On 9/20/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote
From: Daniel R. Tobias The purpose of that list is to prevent spamming, such as the insertion of commercial links where they don't belong. It applies only to a very narrow category of sites that are being actively inserted irrelevantly and have no useful purpose, such as ads for "herbal Viagra". It is a gross abuse of the spam blacklist to include sites that are disliked for political or personal reasons and are not otherwise being spammed.
That is not the basis on which sites are banned. They are banned because they scapegoat Wikipedia editors and administrators. SlimVirgin is not to blame for the imaginary failures of Wikipedia; she, and people like her are responsible for our real success. Scapegoating her gets us absolutely nowhere.
Let's try and clariy this. The spam blacklist is Meta business, with some sort of tweaked version that applies to enWP. I was looking at the pages on Meta. The guidelines could be described as terse; in fact, any terser and they'd be the smile on the Cheshire cat. There is a page on Meta for discussions of inclusions on the spamlist. Not very active, for a supposedly contentious area.
Because this is on Meta, presumably, rather than on the over-heated pages of enWP, there seems to be a minimal process for additions. I don't see the basis of 'commercial' in what Daniel writes (unless spam is by definition 'commercial'). The policy, such as it is, seems directed against links for which hand removal would be too much work. I'm not sure in what sense Fred means 'banned' here, but let's assume this is some notion of enWP blacklist, regulated by the ArbCom. Now, are Fred and Daniel talking past each other, or is this an actual debate about policy? And if so, where is this policy located (which site)?
Charles
The relevant ArbCom case's proposed outcomes are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Attack_sites... It includes blocking and banning anyone who links to attack sites, and prohibiting links to them. It does not really do a good job of defining what an attack site is. People tend to read it anywhere from a restrictive "Well, ED has zero signal-noise anyhow, so there's never any good cause to link to it" to a liberal "Don't link to the internet".
Right now the community gets it right anyhow. The MONGO ruling has created havoc, but we've managed to work through it anyhow. A second ruling, especially if ArbCom continues on the path its on, will probably create additional havoc. I trust the community to work through it, since we're already doing a good job.
To be perfectly frank, not linking Wikipedia Watch from the article on it will just give it more traffic, not less, just like labelling a button "Do not push" will get it pushed more often, not less.
As for the rest of it ... there have been a lot of unilateral actions on the badsites front. It's not realistic to rule anything out, regardless.
WilyD