-----Original Message----- From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com] Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 06:08 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
The problem is the cases in the middle. What overrides NPOV?
I still don't understand what NPOV has to do with this. A link to edit a Wikipedia user's page is as shameful for MIchael Moore as any excess of ours. In a way, linking to it puts him in a false light, displaying petty bullying.
The NPOV violation here is that in the POV of some of us, harassing, maligning, or exposing Wikipedia editors is a bad thing. More specifically, it is seen as the one bad thing in all the world that might merit link removal. Other people do not share this POV.
Perhaps one could make an NPOV-friendly case for removing all links to all harassment, or maligning, or exposing of anonymous or pseudonymous people. It would be even more clearly consistent with NPOV to argue for a removal of all links to all living miscreants everywhere.
Needless to say, I don't think those are a good idea either. I think our job is to give people the facts as best we can, while leaving the moral judgments to our readers.
William
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Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points. Fred
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points.
Fred, your habit of picking one thing -- generally peripheral -- out of a longer post to disagree with, replying with a couple of lines, and apparently ignoring the meat of my point is wearing on me a little.
You appeared to ask what NPOV had to do with this. Since you are having trouble seeing it at the small scale of a link to Michael Moore's web site, I thought taking the principles to an extreme would make it clearer. I think that's technically a reductio ad absurdum and not a straw man: I never suggested that you or anybody advocated the extreme version.
Regardless, if that's not helpful, you can just say, "Sorry, that doesn't help me. What I'm really trying to understand is...." Given that, I'm glad to try again.
I definitely don't see this as some sterile debate. I think it's an important issue for Wikipedia's future, and want to be sure that everybody at least understands the risks that we see, whether or not they see other issues as larger.
William
On 20/10/2007, fredbaud@waterwiki.info fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points. Fred
Those are most certainly not strawmen. Will Beback has been arguing that the POV of a claimed aggrieved Wikipedia editor is automatically relevant to all articles. You can't say that fits NPOV.
- d.
Quoting fredbaud@waterwiki.info:
-----Original Message----- From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com] Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 06:08 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
The problem is the cases in the middle. What overrides NPOV?
I still don't understand what NPOV has to do with this. A link to edit a Wikipedia user's page is as shameful for MIchael Moore as any excess of ours. In a way, linking to it puts him in a false light, displaying petty bullying.
The NPOV violation here is that in the POV of some of us, harassing, maligning, or exposing Wikipedia editors is a bad thing. More specifically, it is seen as the one bad thing in all the world that might merit link removal. Other people do not share this POV.
Perhaps one could make an NPOV-friendly case for removing all links to all harassment, or maligning, or exposing of anonymous or pseudonymous people. It would be even more clearly consistent with NPOV to argue for a removal of all links to all living miscreants everywhere.
Needless to say, I don't think those are a good idea either. I think our job is to give people the facts as best we can, while leaving the moral judgments to our readers.
William
Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points. Fred
Fred, if there are strawmen above please explain what they are. I at least don't see any.