On 10/14/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/14/07, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
I disagree that protecting our editors from harassment must come at a cost to the encyclopedia's content. We remove links, sources, and participants day and night in order to improve it. Let me compare this to three other situations: spam, fan forums, and lawsuits.
I remove dozens of commercial spam links to every week. Arguably, those many of those links could provide some benefit to readers. An article on recreational vehicles may, in some folks mind, be improved by providing links to stores selling RV accessories or used RVs. Yet we've decided that commercial links are inappropriate because they would overwhelm the articles and because they do not provide any actual content. Their harm outweighs their good. Likewise, links to external harassment that drives away valuable editors also cause more harm than good.
Is this an appropriate parallel to the official website of a famous person?
Fan forums and blogs are routinely deleted (with very few exceptions)
because they do not provide reliable information for our readers whether used as a source or for further reading. Forums and blogs that engage in active harassment of editors of a reference work are even less reliable as sources for that reference work.
So michaelmoore.com is an unreliable source, period? Last time I checked self-authored blogs were one of the few sources considered acceptable for biographies.
Finally, we do not allow people who have said they are planning to sue
the WMF to edit Wikipedia because they have an unavoidable conflict of interest. So does someone using harassment. The person in charge of a self-published site that is harassing Wikipedia editors is trying to affect the project in inappropriate ways. We can't stop them from doing so but we should not view them as neutral or even reliable sources while they pursue their agenda against the project and its volunteers.
Ironically, it is just as arguable that the person being harassed has a conflict of interest as well.
In all three of these cases restricting inappropriate links, sources,
and participation improves the encyclopedia instead of harming it.
Nobody's disputing that in some cases, these restrictions improve the encyclopaedia. To assert that we improve the encyclopaedia by removing links to any blog or forum which harasses our editors is a bit of a stretch, nevertheless. In most cases, we don't link to these sites because there is no good reason to; you are now asserting we should go further and never link to them even if there is a good reason to.
Johnleemk
W.
This is in fact the case, there is simply no reason to link to most of these sites. In the case of the article on Michael Moore, the link is to a site BY the subject person of the article. It's like discussing Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn but never mentioning the title of the book because it's offensive.
We have plenty of other good, non-torturous reasons to not to link to blogs. They're not reliable sources of information. But if the article is about the blog, there should be a link to the blog that is being discussed.
If there is no reason to discuss the site, if it's not notorious, or famous, if there's no reason for it to be in Wikipedia, then there's no reason to link it.
Blogs are not reliable references for articles, they are opinion pieces.
If the blog is known and has an article, or the website is the official site of a celebrity, it should be linked. This is a cyberspace project, to pretend that cyberspace does not exist is just going to make us look ridiculous and lead to no end of conversations and bad behaviour and notoriety.
However, a victim of a stalker is not the equivalent of a stalker.
If someone is using Wikipedia as their medium for harrassing an Wikipedia editor, that doesn't make the Wikipedia editor who is being harrassed complicit in their victimhood and equally guilty of abusing Wikipedia.
To say say that because you're being stalked by another person who found you on Wikipedia gives you, the victim, a conflict of interest in Wikipedia empowers the stalker to the point of the ridiculous--it will make Wikipedia the favorite place in the known universe of stalkers everywhere to be granted their every dream: entangling the victim hopelessly without recourse and with plenty of blame in their lives. Do you realize that a stalker doesn't even have to know their victim's name to begin stalking them? Stalking takes place first in the mind of the stalker.
Stalkers count on being able to manipulate others besides their victim to create a tie where there is none. Assigning equal quilt for the problem of stalking to the victims is precisely what stalkers are seeking--there are seldom any crimes today where this is still done. It used to be everywhere, not just in some countries, that victims of rape are held culpable for being raped. This is the case in only a few countries, though. Most of the world today does not assign a victim guilt in the crime done to them. Stalking is abberant behaviour, and it is a crime. The victim is not the guilty party, and is not equal to their attacker in this.
The courts and the psychiatric community has long since realized that stalkers do not have to be aided by their victims, and that victims are not the cause of their being stalked. Please don't say that they have an arguably equal conflict of interest, when they don't have to ever engage their stalker in any way to be made a victim, whereas the stalker has to actively target and attempt to engage not just their victim, but the community on behalf of the stalker targetting the victim. Granting this to the stalker is way beyond acceptable.
KP