On 19/09/2007, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Are we here to work on the encyclopedia, or not? Very
importantly, do we
allow naked politics on the site? By that I mean, do we stay with allowing
criticism of actions on the site (which has always been permitted), or would
it be OK to impute motives and attack those, blacken people's reputations,
and so on? If so, exactly what good would come of it?
Charles
Erm, the latter is already done, extensively,
regularly and self-righteously.
Every time you call someone a troll, you
are implying that person's intent is to
get a negative reaction. Clueless newbie
edits are regularly labelled as vandalism -
which means intentional defacement of
Wikipaedia. Enforcement of the conflict
of interest policy almost always involves
negative speculation on people's motives.
And what is a sockpuppetry investigation
but a search for hidden malice? Any time
anyone does anything that a significant
number of people don't like, that person's
motives are guessed in the worse possible
light.
The majority of user-contributed websites
are attack sites, since it is human nature
to attack. Off the top of my head, the only
one I can think of that isn't is DeviantArt.
Yes, people do attack other people on
DeviantArt, but they fullfill requests from
representatives to take things down, no
questions asked.
Most places, however, will merely say no
when you ask them to take something down
and they don't want to. Wikipaedia and
Encyclopaedia Dramatica are significant
exceptions to this - they will very often make
things worse in response to complaints.
What makes Wikipaedia worse than
Encyclopaedia Dramatica is its higher
Google rankings and self-righteous attitude
(those people deserve to be attacked and
suffer, for the good of the encyclopaedia!)
Encyclopaedia Dramatica, at least, merely
has a rather negative sense of humour.