On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:57:43 -0500, "The Mangoe" the.mangoe@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)