On 5/31/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/31/07, Blu Aardvark jeffrey.latham@gmail.com wrote:
jayjg wrote:
The purpose of BADSITES was, in general, to ensure that any policy like BADSITES would never be passed, and in particular to insure that links to WR would not be removed from Wikipedia.
This is an interesting argument, which, although repeated numerous times, has absolutely zero evidence to back it up. The argument seems to go, "BADSITES didn't go the way we wanted it to, so it *must* have been launched by a disruptive user with the intent to invoke the opposite reaction."
No that's the straw man version of the argument. You know the difference, so please stop doing that.
Well, it fits the history very well. At the time, the supporters of bans to those links took the proposal seriously and defended it. When it became clear that it wasn't going to reach consensus, the action moved to NPA when someone suggested that a cut down version more properly belonged there. Then SlimVirgin started asking about it in RfAs. I don't see any real difference in what was proposed at each of the steps along the way; the terms of the argument have remained about the same.
The allegations about DennyColt, however, are an innovation. I'm willing to believe that he was not a willing tool/puppet of SlimVirgin et al., but nobody has presented anything more than weak supposition that he might have created his essay/policy/proposal to be provocative. It seems to me more likely that he was an independent agent.
At any rate, the terms of the discussion in the large have also remained essentially constant. Every argument that has been advanced here against WR was advanced earlier in the discussion about the failed proposal.