On 11/21/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
What is absolutely clear here - *absolutely* clear - is that we were deliberately trolled by Wikipedia Review. And a major part of the success of that trolling was: you, I'm afraid. Your consistent and persistent assertion that any removal of any link was necessarily BADSITES, the fact that even now you are raising BADSITES despite numerous attempts by others to move on from that, this is what makes a silly mistake into a drama. As Jayjg noted above, it's the reinsertion as ZOMG! CENSORSHIP! NO BADSITES! that usually starts the whole festival of stupid.
Well, yeah: the only thing that makes it controversial, obviously, is the controversy, for which it takes two to tango. Please accept 50% of the blame.
As for why *I* didn't put the text or link in (since after all I was the one who put in the timeline that was the context for all this): It' because I felt-- and still feel-- that you cannot be trusted.
By "you" I mean all the admins on the side of erasing these links. Based upon threats I received in earlier rounds, I assumed that if I provided citations for the timeline, one of them would take advantage of the lapse and block/ban me. I gave enough information to find the referenced material, in case someone wanted to check up on it or read the material for themselves, so the lack of actual links wasn't an issue for me anyway, though the irony of not being able to provide them was not lost on me at all. If someone wanted to link to them, that was fine by me; without sufficient references, accusations about what is on websites are hearsay and of no real merit, and I had no problem with the links being there. So if one of the targets/victims of administrative wrath wanted to take up a new account and put the links in, I didn't (and still do not) care. The other side of the coin is that your faction was blatantly trying to keep people from evaluating the matter for themselves, to the point where the WR "trolls" could hardly err in accusing you of a cover-up!
And the flip side is that Will Beback was approximately as guilty of trolling in that specific case. I mean, hell, if you can attribute motives, so can I: I can concoct a theory of how dredging up a deeply buried 3 week old blog comment was really s scheme to rile up the BADSITES opponents and discredit them. Upon turning down the paranoia to a more realistic level, I contend that he was absolutely guilty of dragging an off-Wiki spat with TNH back into WIkipedia.
One of the things you seem to miss, Guy, is that I (and I'm pretty sure that Dan holds the same opinion) don't really care about the running vendetta between Wikipedia Review and and The Cabal. At least, not as to the issues behind it. The thing that's annoying us is that The Vendetta keeps causing collateral damage in other parts of Wikipedia that don't have anything to do with the topics that started the whole rucus. It is the basis of the tactic of avoiding confronting the abstract principles of the matter by stirring up controversy about the "trolls" whenever one of those principles comes to the fore of the discussion. The various detractors keep getting hit with personal attacks (in this case, the insinuation that Dan is too thick to catch on the Real Motives) which keep shifting around when previous versions (e.g. the more forthright but equally dubious claim that Dan and I are partisans specifically acting as defenders of WR itself) become to obviously implausible.
To my mind, this business of "having" to know the history of the conflict is the root of the problem. If the history has to be known, then the whole thing is about institutionalizing the conflict even to the point of collateral damage. I think the issue would go away entirely if the history were compeltely forgotten.