[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia privacy concerns

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 12 Apr 2007 at 14:24, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Denny Colt wrote:
> > This conversation spawned from some vehement opposition to a proposed policy
> > to ban links to attack, outing, and hate sites aimed at hurting Wikipedians.
> > The policy is:
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Attack_sites
> 
> That has been getting Kafkaesque because the "policy" has been used to *ban
> links in the discussion about the policy*.  That's right, in discussing a
> policy about whether attack sites may be linked to, nobody may ever use an
> attack site as an example of why one might want to link to an attack site.

Fortunately, the "vehement opposition" seems to have won against this 
"Kafkaesque" policy; while it's not formally dead yet (somebody tried 
to put a "failed" flag on it but was reverted), it's clearly on life 
support.  All of the straw polls on the talk page show overwhelming 
opposition, and, after various proponents "enforced" this non-policy 
by deleting links on talk pages all over the place (including on the 
talk page of the policy discussion itself), claiming that they were 
merely enforcing an earlier ArbCom ruling, two members of the ArbCom 
expressed a view in opposition to using their ruling as a precedent 
for any action unrelated to its original subject, thus deflating that 
whole line of argument.  Thereafter, policy proponents who had 
earlier claimed that the presence or absence of consensus in favor of 
the draconian link ban was irrelevant because the ArbCom had ruled, 
and The Law Is The Law (notwithstanding how the ArbCom isn't supposed 
to be making policy in the first place), suddenly started talking 
about consensus once again, and implying that they thought that such 
a beast existed for their policy, even though no more evidence of its 
existence was present than for the unicorn or centaur.

Meanwhile, they also did their best to do character-assassination of 
the opponents, accusing them of being sockpuppets, or saying they 
should be dismissed for low edit count, or calling them supporters of 
attack sites, while getting into moral outrage at any responses they 
got back that might come close to being personal attacks.

-- 
== Dan ==
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