charles.r.matthews wrote:
Delirium wrote
If the already absurd BADSITES policy (and
friends) is going to drive itself off a cliff and now prohibit links to
any sites that, through n degrees of link traversal, may *indirectly*
reach objectionable material, then we might as well just turn off
external links entirely.
Making "attack" transitive does has this effect. So it's not a great
theoretical position, to state that any link to an attack is an attack. The conclusion,
from some time ago in my case, that the "attack" language is not useful for
describing how hypertext works. We should, as ever, look at intentions of WP editors in
linking, and look also at how any link contributes to the mission. Stick with
"don't link to junk" and "don't link in order to harass".
Charles
Hi Charles and everyone,
In a hypothetical case, if an editor is (has been) using her/his edits
to sustain a _particular_ viewpoint, perhaps at odds with the truth, in
articles about a tragedy which happened years ago but of international
significance, and it later turns out that that he/she was closely
involved with the tragedy and people *at the time* suspected his/her
motivation then it surely is of benefit to the mission to investigate
whether there may have been any cover-up by people who are in a position
to obliterate edit histories of articles. It should thus be a simple
matter to lay that particular hypothetical conspiracy theory to rest (a
theory similar to one I've heard repeated on several occasions in the
SlimVirgin case), if it was only a conspiracy.
The broader question of editor motivation is one that should hopefully
be dealt with sensibly by the wiki concept itself, and yes intentions,
whether to benefit the project or to harm it, are of great importance.