On 12 Apr 2007 at 14:24, Ken Arromdee arromdee@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:
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.