An aggressive and vocal minority of users (including some administrators who are known to aggressively hammer 'opponents') wanting to be able to remove on-Wiki references and links to web sites that specifically have targeted them. In and of itself, this is not a Bad Thing on the surface. However, their implementation and ideas do not enjoy widespread community support or endorsement, as evidenced by the backlash they face each time they try to do it. In spite of this, they have now extended this to:
1. Damaging articles and the encyclopedia (Will Beback and his abuse during over Teresa Hayden's site).
2. Specifically have 'broken' two RFAs by dropping poison pills on them (Cla68 and Gracenotes), disrupting Wikipedia for political gain.
3. They have made the notion of "attack sites" political and sociological poison, to damage their Wikipedia "enemies".
Someone really needs to throw out the bathwater, without murdering the baby as seems to be the intent here with the BADSITES gamesmanship. Apologies for any frankness that cuts through undeserved AGF.
Regards, Joe http://www.joeszilagyi.com
On 30/05/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
their implementation and ideas do not enjoy widespread community support or endorsement, as evidenced by the backlash they face each time they try to do it. In spite of this, they have now extended this to:
- Damaging articles and the encyclopedia (Will Beback and his abuse during
over Teresa Hayden's site). 2. Specifically have 'broken' two RFAs by dropping poison pills on them (Cla68 and Gracenotes), disrupting Wikipedia for political gain. 3. They have made the notion of "attack sites" political and sociological poison, to damage their Wikipedia "enemies".
Looks about accurate.
- d.
On 5/30/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
An aggressive and vocal minority of users (including some administrators who are known to aggressively hammer 'opponents') wanting to be able to remove on-Wiki references and links to web sites that specifically have targeted them. In and of itself, this is not a Bad Thing on the surface. However, their implementation and ideas do not enjoy widespread community support or endorsement, as evidenced by the backlash they face each time they try to do it. In spite of this, they have now extended this to:
- Damaging articles and the encyclopedia (Will Beback and his abuse during
over Teresa Hayden's site).
- Specifically have 'broken' two RFAs by dropping poison pills on them
(Cla68 and Gracenotes), disrupting Wikipedia for political gain.
- They have made the notion of "attack sites" political and sociological
poison, to damage their Wikipedia "enemies".
Someone really needs to throw out the bathwater, without murdering the baby as seems to be the intent here with the BADSITES gamesmanship. Apologies for any frankness that cuts through undeserved AGF.
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"? "disrupting Wikipedia for political gain"? "murdering the baby"? Joe, I know it's important to you to win this argument, and you appear willing to hurl almost any accusation in order to do so, but seriously, you're frothing at the mouth now. Take a chill pill, man.
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
- d.
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Pardon me for not knowing, but what is that site, and who was removing links to it?
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Pardon me for not knowing, but what is that site, and who was removing links to it?
Will Beback, a coupla days ago. Discussed, er, on this very list quite a bit. At this point I really do have to say: do try to keep up.
- d.
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Pardon me for not knowing, but what is that site, and who was removing links to it?
Will Beback, a coupla days ago. Discussed, er, on this very list quite a bit. At this point I really do have to say: do try to keep up.
Ah. I do try, but with hundreds of e-mails a day, some threads do slip through. Anyway, was Will basing his actions on BADSITES? Is that what he said?
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Pardon me for not knowing, but what is that site, and who was removing links to it?
Making Light, the blog of Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden. As discussed earlier...
Will Beback took it on himself to construe one single thread on the site as an attack, declared the entire thing an attack site, and started removing the c.100 links from over the wiki. None of which were to the relevant thread as far as I'm aware; indeed, it would have taken a rather dedicated dig and knowing the offending material was there to find it...
(There are 100 now, anyhow - a fair portion in article space but mainly discussion pages - and, yes, the ones on talk pages were being removed too...)
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Will has apologized for that and has said he overreacted at the shock of seeing his name on the site. It has now been taken down. That kind of blog was never part of the ArbCom's definition of an "attack site," and the speed with which the owner removed the name shows that it's a responsible site.
At the end of the day, regardless of which side of the question people are on, it seems widely conceded that the BADSITES page was a bad idea. Now, given that many of the editors who initially supported it have been the subject of some pretty nasty stuff off-site, I am hard pressed to suggest they were acting in bad faith; there are wounding words on several of those sites, and it is not surprising that they would encourage an attempt to lessen their pain.
However, many of the people who initially supported this essay/proposed policy (and I think I see both Slim Virgin and jayjg saying this) have come to the conclusion that this proposal is seriously flawed.
I see that there is much stronger support for the current proposal on the NPA site - it's pretty well down to minor wordsmithing at this point. Is it possible to come together as a community and slay the demon that BADSITES has become? Can we now put the "rejected" tag on it, having found what appears to be near resolution on NPA?
