[WikiEN-l] Time to reboot wikien-l

[jayjg]

On Nov 21, 2007 10:09 AM, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Err, that should be reversed, Alec made 162 edits and Dan 24.