[WikiEN-l] JzG's banning Private Musings regarding BADSITES debate

[William Pietri]

Alec Conroy wrote:
> There is now an ever-growing consensus that BADSITES is rejected, and
> that linking  to "badsites' for encyclopedic purposes is permissible
> in some circumstances. 

Setting aside the question of the block for a moment, I'm curious about 
the incident that triggered the block.

If I understand rightly, [[Robert Black (professor)]] is a respected 
Scottish law prof who is from Lockerbie, who has taken a great interest 
in the Lockerbie case, and was involved in setting up the Lockerbie 
trials of the Libyan agents.

In response to recent activity in the case, in early July he set up a 
blog to discuss it. We briefly mentioned the blog and added a link to 
it. That link stayed in place until a few days ago, when he gave a 
one-sentence mention of the allegations that SV "systematically altered" 
the Wikipedia Lockerbie articles, mentioning what some claim is her true 
name. He doesn't claim that they are true, just that they are interesting.

The link was removed within 24 hours by a newly created account called 
"Privacyisall", which has only edited around this, and shows enough 
instant facility with Wikipedia that the account could well be a sock. 
The edit summary: "Remove blog which outs and attacks our editors as per 
Arbcom ruling."


So if I got that right, it seems to me that here we have another case 
along the lines of Micheal Moore.

Prof. Black is an intentionally public figure talking about a topic on 
which he is a credentialed expert. He starts an official blog, which 
seems relevant, so we mention it. We include a link, both because 
statements in articles should be verifiable, and because if somebody is 
interested enough to read about Robert Black, they could well be 
interested in reading his blog.

However, once Black mentions something we personally don't like, we 
remove the link. He's not attacking anybody, the mention is clearly 
pertinent to his field of interest, and the link on Wikipedia couldn't 
possibly have been included as part of an attack. But still, putting the 
link back is considered a serious enough offense that the account 
involved is blocked, and there seems to be a fair bit of support for the 
blocking.


If we can have this much drama, it sounds like we don't have enough 
consensus yet. What can we do to create more?

William





-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri