-----Original Message----- From: Daniel R. Tobias [mailto:dan@tobias.name] Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 07:58 AM To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
On 20 Sep 2007 at 2:54, "English Wikipedia" <wikien- l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
I guess we should keep a list, somewhere...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist
And maybe one more easily accessible.
The purpose of that list is to prevent spamming, such as the insertion of commercial links where they don't belong. It applies only to a very narrow category of sites that are being actively inserted irrelevantly and have no useful purpose, such as ads for "herbal Viagra". It is a gross abuse of the spam blacklist to include sites that are disliked for political or personal reasons and are not otherwise being spammed.
That is not the basis on which sites are banned. They are banned because they scapegoat Wikipedia editors and administrators. SlimVirgin is not to blame for the imaginary failures of Wikipedia; she, and people like her are responsible for our real success. Scapegoating her gets us absolutely nowhere.
Fred
On 20/09/2007, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
That is not the basis on which sites are banned. They are banned because they scapegoat Wikipedia editors and administrators. SlimVirgin is not to blame for the imaginary failures of Wikipedia; she, and people like her are responsible for our real success. Scapegoating her gets us absolutely nowhere.
Fred
Well, the failures of Wikipaedia are quite real, but other than that, I do agree with you. Societal problems are not the fault of the individual.
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
That is not the basis on which sites are banned. They are banned because they scapegoat Wikipedia editors and administrators. SlimVirgin is not to blame for the imaginary failures of Wikipedia; she, and people like her are responsible for our real success. Scapegoating her gets us absolutely nowhere.
That may be true, but we look mighty odd when we react differently to scapegoating that relates to us than we do to scapegoating that relates to others. If someone famous scapegoats people, there's not really much we can do about it. Maybe Michael Moore shouldn't be making idiotic comments, but for better or worse he's famous and he does. We have plenty of his idiotic comments reported many of our articles, but it seems that when they're about *us* suddenly we get a lot more touchy. Which is a bit too self-referential for a neutral, descriptive encyclopedia.
-Mark