[WikiEN-l] When Websites Attack

[Daniel R. Tobias]

The last part of my last message didn't make it to the online 
archives, apparently due to the UNIX/Linux misfeature of treating the 
word "From" at the beginning of a line as a message separator in 
mailbox files, so I'm reposting it:

[F]rom all of this, it's obvious that the policy (currently embedded 
in [[WP:NPA]] after the attempt at a separate BADSITES policy failed) 
is highly flawed, and causes much more trouble than good, and also 
clearly doesn't agree with consensus given that none of the above 
attempts actually succeeded in suppressing the information they were 
trying to do, and all of them met with strong opposition including 
from admins.  

Particularly troublesome is the part of the policy that claims that 
the 3-revert rule doesn't apply to removing attack site links.  This 
is a destructive invitation to edit-warring, going against the very 
reason 3RR was enacted in the first place: everybody who edit-wars 
does it because they think they're right and the other guy is wrong. 
In true, noncontroversial cases of gratuitous personal attacks, 
harrassment, outing, and the like, this special exception is 
unnecessary; if somebody vandalizes a user page to reveal the true 
name and address of that user and invite people to stalk him/her, 
there will undoubtably be a whole flock of editors and admins rushing 
to revert the vandalism, oversight the personal info, and block the 
user who inserted it; it's unlikely that anybody would need to revert 
more than 3 times in this process, and even if somebody did, it 
wouldn't be punished given the obviousness of the case (it's the sort 
of thing that goes under WP:IAR).  It's only in cases where there's a 
real controversy over whether the policy applies to a particular 
case, and whether it makes any sense to invoke it, that there would 
be a perceived need to do multiple reverts, and those are the cases 
where discussion rather than edit-warring would be productive.

Anyway, the policy is clearly not factually accurate, given that 
somebody *did* get blocked for 3RR over removing one of the links 
mentioned above.

If the policy is not to have a stake driven through its heart (my 
preference), it at least needs a massive rewrite in accordance with 
Jimbo's stated principles, so it calls for a thoughtful, reasoned 
approach to potentially harmful links rather than an absolutist black-
and-white "we're good, those sites are evil" zero-tolerance rule.

-- 
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