It is about time that meta gets its process act together. Meta administrators and stewards are largely unanswerable to anyone. The Wikipedia ArbComm ruled that the spam blacklist was not to be used for content control. (I.e., "fringe" is not an argument that should support a blacklisting.) But this is completely ignored at meta, it's outside of ArbComm's "remit," and I saw that even the most abusive blacklistings, where the links being added were actually positive contributions, were sustained on review. Basically, it's Moulton's maxim: bureaucracies don't correct their own errors. To do so would be to admit error.

(The large majority of blacklistings that I've seen were appropriate. But that makes it all the more important to have an independent review process, to deal with the exceptions.)

If anyone wants to look at this, there are two sites in particular that remain on the global blacklist. I'm sure there are many other examples.

lyrikline.org. This was locally whitelisted on en.wip as a result of my work. (more accurately, the english language interface was whitelisted.) I never finished the job of replacing all the links that had been summarily deleted by a blacklist volunteer. No evidence was presented of even a single truly inappropriate link. The blacklisting "discussion." Lyrikline.org is a library of readings from prominent poets, from all over the world. It's supported by the German government. It has won awards for its work, and is extraordinarily useful as a source or external link for articles on the many poets represented there.

A study of the lyrikline blacklisting is at User:Abd/Blacklist/lyrikline.org.

Denial of delisting request. Notice charges of copyvio, which are preposterous for this site." In other words, a person, seeing this as a very useful site to link to, worked hard (as covered in my page on the history of this) to do it, and was slapped down, blocked, and the site blacklisted. De.wikipedia went on to whitelist the site, and since it is hosted in Germany, one would think they would know! It was also effectively whitelisted on en.wp.

Denial of delisting request. Notice that "excessive link placement" is the only evidence presented of "spamming.

lenr-canr.org. This was originally blacklisted on en.wp JzG, in a manner that was covered in RfAr/Abd and JzG. This was the decision where ArbComm ruled that the blacklist was not to be used for content control. However, when JzG was challenged on en.wp over his blacklisting, he rushed to meta and requested global blacklisting, which was granted. He made a series of false, deceptive, highly misleading arguments, such as calling the signature of the site owner Jed Rothwell, a long-time critic of JzG, "spam," implying that these were links. They weren't links at all. In other words, the primary evidence of "spamming" was not links at all, but just Jed identifying himself as "librarian, lenr-canr.org," editing as IP, and these edits, for the future, would not be interdicted by the blacklist at all.

What was interdicted was the legitimate usage of lenr-canr.org as a source of convenience links to published papers, hosted there with permission. If, out of the thousand peer-reviewed papers there, there is one true copyvio, it's possible, but not terribly likely. (Jed Rothwell normally obtains permission from both publishers and authors before hosting, but there are some prominent authors in the field where they have given permission, Jed has requested confirmation from the publisher, who did not respond. Jed is nonprofit and the most he would suffer, if the publisher truly didn't want him to host the document, is a take-down notice. Which hasn't happened. But that condition isn't the norm, affecting at most a couple of pages, not nearly enough to justify blacklisting the site.)

I was able to get many pages on the site whitelisted on en.wikipedia. Whitelisting was denied, as I recall, for only one page, and this was because of some unclarity like that mentioned above. That page looked like it might be copyvio. Technically, though, to legally prohibit linking to a page, it must be *known* that it is copyvio. There would be no risk, but I did not push the issue of this one page, I was much more concerned about the bulk.

A huge amount of evidence could be presented on this one. For another day, another place, perhaps.

Wikipediots don't enjoy fancy poetry, and they don't believe in cold fusion, nor even wish to entertain the concept of cold fusion. Therefore, no links to those sites.

Arggh. I defintely edited the other post to blank it.... so I'm restoring this from my browser history. This is the edited post I wanted to keep.

Well, actually, this isn't about Wikipediots. Wikipedia process decided to whitelist lyrikline.org, and I got all the links to lenr-canr.org I asked for, but one, whitelisted. It's meta I'm talking about, which doesn't have the relatively open processes of Wikipedia.

Maybe if someone is highly experienced at meta, there is a way, but it's looking to me like there are highly experienced users there who are also frustrated.

The default structure punishes anyone who actually speaks up, if they later come up for consideration for privileges. It's that high supermajority approval, without any balancing ease of removal, that whacks the community upside the head, long-term.

Supermajority approval is a poor standard, guaranteed to long-term imbalance the privileged core.

Anyway, about poetry. My favorite from lyrkiline, a poem by Chirikure Chirikure

Hakurarwi.

The full lyrikline page is linked now, from the Wikpedia article, and you can listen to him read the poem, click the right-arrow by the name of the poem. These recordings were generally made specially for Lyrikline. They are copyrighted. By them. See the FAQ.

Spam? Hah! Copyright violation? Those meta administrators are basically idiots, if there are exceptions, they are useless because they are not restraining their colleagues. So far, reviewing the prior use of lyrikline links, I found not one that was actually inappropriate, and the arguments that were on occasion presented by admins were *content arguments,* i.e., that a page in a language other than that of the encyclopedia would be useless and must therefore be spam. No, when one reads an article on a poet, to be able to hear the language of the poet, and to see actual poetry, is valuable no matter what the language.

Here is my working page on Lyrikline poets. Need some mainspace edits? Easy peasy. The pages where I already added a link are in italics. A typical external link is at the top. Originally, I asked about these links on the Talk pages and on WikiProject Poetry. I stopped doing that because there was never an objection. Mostly the WikiProjects are dead, though. If you add a huge pile of links on one day, you might attract the linkspam patrol. Be sure to stop immediately! But you have the entire sorry story to point to if you want to. There are now many lyrikline links standing on Wikipedia. I don't know if any have been removed since the "antispam" people went around vandalizing. Without discussion, of course. Fighting Spam takes precedence over Assume Good Faith (they used to be even more direct about saying that) and Content.

The redlinks represent a notable poet, who has a biography on lyrikline. Lyrikline content is copyrighted, so don't just copy it. But the bio there and references should help find material, if you want to create some articles. Lyrikline, contrary to what the spamlist idiots claimed, is not "self-published," it is all "curated" work. You can't just submit your poems to lyrikline, they won't even look at them, they claim.

See the Wikipedia article for a description of lyrikline.org.

By the way, follow the link given for lyrikline in the article. Then copy the current address from the browser address bar into the Wikipedia:Sandbox and try to save it. It won't fly. That's because lyrikline has changed their system a little and the whitelisted address for the english language homepage is not longer what it's redirected to there. Many users trying to use lyrikline links are going to run into this and the vast majority will give up. The blacklist is damaging content, and that is continuing to be the case. The whole site should have been whitelisted on WP, but the admin wanted to preserve some shred of "correctness" to the blacklisting, and bought the language argument.

Like he should overrule, in advance, any editor who thinks differently. They do this all the time, see MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist and MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist

For example, this. The blacklist is the wrong tool. There are other possible ways to deal with commonly-abused sources. However, if the blacklist is used, I argued that any registered editor should be able to request whitelisting of a link for use in a specific article, it should not routinely be debated. At that point the cabal editors complained that I was not minding my own business by getting involved with the whitelisting process... I was trying to make it easier. But admins like Stifle (what a name!) like that they can make generic content decisions that most editors have no clue about how to appeal.

They will, by the way, blacklist a site and then later use the absence of links as proof that the site is useless....

(blanked duplicate post. mods?)

I also see that I put this in completely the wrong place. Bad day.