On 7/2/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
jayjg wrote:
On 7/2/07, James Farrar
<james.farrar(a)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.