G'day Mangoe,
On 5/31/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Contriving an "indirect" personal attack against another editor, in the form of a link to an off-wiki site which makes such an attack, is tantamount to a direct personal attack and is likewise disallowed.I disagree. People who follow links out of Wikipedia ought to understand that those sites aren't going to play by Wikipedia's rules, and therefore may be more rough-and-tumble (or differently rough-and-tumble) than Wikipedia is. A bare link to WR with no explanation isn't a personal attack. Period. Linking to it in the context of telling someone on Wikipedia to find some dirt on another editor may be an attack-- it's a bit of a grey area, since if the information is true and germane, it cannot be construed to be the kind of response that NPA is directed against.
Linking to an attack site is not, eo ipso, a personal attack. However, if I say on WR, "Mangoe is a dickhead", then mosey on over to your talkpage and say, "Psst, Mangoe, have a butcher's at this," and link to my attack, I'd have to do some pretty fancy tap-dancing to explain why I wasn't attacking you. Certainly I'd have to do better than "well, he clicked a link to WR, he should have known Wikipedia rules don't apply there," because that is bollocks.
The thing is that none of the controversial cases since the beginning of April have involved this kind of insinuation. This is definitely a place for AGF, whereas it seems to me that part of the subtext of this is that we are supposed to be getting the message that linking to (or for that matter, participating on) WR is prima facie evidence of malign intent.
A rebuttable presumption, perhaps?
I don't think linking to attack sites should be outright banned. I *do* think that anyone linking to one needs to have a bloody good reason (several have been elucidated in this thread).
WR has a deserved poor reputation. If you choose to post to a forum such as WR[0] you do so with the knowledge that it will be difficult for Wikipedians to accept your bona fides. I've just taken a look at the MONGO RfAr again, and while there's a couple of things there I find iffy[1], I think the section headed "Karma" makes a good point.
Assume good faith is quite possibly the most commonly-misunderstood part of Wikipedia policy, alongside Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point and the three-revert rule. I'd make an annotated list of commonly-misunderstood policy pages, but someone would undoubtedly misunderstand it, fail to assume good faith, charge me with WP:POINT violations, and then edit-war over it.
[0] No, I don't mean "one that criticises Wikipedia".
[1] They're much too strong on the subject of attack sites, and the definition of Encyclopaedia Dramatica is funnier than it was intended to be.