[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[Blu Aardvark]

Slim Virgin wrote:
> Risker, the situation was that a bunch of admins had been removing
> links to attack sites for about 18 months. Not in any kind of
> systematic way (i.e. not hunting them down so far as I know), but just
> removing them if they noticed one. That was the de facto policy.
> That's how policy develops, by admins doing things. It just wasn't
> written down anywhere.
>   

I asked this before, but was largely ignored. Isn't "just removing them 
if they noticed one" a "systematic way"? If we aren't even looking at 
the nature and content of the link, but just unthinkingly removing it, 
isn't that a rather problematic way of doing things?

The de facto policy appears to be to remove links to *content* that 
meets the criteria of personal attacks against Wikipedia contributors. 
This "policy" /is/ supported by consensus. The difficulty appears to be 
that a select few editors want to (or have the appearance of wanting to) 
use an Arbcom ruling to justify removing any and all links (as they see 
them, not necessarily via Special:Sitesearch) to a selected handful of 
sites, regardless of the content or context of the link.