BADSITES could certainly be marked as "historic" just as the similar proposal you made a year ago, Slim. I don't think anyone would object to that; on the other hand, it certainly did not carry any form of consensus, and from what we are seeing in this thread and other similar threads here on wiki-en-l, there is considerable resistance from a wide range of editors, administrators, and even arbitrators on having anyone interpret it as policy.
Would you support the inclusion of a sentence in NPA indicating that links to content that meets the definition of personal attacks will be treated in the same way as a direct personal attack? And would you support the removal of the disputed section on the current version of NPA? That section really is BADSITES in short, and continues to perpetuate the very issue you have (correctly I believe) found to be unnecessarily provocative.
Quiet words off-wiki may well have been the suitable way to address this situation two years ago, when there were about 500 "serious" editors and a more homogeneous pool of administrators. Now, there are easily more than ten times that number of serious editors and over 1200 admins. Wikipedia has blossomed beyond the small community where a "word to the wise" can control processes. The mere fact that there have been ongoing disputes about just about every Wikipedia policy in recent months indicates how dramatically the community has changed.
Risker
On 5/28/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/28/07, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Slim, would you support the changes I proposed a few posts ago? It does
not
conflict with your position that most admins are sensible (and I agree
with
you there), but at the same time does not tie anyone's hands when a situation such as the WillBeBack one occurs.
The problem with marking that proposal as rejected (as you were saying earlier) is it makes it appear that what it ought not to be happening, but it *is* happening.
The problem with this whole discussion is that lots of people are taking part in it in bad faith. One of the most vocal opponents of no-links-to-attack-sites is simultaneously posting to WR that he's been doing Google research on me to see how easy it is to identify me. It's impossible to assume good faith with that going on, and I have to question why someone like that is allowed to interfere with our policies. But they are, because we allow anyone to edit anything.
Opposing a policy or practise because of dodgy implementation is like Jeff opposing BLP because of the way he sees it panning out. The answer is not to ditch BLP, but to have a quiet word with people who are being too heavy-handed. A *quiet* word, because the person having the word might be wrong and the heavy-handed ones might be right. Policies often need tweaking back and forth as we watch how real people really apply them. The tweaking only works when everyone's acting in good faith. When you have an issue that trolls have an especially keen interest in, the good-faith system collapses, and every tweak creates a new platform for further drama.
No one that I know is seriously suggesting that -- as you wrote earlier -- "sites where there is negative content about one or more editors" are ipso facto attack sites. What we are saying is that *purpose-built* attack sites shouldn't be linked to, and that is what the ArbCom said too. We can deal with exceptions when we come to them. That's how I would like to leave it, at least for now until the excitement has died down.
Fundamentally, this is a BLP issue. Our editors are living persons. They don't want to be outed and defamed, and they don't want the readership of sites *dedicated* to these attacks to be increased. That's all this boils down to.
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