Fred Bauder wrote:
However, John, including this link on our mailing list, or linking to it from within Wikipedia is quite mischievous.
On the one hand, yes, he's beating a dead horse. [1] But on the other hand, he's making a perfectly valid point, so if you want to call him mischievous for doing so, I guess I have to call you, I don't know, churlish for doing so.
Do you believe that pile of crap? Or feel drawing attention to it somehow aids Wikipedia?
Fred, you're a smart guy, so I can't understand why you keep beating your same dead horse and willfully missing the point. The point is not that it is or isn't a steaming pile of crap. The point is not that mentioning it "draws attention" to it. The point *is* that the steaming piles of crap are out there and that they don't go away if we ignore them. The point is that protecting our editors from harm is impossible (or is self-defeating if we insist on trying) if we hold that editors are harmed by mere mentions of steaming piles of crap that (a) are out there and (b) everybody else knows about. The point is that the knee-jerk "attack sites bad, bans on attack sites good" argument is not nearly so clear-cut as its proponents would like to make it.
[1. John's beaten horse is not dead because it's wrong -- I for one agree with it wholeheartedly -- but rather because something functionally equivalent to BADSITES still has enough support among people who matter that it's going to be around, in some form, for the foreseeable future. I console myself with the knowledge that "the foreseeable future" on Wikipedia is not very long.]