On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:57:43 -0500, "The Mangoe"
<the.mangoe(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Not much of a cabal, then, is it? Obviously you
should stop
> worrying so much about it.
If the BADSITES faction is as ineffective as the
WR-ites, that doesn't
prevent either of them from making a real nuisance of themselves over
this.
Not sure what you mean. I find that the BADSITES activists - i.e.
the ones who reflexively revert any removal of links with hysterical
cries of BADSITES! - are almost always a major contributor and
enabler of drama.
The single most frustrating thing I find about editing
is having
to watch articles. It's one of the reasons I've taken to writing
articles that, on some level, could be called trivial: nobody has much
of an urge to come along and trash them. I have one article which I
have to watch simply because the same person will come along every few
months and revert it to his heavily POV and from what I can tell
inaccurate version; when I finally grow tired of it, I have to assume
that the article will revert to his version unless someone else is
willing to take up watch for me.
It was ever thus. This with a POV to push are more motivated than
those who work to keep the article neutral.
What BADSITES means is that any article which has an
external link
(including citations) to something less inarguable than a major media
source is vulnerable to that site putting up content to which a
BADSITES proponent objects. It's just one more kind of damage to be
watched for, and when it occurs, to get into a time-wasting spat
about, without regard to the many occaisions on which the community
has stated a consensus against it.
And this has happened.... less than six times. That's around one
quarter of one thousandth of one percent of all articles. Compared
with the number that will suffer blatant vandalism, POV pushing,
edits seeking to damage the reputation of unpopular living
individuals... it's a problem not worth worrying about on anything
like the scale you represent.
I don't think there is really a cabal, in spite of
what we have heard
about the "sooper seekrit" mailing list. But there obviously is a
group of people who aren't going to let BADSITES die
One person, anyway. Dan Tobias. Some of us have moved on.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG