[WikiEN-l] Is Slate an attack site?

[William Pietri]

fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote:
> However, John, including this link on our mailing list, or linking to it from within Wikipedia is quite mischievous. Do you believe that pile of crap? Or feel drawing attention to it somehow aids Wikipedia?
>   

Fred, your response here is exactly the reason I think we shouldn't have 
a BADSITES policy, even the unwritten one we seem to have ended up with.

John has raised a legitimate question, one also unanswered in my mind. 
You respond by impugning his character and/or his judgement -- in my 
view, without cause or benefit. However reasonable it is to try to 
suppress potentially harmful information on a small scale, your good 
intentions have led you into a reductio ad absurdum position where you 
are trying to suppress it on ever-larger scales.

Neither you nor Wikipedia has the power necessary to achieve your goal 
in this case. Any idiot with Google can find the information you are 
hoping to stamp out. Research and long experience prove that trying to 
suppress information both makes it more appealing and more persuasive, 
so your efforts aren't just in vain, they are counterproductive. The 
only reason I learned about it was all this drama, and I imagine that 
goes for a lot of people -- possibly including the Slate author.

Now Slashdot, a major tech news site, and Slate, a major general 
audience web publication owned by the Washington Post, have both 
mentioned this. It's time for all concerned to accept that the cat is 
not just out of the bag, but that the bag is in tatters and the cat has 
had a liter of healthy kittens that are now roving the alleys.

I think the real shame here is that this particular case has poisoned 
the well for your efforts to protect people, possibly for a long time.

No serious Wikipedia participant is interested in exposing anonymous 
editors for thrills, or supporting the barking loons that latch on to 
Wikipedia as the source of all their troubles. By trying ever harder to 
keep anybody anywhere from talking about SV, you and others have 
convinced a lot of people that no information-suppression policy could 
ever work. By overreaching so dramatically, I believe you have reduced 
your ability to protect other anonymous editors. And that's a shame.

William


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri