Slim Virgin wrote:
On 5/30/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name>
wrote:
As others have said, it's not as a source in
an article that anybody
has been or intends on using that site (except perhaps for a future
article on the site itself, if it should become sufficiently notable,
or maybe on [[Criticisms of Wikipedia]] -- the sole thing that it
would ever be a source for would be about itself and the views
espoused by its participants).
Dan, would you be okay with this scenario? I today create a website
that outs you, says where you live, and accuses you of being a
pedophile, with some alleged examples. I then start a discussion about
it on various project pages, and every time I mention it, I link to
it. I'm careful not to link to the actual page that gives your
details, so I'm not linking to a personal attack. I'm just linking to
the main page, and I link here and I link there, I link everywhere, in
an attempt to increase my readership.
Would you be okay with that?
Let's take it a bit further. Let's suppose I'm a reporter and I write
an article about my experiment for a reliable source, and let's also
suppose it's a very notable newspaper, but not a good one, and it lets
me name the website in the article. I don't name you, but I also don't
admit that I made up the pedophile allegation. I just present the
creation of the website as an experiment; veracity of contents to be
left to the reader.
Should someone then be able to create a Wikipedia article about my
site, and link to it in that article so that it ends up in a prominent
place in Google?
See, I'm pretty sure if that happened, you'd be howling, and rightly so.
Then try to imagine how you'd vote in an RfA for someone who called my
website a "mixed bag," and who didn't want a ban on linking to it.
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You can do that with me, if you'd like. If someone libels me, it's -my-
responsibility to sue them and require them to change that, not everyone
else in the world's responsibility to avoid reporting on the incident.
Now, of course, if a website is unreliable, it's unreliable. Web forums
are unreliable, but we still might link to them in an article on the
forum itself. If the forum itself is notable, we do that. Even if it's a
nasty, vicious forum, if it's been reported in other reliable sources,
we report on it. That's what you signed up for.
Now, of course, if little or no source material exists besides the forum
itself, it's inappropriate to have an article on it. That's true whether
it's a forum that discusses cute fluffy bunnies or real-life identities
and attacks on people. But if many reliable sources exist, it -is-
appropriate to have an article on it. That's true whether it's a forum
that discusses cute fluffy bunnies or real-life identities and attacks
on people.
NPOV means -no exceptions-. And that includes if we DONTLIKEIT.