On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, David Gerard wrote:
My concern (which is a general one, not just specifically for this case) is about the danger of taking things stated in a short sentence as a principle in a specific arbitration case as being a complete and full interpretation of the entirety of Wikipedia policy on that issue, disallowing any nuance or complexity of interpretation.
The word for this is "excuse." It's quite difficult in ArbCom rulings not to accidentally craft a handy stick for the foolish to wield.
It's being done. How do we stop it?
It's now moved to [[Wikipedia:No_personal_attacks]]. There's quite a lot of bizarreness there; for instance, the current policy quotes the problematic ArbCom decision even though ArbCom can't make policy--and the opposite ArbCom decision saying that the remove personal attacks guideline is controversial has been described as if it only refers to on-wiki attacks, with the implication that removing links to on-wiki attacks is still controversial but removing links to attack sites is not.
Worse yet, this version of the page has been protected.
What can be done? We seem to have a case where a couple of users, including at least one admin, are insisting that there is consensus for removing links to attack sites unconditionally and regardless of any other circumstances. The lack of nuance or complexity of interpretation is exactly the problem here, and these people are so persistent that it is impossible to stop them without edit warring.