[WikiEN-l] BADSITES redux

[Steve Summit]

Ec wrote:
> joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu wrote:
>> Let's be clear. Many of the links in question are harassing
>> Wikipedians by any reasonable definition. What Michael Moore
>> did was harassment pure and simple.
>
> It's wrong to pretend that your delusions are also those of others.

The call to arms against Wikipedia that appeared for a while on
Moore's homepage was deeply questionable, and impossible to
overlook.  And while I have no desire to reopen that debate, the
question for us as regards link removal in general is: if Michael
Moore (or any notable figure) does something deeply questionable
on his webpage, is it an appropriate sanction against that for
Wikipedia to remove links from [[Michael Moore]] to Michael
Moore's homepage?  To many of us, it's drop-dead obvious that
it's not appropriate (not to mention useless), but to others of
us, it's equally clear that it's a blatantly obvious thing to do.
It is difficult to reconcile these two viewpoints.

Michael Moore is not only a notable public figure, but what he's
notable for is being a troublemaker.  What he did to [[Roger B. Smith]]
was quite arguably harassment, but of course he's celebrated for it.
To the extent that Wikipedia has (a) become mainstream but (b) is
still fallible, it's quite natural for Moore to criticize us,
and in a characteristically Moorelike way.  It would actually be
wrong for Moore to *not* do that, so it becomes even harder (for
me, anyway) to argue that Moore deserves sanction for it at all,
let alone the ultimate death penalty of... having a link to his
homepage removed.

Suppose Roger B. Smith had a publicly-editable wiki or blog, and
Moore called on his readers to aggressively edit it.  Would that
be cause for us to delink Moore's homepage?  Suppose Moore called
for actual physical violence against Smith.  Would that be cause?
Suppose Moore posted Roger Smith's home address, and a picture of
him, and called down a fatwa of death against him.  Would that be
cause for us to delink Moore's homepage?

And then, of course, there's the question of harassment transitivity.
What Michael Moore did was harassment pure and simple, no question.
But does that mean that to link to Michael Moore's home page is
harassing of Wikipedians?  That's much harder to argue.