Thank you, Mr. Escher.
The text was actually deleted because engineer_comp_geek was being cautious about possible copyright violation, as he should be. My point was merely that nothing was really lost by cutting the text and leaving the link. You shouldn’t read anything into it beyond that.
Let’s look more closely at the statement you quoted, in particular, the pronoun it. To what does that pronoun refer? You seem to think the pronoun refers to Lukeinva’s post as a whole, but it does not. Look again at Colibri’s post, it’s post 6 in this thread.
The it refers to “copy-pasted wall of equations”. So reading the statement in context, what Colibri said was, “Regardless of the copyright issue, <snip> [the copy-pasted wall of equations] was virtually useless as an answer to the OP”.
And again, all that was removed was some lengthy quoted material, with a link to the original still intact. You seem to be making a mountain out of a speck of dust.
You know darn well that goes against the very spirit of ATMB. 
Colibri’s Law:
In ATMB, any comment by a moderator that can be misinterpreted, will be misinterpreted.
Corollary: Even if it can’t be misinterpreted, it will be.
So, you’re saying you DON’T like your chicken wings blackened?
You might call that a “Law,” but in point of fact that’s just an ATMB comment. So…
FTR, better put, FthefutureR, I am the OP of the thread in question, and wondered about the long post myself, and ultimately appreciated it as valuable 1) within the thread and 2) for the time and intellect applied to discriminate relevant information (in his estimation). I do have more comments on this to throw on the woodpile–I’m thinking of its relevance to “what I appreciate in an SD poster” thread-- when I get up the energy. (Surely now anticipation must be unbearable…)
I smell an IMHO topic in those quotes.
I just wonder why you can’t just do what you decided to do with the NIV and just post the required extra information that would make the quotations legal.
I believe the answer to that has already been given in this thread several times: It is easier just to have one standard rule covering any/all quotes from any/all sources.
I was under the impression that posting a large block of content from elsewhere was frowned upon anyway, particularly, but not only, if the poster is repeating something they’ve posted elsewhere on the internet.
As for copyright issues, it’s not hard to imagine how exceeding fair use standards quoting a Wiki article might lead to difficulties even if Wiki itself is copyright-free. Our posts become the property of the Chicago Reader, so what ensues if the author of the Wikipedia article decides to use that content in a later work? I’m not saying it’s anything other than far-fetched, but the possibility exists.
No, they don’t. We give the Reader a non-exclusive license to reuse our posts, in a book e.g. We retain copyright over our own words and we can use our own words in any way we like, just as with anything else we write. Quoted material remains the property of the original writer, period. Quoting someone else’s work gives the Reader absolutely nothing that it wouldn’t have otherwise.