[WikiEN-l] Time to reboot wikien-l

[jayjg]

On Nov 15, 2007 9:43 PM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> William Pietri wrote:
> >Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> >> [...]As long as this silly idea refuses to die, neither can my fervent
> >> opposition to it.
> >>
> > I regret that I feel the same way.
>
> And I share Dan's and William's chagrin.
>
> Something I've been struck by: we need to learn or re-learn,
> for today's Wikipedia, how to form consensus.  Back in the day
> I think we knew how to, but either we've forgotten, or the game
> has changed.
>
> A tiny minority of influential people on one side of a
> contentious issue can apparently keep it alive *forever*.
> We have to figure out how to settle these issues, and move on.
>
> I'm not a big player in any of these debates, but by way of
> example, I managed to do this in the case of spoiler warnings.
> I care almost as much about the spoiler warnings issue as the
> BADSITES issue.  I could easily be one of the tedious cranks
> that Snowspinner was just complaining about.  That spoiler
> warnings have been summarily eradicated is deeply wrong.
> But with apologies to Ken Arromdee, who I would have like to
> have supported in that fight, I decided I didn't care enough
> about the issue to keep arguing against the juggernaut that had
> somehow formed against it, so I turned my back and walked away.
>
> I'm not saying the solution is to walk away from things you care
> about.  But the BADSITES issue clearly will not die; we've got
> people on both sides who haven't budged an inch in their positions
> (myself included) and who are apparently willing to trot out the
> same arguments in endless repetetition until the cows come home.
> We've all got to get off that treadmill somehow.

I don't think that's accurate. It is only people who are against
BADSITES who continually trot it out so they can flail against it; it
is the convenient strawman it always was, since it was first created
as a strawman.The history of the proposed "alternative" to BADSITES,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_harassment
, is also fascinating. It turns out that the two main authors
of the policy, BenB4 and Privatemusings, are banned sockpuppets. In
fact, 58% of the edits to the page are by banned editors, mostly
sockpuppets, another 18% are by an ip editor, and another 4% by the
people who most often bring up the BADSITES strawman, Alecmconroy and
Dtobias, for a total of 80%. Though the latter two didn't contribute
much to the actual writing, they certainly dominated the Talk: page -
Alec made 24 edits to the Talk: page and Dan made 162. So we have now
reached the point where policies are essentially being written by
banned editors, sockpuppets, IP editors, and people who oppose the
policy they are writing. And even that "alternative" has apparently
today been unilaterally rejected by a new IP editor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/86.148.219.194

BADSITES has proven to be an extremely convenient way of distracting
attention from the real issues regarding offsite harassment and
non-encyclopedic links; I suspect it has worked even better than its
author ever dreamed it would.