[WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 18 Sep 2007 at 03:38:18 +0000, fredbaud at waterwiki.info wrote:

> Now, I'm not kidding...
> 
> What are the major issues?

Have you read the workshop and evidence pages, and their talk pages?  
The issues have been debated heavily there.

The way I see it, it's a debate about the basic nature of the 
Wikipedia community...  Are we going to be a free and open community 
unafraid of exploring, researching, and discussing every issue 
including criticism of ourselves, or are we going to bury our heads 
in the sand and be afraid of our own shadows?  Are we able to take in 
good stride the broad spectrum of opinion about Wikipedia itself as 
well as every other subject, or are we a mind-control cult that 
excommunicates people it doesn't like and declares them unpersons, in 
order to kill the messenger who brings ideas distasteful to some of 
us?  Are we a community based on consensus hashed out in free-
spirited discussion, or a repressed and secretive group with a rigid 
hierarchy and lots of landmines and third-rails in the form of taboo 
topics for discussion?

Unfortunately, your proposed findings in this case don't give me much 
hope for an outcome that won't lead me to lose interest in 
participating in and supporting Wikipedia.  Your "Salt the Earth" 
remedy is utterly repugnant to the spirit of what Wikipedia aspires 
to be.  Your idea of banning all references to "the attack site" 
without actually saying what site you're talking about is downright 
Kafkaesque.  And your statement that "the community may not override 
a fundamental policy such as Wikipedia:No personal attacks" is 
absolutely and utterly wrongheaded.  NPA is definitely *not* a 
foundation issue; see

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_issues

NPA isn't there.  NPOV is, and that's a principle that many say 
contradicts the imposition of any absolutist link/reference bans.

Saying that NPA is a "fundamental policy" is like saying that a law 
against selling liquor on Sunday is a basic U.S. constitutional 
principle alongside freedom of speech, and can't be modified by the 
legislature or referendum; that's simply false.  NPA is a policy 
adopted by consensus; it can be modified, reinterpreted, tweaked, 
altered, limited, expanded, or even abolished by consensus, so long 
as the actual foundation issues aren't impacted.

-- 
== Dan ==
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