On 17 Oct 2007 at 10:26:47 -0400, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com:
I'm very worried that this means I can't link to an attack site to make fun of it, as I did with Brandft's hive mind. (I was listed on it, so I thought it'd make a good userbox joke - gosh, I feel so old.) This makes no distinction between intent and actual action - [[mens rea]] for the legal nerds out there. In real life, the law sometimes cannot draw a good distinction between intent and the act itself, but in Wikipedia, we usually can. We should be banning the usage of links for the express purpose of harassing or outing editors; not banning links which *might* conceivably be used in a context to harass editors simply because of their content.
I'm inclined to agree. I forgot also that we had fun little threads occasionally when people got stuck on Hivemind. JzG announced his placement on Hivemind. However, an occasional humorous thread being curtailed seems like a minor price to pay.
That, in fact, is how I got dragged into the whole BADSITES issue in the first place, since I was one of those who liked to make fun of the silly stuff that got said in those sites, with links, and I also at one point was featured in both Brandt's Hivemind and Merkey's MerkeyLaw, and proudly linked to them on my user page for it. I resented a policy that told me I couldn't do what I regarded as harmless diversion.
In the greater scheme of things, this is probably a "minor price to pay" as noted above, but in terms of the harm done to the general culture of Wikipedia (by not only BADSITES itself, but by the entire mindset behind it and all its other manifestations), where the entire field of discussion gets riddled with landmines, tripwires, and political third rails that one must avoid, the harm is more than minor in my opinion. It's similar to the pernicious harm to academia caused by the Political Correctness movement, where students and faculty are afraid to speak freely for fear of offending some minority group.