On 9/18/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 18 Sep 2007 at 03:38:18 +0000, fredbaud@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.
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To follow this thread (if not particular post) up...
I don't have a strong opinion either way on BADSITES, but I'd like to agree with whichever arbcom member it was who pointed out that what was really needed was clarifying, not restating, the MONGO case precedent.
The state of confusion over where and when to remove things is the primary problem. We can't just leave it up to people's judgement; the criteria for applying the judgement (both in existing and so-far proposed decision in this new case) are too vague.