On 10/14/07, Will Beback <will.beback.1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I disagree that protecting our editors from harassment must come at a
cost to the encyclopedia's content. We remove links, sources, and
participants day and night in order to improve it. Let me compare this
to three other situations: spam, fan forums, and lawsuits.
I remove dozens of commercial spam links to every week. Arguably, those
many of those links could provide some benefit to readers. An article on
recreational vehicles may, in some folks mind, be improved by providing
links to stores selling RV accessories or used RVs. Yet we've decided
that commercial links are inappropriate because they would overwhelm the
articles and because they do not provide any actual content. Their harm
outweighs their good. Likewise, links to external harassment that drives
away valuable editors also cause more harm than good.
Is this an appropriate parallel to the official website of a famous person?
Fan forums and blogs are routinely deleted (with very few exceptions)
because they do not provide reliable information for
our readers whether
used as a source or for further reading. Forums and blogs that engage in
active harassment of editors of a reference work are even less reliable
as sources for that reference work.
So
michaelmoore.com is an unreliable source, period? Last time I checked
self-authored blogs were one of the few sources considered acceptable for
biographies.
Finally, we do not allow people who have said they are planning to sue
the WMF to edit Wikipedia because they have an
unavoidable conflict of
interest. So does someone using harassment. The person in charge of a
self-published site that is harassing Wikipedia editors is trying to
affect the project in inappropriate ways. We can't stop them from doing
so but we should not view them as neutral or even reliable sources while
they pursue their agenda against the project and its volunteers.
Ironically, it is just as arguable that the person being harassed has a
conflict of interest as well.
In all three of these cases restricting inappropriate links, sources,
and participation improves the encyclopedia instead of
harming it.
Nobody's disputing that in some cases, these restrictions improve the
encyclopaedia. To assert that we improve the encyclopaedia by removing links
to any blog or forum which harasses our editors is a bit of a stretch,
nevertheless. In most cases, we don't link to these sites because there is
no good reason to; you are now asserting we should go further and never link
to them even if there is a good reason to.
Johnleemk
W.
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