On 5/5/07, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
G'day Todd,
There's a -tremendous- difference between tolerating spam and leaving it in an article where it's appropriate. I'm 100% for stopping any spamming campaign. But if someone were spamming a link to the NYT with "SUBSCRIBE TO THE NYT TODAY!", we wouldn't spam-blacklist it, because there are legitimate uses. In this case, there's a legitimate use. And
No, we wouldn't spam-blacklist it because there are better alternatives available to us --- like blocking the spammer (singular). If a mass effort occurred, I'm sure the /New York Times/ website *would* be added to the blacklist. This would mean that the /New York Times/ could not be referred to in the future, and we could not make changes to existing articles containing links to the website unless we removed the link as part of our edit.
That would be a Bad Thing, but bearable for a brief period. We have the capacity, and I think the will, to do it, if spammers became enough of a nuisance to make it necessary (not that I want to encourage you to stuff beans up your nose). By comparison, we could go a week or month without publishing the HD-DVD key, while standing on our collective heads.
the last I checked, child porn wasn't being printed in everything from Wired to the New York Times.
You seem to be saying that it would be okay to print child porn if the /New York Times/ included a sample in a series on the topic.
And yes, we -can- cover the topic without using the number, in the same way we -could- cover the speed of light without putting what it is. But either one would be incomplete. Only one, however, involves caving to bullies.
Fuck "caving to the bullies". That is not, and should not be, a factor in our editorial process: "Let's see, can we stick it to The Man by doing this? Cool, discussion over, we'll do it."
I've seen that too often on Wikipedia. If we include the string it must be *only* because it improves the article to have it there --- as David has argued --- and not because The Man wants us to remove it --- as you have argued. I should have thought this obvious to anyone interested in seeing this encyclopaedia flourish.
-- Mark Gallagher "'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend."
- P G Wodehouse, /Carry On, Jeeves/
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If you'll look farther up, I've argued the exact same thing. However, specificity is always an improvement. In any other case, when a numeric value is germane to an article's subject, be that the population of a country at its last census, the number of atoms in one mole, or the memory capacity of the original Commodore 64, we specify that numeric value. There's nothing about "sticking it to the Man" here. If anyone wants to try that, why? It's already been done. "The Man" can't get any more stuck as it is, so to speak.
That being said, there -is- a very legitimate issue of maintaining editorial and academic integrity, by being unafraid to publish specifics, even if someone really, really doesn't like thse specifics, so long as the specifics they don't like can indeed be well-sourced.
Don't straw man me. I've never argued that the string should be there -only- because someone wants it removed. I've argued that the string should be there -despite the fact- that someone wants it removed. That's a critical distinction.