With the recent influx of new posters who tend to dump long lists of "evidence", I'm considering instituting a "Gish Gallop" policy - whereby people making contentious claims have to make the claims one at a time, and back them up with evidence, and then wait for a response, and respond to the response, before moving on to the next claim.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
Too draconian? I'd really like some way of getting more focus. A Gish Gallop free zone.The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. Sam Harris describes the technique as "starting 10 fires in 10 minutes"
The formal debating jargon term for this is spreading. You can hear some mindboggling examples here. It arose as a way to throw as much rubbish into five minutes as possible. In response, some debate judges now limit number of arguments as well as time. However, in places where debating judges aren't there to call bullshit on the practice, like the internet, such techniques are remarkably common.