-----Original Message----- From: Slim Virgin [mailto:slimvirgin@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 2, 2007 10:56 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] FredBauder"clarifies"onattackkkkkkkkk site link policy
On 7/2/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
You got it. BADSITES was nothing but provocation. An attempt to overturn the policy it supposedly supported by generalizing.
It worked on the principle that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.
I'll never accept linking to personal attacks on Wikipedians. I don't care how futile it is considered to be or how bad such "censorship" is. And it a site makes a regular business of attacking Wikipedians, not criticizing, but attacking, I will oppose linking to the site at all. I can see only good coming out of supporting other editors and only harm coming out of tolerating their humiliation.
Fred
On 7/3/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Slim Virgin [mailto:slimvirgin@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 2, 2007 10:56 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] FredBauder"clarifies"onattackkkkkkkkk site link policy
On 7/2/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
You got it. BADSITES was nothing but provocation. An attempt to overturn the policy it supposedly supported by generalizing.
It worked on the principle that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.
I'll never accept linking to personal attacks on Wikipedians. I don't care how futile it is considered to be or how bad such "censorship" is. And it a site makes a regular business of attacking Wikipedians, not criticizing, but attacking, I will oppose linking to the site at all. I can see only good coming out of supporting other editors and only harm coming out of tolerating their humiliation.
Exactly right.
I want to clarify that when I wrote above that the BADSITES proposal worked on the principle that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it, I meant that this was the mindset of the proposer, not that I agreed with it. It seems to have been a strawman proposal, intended only to cause arguments, and it was singularly successful in that regard.
On 7/3/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
I'll never accept linking to personal attacks on Wikipedians.
There definitely needs to be a line drawn between attacking and outing them:
One site might say "User:X is an incompetent admin who pushes a [ideology]ist agenda and is part of a cabal with User:Y and User:Z. The three of them are a disgrace to Wikipedia". That's definitely an attack, but it's sticks and stones.
Another site might say "User:X on Wikipedia is [full name] from [location] who used to work for [company] and is a disgrace to [real-life occupuation]". That's also an attack, but it's serious business, particularly if User:X had desired to remain anon/pseudon-ymous.
On a side-note, the humor of elongating the word "attack" with extra K's is not apparent, nor is the relationship to supremacy groups (if that is what's being implied).
—C.W.
Fred Bauder wrote:
I'll never accept linking to personal attacks on Wikipedians. I don't care how futile it is considered to be or how bad such "censorship" is. And it a site makes a regular business of attacking Wikipedians, not criticizing, but attacking, I will oppose linking to the site at all. I can see only good coming out of supporting other editors and only harm coming out of tolerating their humiliation.
I agree with the principle -- we should treasure and support our editors -- but I don't think the rest follows in all cases.
For example, I once linked to what could easily be read as an off-wiki personal attack on me. That was very helpful, as it made the situation clearer to fellow editors, and resulted in me getting the assistance I needed. A blanket ban would have made my life as an editor worse, not better.
Rather than making the judgment based on the thing linked to, I think our judgment should be based on the way we are linking. Linking to a personal attack can be done as a personal attack, of course, and that should be treated like any other personal attack. But it also can be a way to defang the personal attack. It can be a way to show what kooks the attackers are. It can shine a light on things that fester in the dark.
Stepping back, links to contentious material can certainly be helpful in discussing and building consensus around whatever the new do-not-link policy ends up as. After some random clicking around on the sites whose names should not be spoken, I still haven't seen anything particularly horrific. I'm not saying it isn't there, of course. I'm just saying that if some people can see a problem and others can't, they are unlikely to ever come to consensus on the severity of the problem, let alone the solution.
William