Armed Blowfish wrote
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Are we here to work on the encyclopedia, or not? Very importantly, do we allow naked politics on the site? By that I mean, do we stay with allowing criticism of actions on the site (which has always been permitted), or would it be OK to impute motives and attack those, blacken people's reputations, and so on? If so, exactly what good would come of it?
Charles
Erm, the latter is already done, extensively, regularly and self-righteously.
That would be against policy, then. I'm against it. It sounds as if you are, too.
Every time you call someone a troll, you are implying that person's intent is to get a negative reaction.
On WP, calling someone a troll is way past violating WP:CIVIL.
Clueless newbie edits are regularly labelled as vandalism - which means intentional defacement of Wikipaedia.
The V-word should be used economically. I had a very interesting example, where a net nanny was producing apparent vandal edits for someone. Fortunately I didn't leap to conclusions, there.
Enforcement of the conflict of interest policy almost always involves negative speculation on people's motives.
I have repeatedly said that COI is not a reason to abandon AGF. It really isn't. People use it instrumentally, to try to win editing arguments, but they are in the wrong there.
And what is a sockpuppetry investigation but a search for hidden malice? Any time anyone does anything that a significant number of people don't like, that person's motives are guessed in the worse possible light.
A search for abusive sockpuppetry is a search for abuse, plain and simple. I don't accept this.
The majority of user-contributed websites are attack sites, since it is human nature to attack. Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of that isn't is DeviantArt. Yes, people do attack other people on DeviantArt, but they fullfill requests from representatives to take things down, no questions asked.
I have said that "attack site" is a useless classification. It is facile and prejudges just the issues that matter in assessing critical material.
Most places, however, will merely say no when you ask them to take something down and they don't want to. Wikipaedia and Encyclopaedia Dramatica are significant exceptions to this - they will very often make things worse in response to complaints. What makes Wikipaedia worse than Encyclopaedia Dramatica is its higher Google rankings and self-righteous attitude (those people deserve to be attacked and suffer, for the good of the encyclopaedia!) Encyclopaedia Dramatica, at least, merely has a rather negative sense of humour.
Well, WP is better than ED on just about everything except intention to shock and persecute. Think what you're saying a moment.
Charles
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