[WikiEN-l] Essjay and BADSITES and dead links... oh my!

[Daniel R. Tobias]

The wikidrama continued in the [[Essjay controversy]] article over 
the last 24 hours.  First, various people edit-warred over the 
insertion of the relevant link to a site that some regard as a so-
called "attack site", which also happened to be where important 
activity in the history of the Essjay affair first came to light. The 
anti-linking side threatened to block people for adding the nefarious 
link, and actually blocked at least one ([[User:KamrynMatika]], 
blocked by admin [[User:ElinorD]], about whom I must apologize 
profusely to the Wikipedia community for playing any role in making 
her an admin; I voted to support her RfA, despite knowing of her anti-
attack-site stance, out of a desire not to impose political litmus 
tests like the other side did).  This puts the lie to any assertion 
that the link ban is "no big deal" because it won't be used to block 
any linking that helps the encyclopedia... any such applications 
(like attempts to suppress links to [[Teresa Nielsen Hayden]]'s blog) 
were clearly misguided and can be reversed by using common sense and 
[[Wikipedia:Ignore All Rules]]... well, except for now, I guess.

Then, [[User:MichaelLinnear]] came up with a seemingly good solution 
to the mess; he found a respectable news outlet that was a reference 
for the same fact.  Problem solved... no "attack" links needed, huh?  
Still, [[User:MONGO]] immediately and mistakenly reverted that 
addition... well, anybody who's ever in the past inserted a so-called 
attack link for any reason is clearly a Troll and an Attack Site 
Partisan, so "Assume Bad Faith" is the applicable principle for 
dealing with *their* kind... any link they ever insert must be 
another evil attack site, given that their sinister agenda is to 
promote those sites any way they can. Keep the revert trigger finger 
ready, and the safety off!  Still, he realized his error quickly and 
reverted himself a minute later.

So, problem solved, huh?  Not so fast... while all of this insertion, 
reversion, and re-reversion was taking place, it appears that nobody 
involved actually tried to *go* to that new respectable news link.  
Turns out that it's "404 Not Found"... you get only an error page.  
Well, I guess that's a great thing... no possibility of winding up on 
evil attack-site content that way.  The fact that there's no useful 
information there either is only a minor quibble.

As of now, the nonexistent link is still there at Footnote 1... I 
guess it will stay until somebody either finds another "respectable" 
source, or else dares to face off against the Clique by putting the 
relevant "attack" link back.

-- 
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