowes fbellowes@gmail.com wrote:
It would be petulant for us to remove the link to Moore's site. In any case, the problem seems to be that one editor is in a COI because he is employed by the pharmaceutical industry that Moore is targeting.
On 8/26/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/24/07, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
A clear violation of [[WP:NPA#External links]]. Just asking nicely is likely to fail. That link should be removed from wikipedia until the attack is removed from the website.
Crockspot
So, we should not link the official website of a notable person, just because that notable person said some not-nice things about an editor? People like Jayjg were saying "Oh, this wouldn't happen - this is clearly not covered by the policy, all you need to do is use some common sense." Common sense is apparently not so common.
(Oh, yes, and should we remove all citations to michaelmoore.com pages in our articles because it is now apparently an "attack site"?)
When there is a trade-off between protecting one of us, and the quality of our encyclopaedia, which ought to come first? I suspect this disagreement is really intractable because it is a question of values. It is impossible to objectively answer this question.
When attacked, some people's response is to demand that all links to the attack be removed. When I appeared on Hivemind, my response was to link to it - from a userbox, no less. These different responses occur not because some people see the logic and some people don't, but because different people have a different way of applying the same logic.
If you ask me, the only way we'll ever put this debate to rest is if we have some leadership which can push something through. Remember, the only reason many think this policy was/is warranted was a vague edict of the arbcom's.
Of course, I am doubtful we will see much leadership on this question. It's too hot-button an issue. It will probably be left to burn out on its own, pissing off a lot of editors on both sides in the process. I'm not sure if that's what anyone wants, but that's what'll probably happen.
...true, THF has a COI and was using his editorial powers in such an abusive manner as removing trolling comments like "Michael Moore is a fat ass" from the articles...
I've looked at what THF did. THF has nothing to apologize for, as far as I can tell. Moore should be thanking him for removing the vandalism off his pages.
We can't insist that life be fair, but we can look into acusations of unfairness and identify when they have no evident factual basis.