A few posts up, Slim Virgin said:
"Please don't keep raising the issue of BADSITES. It was started by a strawman sock for the purpose of stirring it. Please don't do his job for him."
I completely agree with Slim that this was started by someone who had some pretty murky ulterior motives; I'll take her word that it was a sock. The question is how to stanch the bad practices that are flowing from it.
The most straightforward way would be to mark BADSITES as either rejected or historic, and to remove the disputed section in the current policy. (That takes care of the messy attempt made by DennyColt.) As far as I can tell, there was absolutely no objection to the idea of including a statement in the current NPA policy supporting the removal of any links where the content of the link met the definition of a personal attack, regardless of the origin of the content.
Recent history - and from what I read, past history as well - indicates that wiping out all links to sites where there is negative content about one or more editors has had a negative impact on the encyclopedia. But even people who have argued that links should be removed on a case-by-case basis have demonstrated that they are willing and ready to remove links to threads that can even remotely be considered personal attacks.
I agree that the current impasse has gone on long enough.
Risker
On 5/28/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 28/05/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The supporters of BADSITES talk sweet reason, but every time they *act* upon the idea they act like rabid killbots on crack. Surely
you
can see this introduces scepticism, and is also why many of us have profound scepticism of the idea. The attempt to abuse an RFA to try to backdoor in an utterly failed bad policy proposal is disgraceful.
That isn't even remotely what's happening, David. First, I haven't seen anyone who supports the removal of these links going around removing them in any systematic way, never mind like "rabid killbots on crack."
The last go-round, when the policy's supporters were removing Daniel Brandt's links from the Signpost article about Daniel Brandt. The go-round before that, when they were removing the names of sites from the discussions.
This is why the policy failed: how it was actually carried out in
testing.
Please don't keep raising the issue of BADSITES. It was started by a strawman sock for the purpose of stirring it. Please don't do his job for him.
I dislike BADSITES because of the way it's been implemented every time it's been put into practice. Or is that the trolls deleting the links?
BADSITES had existed in spirit for about 18 months and had been practised without fuss for the most part. Then a troll turned up and decided to write it down, and cleverly chose a shortcut that in itself would make most people cringe. The troll's concept was that the best way to get rid of a law you don't like is to enforce it rigorously.
Any rule applied without common sense is going to get a bad name -- but as you say, it's the application that's at fault, not the basic idea. I'm arguing here against throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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