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

[Ray Saintonge]

William Pietri wrote:
> He's writing about his area of expertise, and that's clearly pertinent 
> to his biography, in the same way his writing a book or an article would 
> be. Failure to link to his blog when we mention that it exists violates 
> WP:V. Removing all mention of the blog would be a failure to mention a 
> relevant fact in an article because we don't like what the article 
> subject says; that violates WP:NPOV.
>
> Either one goes against the animating spirit of the project:
>
>     Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
>     free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
>
> That's not "all human knowledge we like" or "all human knowledge we 
> think you're ready to handle". Wikipedia should not be in the business 
> of making moral judgments about the topics we cover: that's the reader's 
> job.
>
> If you would like to propose a policy where we do not link to any source 
> that contains discussion of things that might be defamatory, by all 
> means propose it. But I strongly believe it does not flow from the core 
> policies or our shared principles, so I think it will have to be a new 
> policy.
Indeed.  The more I see the struggles connected with BADSITES the more 
I'm convinced that there is a handful of people incapable of taking a 
mature and nuanced view of the issue. Even with breaches of privacy 
there could be cases where revealing an identity _may_ be justified, 
such as when a person is using a pseudonym to mask a serious conflict of 
interest.  (A tobacco company executive claiming that smoking is good 
for you?)

There are points and principles where there is a strong common 
consesnsus.  Nobody supports inappropriate breaches of privacy, or 
defamation, or personal attacks.  Despite that the majority are capable 
of seeing that the serious misbehaviour of a few should not justify 
extreme restrictions on everybody's freedoms to do things.  That's the 
essence of assuming good faith.  Does it take so much subtlety to 
understand that good faith is not dependent on the reader's willingness 
to feel injury.

Ec