On 7/2/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
jayjg wrote:
On 7/2/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
If I'm being silly, it's only because such a blanket ban is silly.
Define "blanket ban".
Several of the people involved in the debate over WP:NPA -- specifically its "attack sites" section -- appear to be in favor of banning all links from Wikipedia to those "attack sites". They make no distinction between links from article space versus project or talk space, nor between links which are intended to serve as attacks and links which are merely involved in commentary, or for reference. They insist on the retention of wording which has this interpretation; they continue to cite Arbcom's "MONGO decision" as if they wish to enshrine and more broadly apply that principle. They resist the introduction of more moderate wording such as "links to abusive external material which are placed with intent to offend or abuse are disallowed."
If the "attack sites" portion of WP:NPA merely banned links which serve as attacks (an interpretation utterly consistent with the rest of NPA), if it did not try to resurrect BADSITES by punitively banning all links to an unnamed (and unnamable) list of shunned sites, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it.
Look, let's start talking some sense now. ED, WR are attack sites, nothing more. They have no value whatsoever, and, unless under some extraordinarily unlikely circumstances, there's simply no reason to link to them. The MONGO case was clear (and correct) about this.
On the other hand, the number of sites like them are fairly small, and people are generally sensible about these things: no-one is going to extrapolate from that to saying "we can't link to the New York Times", and no-one is going to insist on a banning if there is some incredibly important reason why one must be linked to under some bizarre and unforeseen turn of events. Yes, it happened that one editor tried to treat a site as an "attack site" and most others didn't agree with him. However, his actions were quickly stopped, he apologized, and no real harm was done.
The hysteria-talk really must stop, it adds no value whatsoever.