[WikiEN-l] Is Slate an attack site?

[Phil Sandifer]

On Oct 11, 2007, at 6:16 AM, fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote:

>
> I think that's an accurate impression. They take it in. Hook, line  
> and sinker.

And why shouldn't they? It's not like we give them a single reason  
not to.

At this point, the claim has been raised in multiple high-profile  
sources, and now in a reliable source. Yes, we know Brandt is a  
nutter. But we are a very small percentage of the Wikipedia userbase,  
little yet of the world. And the censorious approach we have taken on  
this matter, led mostly by SlimVirgin herself, is increasingly  
proving idiotic at best and disastrous at worst.

Seriously. This entire problem would have gone away if SlimVirgin  
hadn't been so idiotically thin skinned about it and had actually  
made some sort of fucking comment on the subject instead of trying to  
suppress the entire discussion. And, because SlimVirgin is a friend  
of many of us, far too many of us (myself included) went along with  
her poor judgment and deferred to her desire for privacy by aiding in  
removing all mentions of this accusation. That was wrong of us, and  
that bad judgment has bitten us on the ass several times already.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that Brandt, Bagley, or any other  
nutjob running an attack site be taken seriously. But we can do a  
better job of confronting them than removing all links to them. If  
somebody who is smart enough and respected enough to write the  
headline story for Slate can fall for Brandt's shit, it's probably  
time for us to wake up and realize that Brandt is pretty good at what  
he does, and needs a response beyond censorship.

But no. Instead we have a member of the arbitration committee  
advocating a policy that has already shown itself to be idiotic at  
best and disastrous at worst.

-Phil