Wikipedia is goingto be a safe and pleasant place for people to work. We will respect ourusers and do what we can to protect them from harassment.
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: Rich Holton [mailto:richholton@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 06:40 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] FredBauder"clarifies"onattackkkkk site link policy
jayjg wrote:
On 7/3/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
jayjg wrote:
On 7/2/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
jayjg wrote:
and no-one is going to insist on a banning if there is some incredibly important reason why one must be linked to under some bizarre and unforeseen turn of events.
But those turns of events are not, in fact, so bizarre or unforeseen.
Yeah, they pretty much are. Rare events, and generally involving wiki-drama, not actually building an encyclopedia.
I'm not talking about wiki-drama, I'm talking about hypertext. Wikipedia is a website. Websites link to each other. It turns out it's an incredibly powerful and useful concept. If whenever we're talking about something said on site X -- whether this is in an RFC or Arbitration case, or a topicality debate in project space, or wherever -- and if site X happens to be on a secret list of Sites One Must Not Link To, such that instead we're supposed to use circumlocutions like describing the site in words, or emailing a URL, instead of just making a hyperlink like Time Berners-Lee intended -- if we insist on going through this cutting-off-our-nose-to-spite-our-face exercise, just so we can feel good about not "endorsing" a site that has (perhaps egregiously) wronged one of our editors, that's just an incredibly frustrating and pointless waste of time.
It's only useful to link to sites that have useful content. Wikipedia has all sorts of rules about not linking to useless sites.
You claim that the blanket ban is acceptable because reasonable people can decide to make exceptions if necessary. But why go that route? Why not say that links -- to any site, anywhere -- which serve as attacks, are attacks, and are banned under NPA? Why not let reasonable people realize that this is a sufficient policy, that will disallow all the troublesome links just as effectively as the blanket ban would? What additional protective power is gained by proactively applying the blanket ban?
Well, let's say one links to the front page of an attack site, which doesn't actually contain any attacks, but just links to all sorts of other pages that do.
So what?
I wish you'd answer the question. Why do we need a blanket ban? How does it prevent Personal Attacks (in ways that WP:NPA can't)? How does it help us build an encyclopedia?
That has been explained at length. Wikipedians volunteer their time to help in this project; as a result of that volunteer work, they are exposed to often vicious harassment by a small number of banned editors on websites. We should not in any way bring attention to those websites. It's common sense, good policy, and basic decency. Stop doing it.
Jay,
This does not explain the need for a blanket ban. It does explain the need for not linking to personal attacks, etc.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l