[WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 52, Issue 136

[The Mangoe]

On Nov 23, 2007 5:16 PM, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:

> Wait a minute.  You are attributing all fault to one side here.  A
> big part of the problem is also the absolute determination of a
> small number of people - the most prominent of whom are actually
> members of WR and ED - to protect the right to link to sites which
> just about everybody agrees are of negligible;e to zero value as
> sources for encyclopaedic content.

Must we recapitulate this? It is certainly true that Dan T. and I have
accounts on WR, and that Dan is still moderately active there (I am
not, as I tired of having to wade through Jon Aubrey's fake
incoherence to find anything worth reading, much less responding to).
We would never have looked at WR in the first place if the controversy
hadn't arisen, since we would not have needed to confirm that the
erasures were legitimate (and in the case I was monitoring, it
manifestly wasn't).

Encyclopedic content is where you find it, so I have no truck with a
whole-site assessment. Even openly hostile sites such as WR are
potentially the source of useful material. There's a lto more that
could be said, and we've said it many times, and come to about the
same end each time. But the seeming consensus around LIKELOVE has
nonetheless been undercut by MONGO going in and putting much the same
old verbiage into NPA.

> >Well, and nobody put a gun to WIll Beback's head and made him
> >vandalize every article using TNH as a reference either.

> You what?

Come now. I cannot believe you are unaware that one round of this was
initiated by Will Beback erasing links to 21 articles referencing
Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog because it was an "attack site" (i.e.,
there was a one line comment giving his supposed real name).

> Er, but it *is* us versus the lawless them.  They are banned, but
> they keep coming back and vandalising Wikipedia.

The problem is that the "them" in this case consists of anyone who
criticizes Wikipedia and doesn't play by Wikipedia's rules in doing
so. One can only expect that such sites are going to criticize
Wikipedia by their own standards, both for research and composition,
and for conduct.

I can understand that the core WR group is pestilential. Overreaction
against them, however, simply advances their cause.

> I was running internet seminars in 1995, which was pretty early in
> the UK's net use.

I go back to usenet around 1985.

> But you are concerned about a problem that essentially does not
> exist.  The number of articles from which attack site links were
> improperly removed is, as far as I can make out, below 5.  Which is,
> what, one quarter of one thousandth of one percent of all articles?
> If only all our problems were that small!

Twenty-one is not five, and that's just the one incident. Nobody
really knows how many "legitimate" links to WR were erased because I
don't think anyone went to the trouble of checking all of DennyColt's
changes and recording what they found (and certainly not the many
erasures that have been made more recently). And really, all problems
involving any given editor or even admin are small, on that scale.
Even Jon Aubrey is a small problem, on that scale.

> It's a very small problem, and it's very easily solved, using the
> tried and tested [[WP:BRD]] model.  Rather than the
> [[WP:BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and argue endlessly]] model which seems
> to have prevailed more recently.

Don't you mean the "Bold/argue/rest-for-some-months/Bold-again"
formula? I dunno: perhaps the WP:LINKLOVE formula will work. But it
isn't going to work if someone comes along every few months and tries
to but BADSITES back into NPA.