[WikiEN-l] BADSITES redux

[Steve Summit]

So, a couple threads over, the BADSITES debate is raging again.
One of the principals in the argument claims it's dead, and that
it's a non-issue because it was only ever a strawman proposed by
a sockpuppet or something, but it sure looks like a real
controversy, and smells like a real controversy, not to mention
the fact that it's still quacking and quacking and quacking.

Having followed some (but by no means all) of the interminable
debate, it seems to me it all boils down to three things:

1. If a link in article space is allegedly non-encyclopedic,
   it needs to be assessed according to WP:V or WP:RS or whatever
   the sourcing guideline du jour is.

2. If a link in non-article space serves to harass a Wikipedia
   editor, it needs to be dealt with in accordance with WP:NPA,
   which at times has (and IMO certainly should) treat such links
   just as seriously as on-wiki harassment.

3. If an off-wiki page, not linked to from article space
   or from non-article space, harasses a Wikipedia editor,
   it should either be ignored, or dealt with off-wiki.  Nothing
   we do on-wiki can punish an off-wiki harasser, or force the
   off-wiki harasser to remove their harassing words from the net.

Moreover, we need to keep these three cases -- especially
(1) and (2) -- *separate*.  In particular, the decision to keep
or remove an article-space link needs to be made on the basis
of that link's contributions to encyclopedic content, *without*
any confounding arguments about what the linked-to page (or some
other page on the linked-to site) might happen to say about a
Wikipedian.  Any attempt to conflate the two arguments invariably
leads -- as we've seen all too well -- to irreducible confusion.
(And has been pointed out, the number of pages that simultaneously
(a) provide useful encyclopedic content but (b) mention Wikepedia
editors -- in any light -- is really pretty vanishingly small.)

What we truly do not need -- which BADSITES promoted, but which
some people keep promoting under various guises -- is the notion
that off-wiki harassment of a Wikipedia editor is such an
uber-mortal sin that we should summarily ban all links to the
harassing page and/or the harassing site and/or sites that link
to the harassing page or the harassing site.  These extreme
sanctions, which involve trampling on various other cherished
Wikipedia policies and ideals, are what people were so upset
about with BADSITES.  But the fact that people keep taking about
(and exercising) similarly extreme sanctions is why BADSITES,
despite protestations to the contrary, is still alive, whether
under that name or some other.

The defenders of the policies-they-don't-want-called-BADSITES
keep claiming that their policies are not BADSITES, and that
BADSITES is dead, and that stubborn insistence on debating
BADSITES is distracting from the real work at hand.  But as long
as people keep using "abuse of Wikipedia editors!" as a factor in
trying to delete links that don't abuse Wikipedia editors, and
in trying to ban users who don't abuse Wikipedia editors, and in
particular in writing policy about all of this, the rest of us
are going to keep crying Foul!, and naming the foul "BADSITES",
because that's what it smells exactly like.

Yes, we need to protect our editors and save them from harm.
But we don't need to destroy the encyclopedia in order to save them.