Quoting Will Beback <will.beback.1(a)gmail.com>om>:
joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu wrote:
The problem with spam links at all is that even a
few of them make
people less
likely to trust whether the external links provided are useful.
Yes, that's
exactly the point. More is not better. Including links that
offer slight benefit lowers the quality of the the entire collection.
Articles are usually better with fewer links, and editors who go through
and clear out excess external links are often thanked. Links aren't
sacred: we add the ones we think are best and cull the rest.
Yes, but letting our personal goals get in the way isn't a good thing.
As long as the
page which happens to have an attack on
the Wikipedian is a relevant external link it is better and doing
less damage
to the article than a link about buying cars or a random blog.
Whoa, is that
really what you mean? You'd defend the link to a webpage
that contains harassment of a Wikipedia editors just because it was
somewhat relevant to an article topic? And you think that such links
are less harmful to Wikipedia than other, non-harassing blogs? I think
we must be mis-communicating.
"Somewhat relevant" may be too low a standard here. If we have another
link that
could just as well go in the section that isn't there obviously we should
replace it. For many articles we have many good links about the same
issues and
we can't include them all. In those cases, when we have no other way of
deciding, I don't see anything wrong with deciding based on harrassement
concerns. However, we're not talking about somewhat relevant links, we're
talking about links to the official sites of the subjects.
And the vast
majority, most likely all, the damage from harassing links will
occur whether
or not we link to the website. The end result of this also is to remove more
and more to prevent harassement. For example, if someone keeps harassing an
editor until the person's article is deleted, do we delete it? No, not
any more
than we would if the person in question had politely asked for their
article to
be removed as one of borderline notability. Nor do we make convenience
alterations and remove pertinent information of notable people
simply to stop
their little campaigns on Wikipedia. We do remove information when the
sourcing
is questionable, but that's basically it. And there's no substantial
difference
changing that policy whether we change it for birthdates, external links,
sourced criticism or anything else.
You are seriously misinformed about the extent
of deletions made through
the OTRS process. We quietly remove large amounts of sourced material,
even whole, highly sourced articles.
I'm not misinformed. I should have added something like " content that is
well-sourced but the individuals are not major public figures and would likely
get deleted if it went to AfD, or they are such major public figures that we
need to bow to them, minor well-sourced details about public figures that were
not widely reported and maybe a handful of other circumstances" I've not done
OTRS work, but in the times I've been peripherally or incidentally involved
with OTRS, the reasoning for removals has generally been good, and when the
person was genuinely notable a replacement article was eventually created that
was often very similar to the original content.
And if we're really deleting much more than that we have much more serious
problems than the external links policy.