[WikiEN-l] Unreliable sources, or no sources at all?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

Since I'd at least like to think of myself as not one of those 
classic trolls who are unwilling to listen to others or admit that 
I'm sometimes wrong, I'll admit now to probably overreacting in this 
case, and being too quick to find slippery slopes where they might 
not really exist.  I still think the other side could have done 
better at explaining in a logical way why that particular site needed 
to be purged, and to consider that I might possibly also have a point 
too, and not just be trolling to be disruptive, even if I might not 
have been right this time.

Giving a clear explanation that somebody was insidiously spamming 
that link and it needed to be blacklisted would have worked better 
with me than the seemingly vague and shifting rationales that people 
were actually giving in the debate, about it being an unreliable 
source (irrelevant when it came to removing links from discussion 
archives), it being a copyvio (maybe true, but the only proof they 
were showing was a boilerplate disclaimer in the site about not 
having copyright permission, but the identical text is used in many 
sites, some of which have valid fair use purpose), and it being spam 
(but even non-spammed links to it were being purged).  It seemed like 
the explanations were being made up on an ad hoc basis so people 
could justify what their friend was doing.

My point, that making exceptions to the normal principle against 
editing others' comments in discussion was potentially dangerous, and 
was just the mindset that led to stuff like BADSITES, even if 
mistaken in this case, was never considered to be in any way a 
serious point rather than an irrelevant troll.
-- 
== Dan ==
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