-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Holton [mailto:richholton@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 09:24 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Fred Bauder"clarifies"on attack site link policy
jayjg wrote:
On 7/4/07, James Farrar
<james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/07/07, Fred Bauder
<fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
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.
Yes, we got that the first time...
It bears repeating.
Please do repeat it jay. I agree with the sentiment. I don't know of
anyone here who disagrees.
Where the disagreement lies is on the steps needed to make it a safe and
pleasant place to work.
Banning all anonymous edits may well make it a safer and more pleasant
place to work, but we do not take that step. No, I'm not using a
strawman here; I'm just demonstrating that there are a range of possible
actions to address the issue. Not all are good.
The point under discussion is whether a blanket ban of certain sites is
a good step to take.
It's a drastic remedy that cause almost as much trouble as it avoids, but is still
justifiable. What the ban on linking to Encyclopedia Dramatic accomplishes is to scotch
ready acceptance of that type of snarky dialog on Wikipedia itself. If we accept casual
links to whatever cute meme on ED that strikes someone's eye, what we are doing is
saying, hey, this site is cool. A little looking around at their entries on our
contributors will soon demonstrate the hurtful nature of their entries and the absence of
critical content.
Part of the ban is posturing, very similar to our posturing on pedophilia. We have no way
to prevent either pedophiles or drama affectionados from editing Wikipedia. All we can do
is make a big noise about it. We will have snarky editors engaging in hurtful attacks on
other users both on and off Wikipedia no matter what we do. So what is involved is more
staking out a position than anything else.
So it is very much a matter of saying and meaning:
We will make every effort to support our contributors and to defeat attempts to harass
them.
Fred