On Nov 21, 2007 11:52 AM,
<joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote:
>
> Quoting jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com>om>:
>
> > On Nov 15, 2007 9:43 PM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
> >> William Pietri wrote:
> >> >Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> >> >> [...]As long as this silly idea refuses to die, neither can
> >> >> opposition to it.
> >> >>
> >> > I regret that I feel the same way.
> >>
> >> And I share Dan's and William's chagrin.
> >>
> >> Something I've been struck by: we need to learn or re-learn,
> >> for today's Wikipedia, how to form consensus. Back in the day
> >> I think we knew how to, but either we've forgotten, or the game
> >> has changed.
> >>
> >> A tiny minority of influential people on one side of a
> >> contentious issue can apparently keep it alive *forever*.
> >> We have to figure out how to settle these issues, and move on.
> >>
> >> I'm not a big player in any of these debates, but by way of
> >> example, I managed to do this in the case of spoiler warnings.
> >> I care almost as much about the spoiler warnings issue as the
> >> BADSITES issue. I could easily be one of the tedious cranks
> >> that Snowspinner was just complaining about. That spoiler
> >> warnings have been summarily eradicated is deeply wrong.
> >> But with apologies to Ken Arromdee, who I would have like to
> >> have supported in that fight, I decided I didn't care enough
> >> about the issue to keep arguing against the juggernaut that had
> >> somehow formed against it, so I turned my back and walked away.
> >>
> >> I'm not saying the solution is to walk away from things you care
> >> about. But the BADSITES issue clearly will not die; we've got
> >> people on both sides who haven't budged an inch in their positions
> >> (myself included) and who are apparently willing to trot out the
> >> same arguments in endless repetetition until the cows come home.
> >> We've all got to get off that treadmill somehow.
> >
> > I don't think that's accurate. It is only people who are against
> > BADSITES who continually trot it out so they can flail against it; it
> > is the convenient strawman it always was, since it was first created
> > as a strawman.The history of the proposed "alternative" to BADSITES,
> >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_harassment
> > , is also fascinating. It turns out that the two main authors
> > of the policy, BenB4 and Privatemusings, are banned sockpuppets. In
> > fact, 58% of the edits to the page are by banned editors, mostly
> > sockpuppets, another 18% are by an ip editor, and another 4% by the
> > people who most often bring up the BADSITES strawman, Alecmconroy and
> > Dtobias, for a total of 80%. Though the latter two didn't contribute
> > much to the actual writing, they certainly dominated the Talk: page -
> > Alec made 24 edits to the Talk: page and Dan made 162. So we have now
> > reached the point where policies are essentially being written by
> > banned editors, sockpuppets, IP editors, and people who oppose the
> > policy they are writing. And even that "alternative" has apparently
> > today been unilaterally rejected by a new IP editor:
> >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/86.148.219.194
> >
> > BADSITES has proven to be an extremely convenient way of distracting
> > attention from the real issues regarding offsite harassment and
> > non-encyclopedic links; I suspect it has worked even better than its
> > author ever dreamed it would.
>
> Jayjg this would be a nice story except for a few problems: 1) A
Tony Sidaway supported it strongly. See
Well, Mongo appeared to support it. (See his comments on the talk
page as well
as
). Mongo then went to [[WP:NPA]] and attempted to get nearly identical
language
in there where he was supported by Thuranx.