On 7/2/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I wish people would stop these hyperbolic slippery
slopes. The NYT has
not "outed" any Wikipedia editor. The only sites that shouldn't be
linked to are those that make a *habit* of outing people, and the only
people who are warned they might be blocked (or who are blocked) are
the ones doing it deliberately and disruptively, as in "Oh, is THIS
one of the naughty ones?" And "Ooooh, what about this? Aren't I
awful?"
The flip side of this, of course, is that there's no real need to make
this judgement, at least in this particular case. Regardless of
whether WR is covered by the MONGO ruling (it's not explicitly named,
and we've sort of waffled back and forth on the issue for some time
now): why exactly do we need to link to it? For our purposes, it's
not a reliable source; we don't add links to random websites -- even
*interesting* random websites -- in the same way we don't add links to
tabloids. If we just enforce the existing policy on external links,
the problem essentially goes away.
Kirill