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

[White Cat]

[[Essjay controversy]] should really doesn't exist in the first place. How
is this a part of collective human knowledge? But this starts a senseless
discussion which I do not want to get indulged in. I shouldn't even bother
with this comment but it would be too much of a waste to delete it.

    - White Cat

On 6/26/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> --
> == Dan ==
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>
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