Risker
On 31/05/07, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I see that there is much stronger support for the current proposal on the NPA site - it's pretty well down to minor wordsmithing at this point. Is it possible to come together as a community and slay the demon that BADSITES has become? Can we now put the "rejected" tag on it, having found what appears to be near resolution on NPA?
The policy was marked "REJECTED", but someone made it a redirect to NPA, happening to obscure this detail. The redirect should probably be reverted to the failed proposal.
- d.
Ah yes...and now it becomes clear that I've been focusing on forests and forgetting that trees have leaves... ;-)
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I see that there is much stronger support for the current proposal on
the
NPA site - it's pretty well down to minor wordsmithing at this
point. Is it
possible to come together as a community and slay the demon that
BADSITES
has become? Can we now put the "rejected" tag on it, having found what appears to be near resolution on NPA?
The policy was marked "REJECTED", but someone made it a redirect to NPA, happening to obscure this detail. The redirect should probably be reverted to the failed proposal.
- d.
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On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The policy was marked "REJECTED", but someone made it a redirect to NPA, happening to obscure this detail. The redirect should probably be reverted to the failed proposal.
It was tried, and the result was of course an edit war, even when the rejected tag pointed at WP:NPA.
On 5/31/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The policy was marked "REJECTED", but someone made it a redirect to NPA, happening to obscure this detail. The redirect should probably be reverted to the failed proposal.
It was tried, and the result was of course an edit war, even when the rejected tag pointed at WP:NPA.
Considering that there's been so much discussion about BADSITES, to avoid marking it historical/rejected and simply redirecting it to an altogether different policy/guideline is ridiculous...sort of like redirecting the Esperanza page to the community portal. The specific concept of BADSITES is completely different from the specific concept of what NPA says about attack sites.
Johnleemk
On Wed, 30 May 2007, Risker wrote:
However, many of the people who initially supported this essay/proposed policy (and I think I see both Slim Virgin and jayjg saying this) have come to the conclusion that this proposal is seriously flawed.
I see that there is much stronger support for the current proposal on the NPA site - it's pretty well down to minor wordsmithing at this point. Is it possible to come together as a community and slay the demon that BADSITES has become? Can we now put the "rejected" tag on it, having found what appears to be near resolution on NPA?
You can put "rejected" on it, but I see no resolution on NPA.
Slim Virgin and jayg think the proposal was flawed because of the Teresa Nielsen Hayden links being removed. But if you ask them about any of the other abuses of BADSITES, including removal of links in the talk page discussing BADSITES itself, they will insist that the links should be gone and that they cannot think of any real situations where a link to an attack site is useful.
The only "resolution" is that now that BADSITES has been applied to a site they don't care about, they can pretend to be moderates by being moderate about that site, while stil demanding an extreme policy about the sites they were trying to delete in the first place.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
The only "resolution" is that now that BADSITES has been applied to a site they don't care about, they can pretend to be moderates by being moderate about that site, while stil demanding an extreme policy about the sites they were trying to delete in the first place.
Hi, Ken. I'm kinda uncomfortable with you suggesting that pretending is what's going on. Although I'm so far not in agreement with the successor to BADSITES, I haven't seen any reason to doubt the sincerity of the people advocating it.
William
On 31/05/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Will has apologized for that and has said he overreacted at the shock of seeing his name on the site. It has now been taken down. That kind of blog was never part of the ArbCom's definition of an "attack site," and the speed with which the owner removed the name shows that it's a responsible site.
However:
1. he sincerely blocked it at the time as an attack site. 2. BADSITES was always a ridiculous expansion of the ArbCom ruling. 3. As were all the people who act like it while denying its name.
The point remains: letting the idea that some sites must have all mention removed from Wikipedia *leads directly to damaging the encyclopedia*, because *in practice* people can't be trusted not to have attacks of stupid over it.
- d.
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
"Damaging the articles and Wikipedia"?
How would you characterise the removal of all links to nielsenhayden.com from encyclopedia articles? I'd certainly call that an accurate description of the result.
Will has apologized for that and has said he overreacted at the shock of seeing his name on the site. It has now been taken down. That kind of blog was never part of the ArbCom's definition of an "attack site," and the speed with which the owner removed the name shows that it's a responsible site.
However:
- he sincerely blocked it at the time as an attack site.
- BADSITES was always a ridiculous expansion of the ArbCom ruling.
- As were all the people who act like it while denying its name.
The point remains: letting the idea that some sites must have all mention removed from Wikipedia *leads directly to damaging the encyclopedia*, because *in practice* people can't be trusted not to have attacks of stupid over it.
People can have attacks of stupid over any policy. Every guideline, practise, whatever, that we spell out has to be applied with common sense in ways we can't always spell out, and so long as the definition of an attack site is clear enough (and maybe we should clarify it), I can't see it being problematic. If from time to time it's misused, it'll get straightened out soon enough if everyone's acting in good faith.