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

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 == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l