jayjg wrote:
On Nov 21, 2007 8:02 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
What we truly do not need... is the notion that off-wiki harassment of a Wikipedia editor is such an uber-mortal sin that we should summarily ban all links to the harassing page and/or the harassing site and/or sites that link to the harassing page or the harassing site. These extreme sanctions, which involve trampling on various other cherished Wikipedia policies and ideals, are what people were so upset about with BADSITES. But the fact that people keep talking about (and exercising) similarly extreme sanctions is why BADSITES, despite protestations to the contrary, is still alive, whether under that name or some other.
The defenders of the policies-they-don't-want-called-BADSITES keep claiming that their policies are not BADSITES, and that BADSITES is dead...
Who on earth are you talking about here? I hope not me...
What on earth are you being so defensive about?
Is there someone in particular you are referring to?
No one person, no.
I was talking about anyone who advocates things like blanket bans of links to "attack sites". Who advocates removal of otherwise-useful links because the linked-to page (or site) happens to contain something which is construed as being harassing of Wikipedians. Who holds that "supporting our editors and protecting them from harm" requires sanitizing the website so that nothing can be seen which could upset an aggrieved editor, or cause anyone else to ask an aggrieved editor an uncomfortable question. I was talking about the notion that "off-wiki harassment of a Wikipedia editor is such an uber-mortal sin" that we must necessarily adopt "extreme sanctions which involve trampling on various other cherished Wikipedia policies and ideals". I was talking about anyone who doth protest too much. :-)
In short, I was talking about anyone who advocates removing links not because they attack a Wikipedia editor, but because they secondarily or tertiarily or hypothetically attack a Wikipedia editor. Those are the aspects that I didn't like about that old, dead, proposed policy, but which when I see advocated anew make me wonder whether the old policy perhaps isn't all dead, after all.
Several people (perhaps you're one of them; I don't try to keep track) seem to have a hard time with abstract arguments. They insist on names and diffs, and if the names and diffs are not provided, they suggest that the abstractly-described problem might not exist. But if the names and diffs *are* provided, either the namer is accused of having attacked the named, or else the discussion gets completely sidetracked onto the specifics of the named incident, resulting in a conclusion either that the named person didn't do anything wrong, or did something excusably wrong, or did something wrong but for an unrelated reason, or did something wrong which they've apologized for and which won't happen again. In any case, the abstract argument (but the one which would have mattered going forward) is forgotten.
But if you insist, I was thinking of people like the ones who defended the recent removal of links to Michael Moore's home page, or the recent removal of links to what's-his-name's blog (the one that linked to something about a conspiracy involving a Wikipedia editor and MI5).
And if you really insist, I was thinking specifically of Fred Bauder and either you or JzG. But I've only recently discovered that I had you and JzG completely conflated in my head, so I can't be sure which it was.