Delirium wrote
If the already absurd BADSITES policy (and friends) is going to drive itself off a cliff and now prohibit links to any sites that, through n degrees of link traversal, may *indirectly* reach objectionable material, then we might as well just turn off external links entirely.
Making "attack" transitive does has this effect. So it's not a great theoretical position, to state that any link to an attack is an attack. The conclusion, from some time ago in my case, that the "attack" language is not useful for describing how hypertext works. We should, as ever, look at intentions of WP editors in linking, and look also at how any link contributes to the mission. Stick with "don't link to junk" and "don't link in order to harass".
Charles
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charles.r.matthews wrote:
Delirium wrote
If the already absurd BADSITES policy (and friends) is going to drive itself off a cliff and now prohibit links to any sites that, through n degrees of link traversal, may *indirectly* reach objectionable material, then we might as well just turn off external links entirely.
Making "attack" transitive does has this effect. So it's not a great theoretical position, to state that any link to an attack is an attack. The conclusion, from some time ago in my case, that the "attack" language is not useful for describing how hypertext works. We should, as ever, look at intentions of WP editors in linking, and look also at how any link contributes to the mission. Stick with "don't link to junk" and "don't link in order to harass".
Charles
Hi Charles and everyone,
In a hypothetical case, if an editor is (has been) using her/his edits to sustain a _particular_ viewpoint, perhaps at odds with the truth, in articles about a tragedy which happened years ago but of international significance, and it later turns out that that he/she was closely involved with the tragedy and people *at the time* suspected his/her motivation then it surely is of benefit to the mission to investigate whether there may have been any cover-up by people who are in a position to obliterate edit histories of articles. It should thus be a simple matter to lay that particular hypothetical conspiracy theory to rest (a theory similar to one I've heard repeated on several occasions in the SlimVirgin case), if it was only a conspiracy.
The broader question of editor motivation is one that should hopefully be dealt with sensibly by the wiki concept itself, and yes intentions, whether to benefit the project or to harm it, are of great importance.