Jimmy Wales wrote:
First, blogs-as-sources is already a tricky topic, but
there are of
course cases where a blog is a legitimate source. For example, if a
well known person blogs in response to a media controversy, that
particular blog post can be quite valid as a source for a sentence
saying "In a post to his personal blog, John Doe vigorously disputed the
allegations put forward by the New York Times."
Now suppose that same well-known person, in a completely different
matter, gets into some kind of squabble with a Wikipedian and uses their
blog as a weapon in that dispute. In some extreme cases (death threats?
libel? we could discuss...), there could be a reason to delink the blog
everywhere.
I don't see this being a reason even in extreme cases. If the person in
question posts a death threat or libel in some other completely
unrelated blog posting, how does that in any way affect the fact that he
"vigorously disputed the allegations put forward by the New York Times"
in the original blog posting being used as a reference?
Or, in case of a redirect to an attack page, there is
absolutely a reason to delink the blog (because the link is no longer
valid).
That's already covered by existing guidelines. The procedure when a
reference URL changes to something other than the referenced text is to
try to find the old version in
archive.org, or otherwise "fix" it. If it
can't be found anywhere, though, we still don't remove the reference but
rather record the date that the original link was found to be inactive;
even inactive, it still records the sources that were used, and it is
possible hard copies of such references may exist, or alternatively that
the page will turn up in the near future in the Internet Archive, which
deliberately lags by six months or more.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CITE#What_to_do_when_a_reference_link_.22goes_dead.22>
I suppose if the "dead" link goes to something actively misleading
instead of just a standard 404 page one should deactivate the link,
though, to make sure readers notice the fact that it's not the material
that was originally referenced.