[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[The Mangoe]

On 28/05/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

I really didn't want to get involved in this mailing list, but seeing
as how SlimVirgin has taken to talking about me behind my back....

Anyway, this claim is quite incredible. I have seen no evidence that
this is so, or for that matter any prior claims that this is so. As
far as I can tell, DennyColt just took it upon himself to turn the
ArbCom statements into a policy and then began enforcing it against
Wikipedia Review (which the ArbCom decision pointed to). He stepped on
my tail by erasing a citation from Expert Retention, the first point
at which I knew anything about all of this.

I'm getting heartily sick of having to police this. As it has turned
out, mostly this seems to have been used for presumptive edits (like
erasing someone's link to their blog) or personal attacks (Will
Beback's vendetta against Teresa Nielsen Hayden's site, which is/was
used to cite dozens of articles). And it isn't being done by admins;
all of the problem edits have been done by regular editors.

I am guessing that I am the person she mentions as participating in
this in bad faith. The truth, as I've said several times, is that I
only found out about WR because of this "policy". I am not wholly
sympathetic to them; it seems to me that most of those there who got
banned committed some sin. However, it also seems to me that some of
their criticisms are not without foundation. In any case, it has
passed out of the focus, which has now turned, in the scattershot way
that the opposition to it predicted, to other random victims. There's
no need to protect WR if only because nobody is really trying to
delete the 193 remaining links to it.