On 7/3/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote: 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.

Fred Bauder wrote: 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