Alec Conroy wrote:
How would your policy prevent incidents like MakingLights and the MichaelMoore from happening again in the future?
It's a good idea to check any proposals against real-world incidents. But you should enlarge your list to cover more severe cases of harassment. The MichaelMoore issue barely even counts.
DISCLAIMER:
Just to remind us all, I'll recap the Making Lights saga, but I won't name the person who was involved, and I sincerely would ask everyone else not to criticize someone today for something they did months ago. Seriously. We've all made mistakes, they're over and done with, and I _sincerely_ am not trying to relive this past saga-- I just don't want to relive it in the future either.
Ordinarily, I'd use a hypothetical example here, but I've found that in this debate, hypothetical examples are invariably dismissed when someone says "Oh, that could never really happen". So I actually do have to use a real-world example if we're going to talk about this.
You protest too much. An example with more severe harassment would perhaps be more useful. Also, if you don't include the whole story then it doesn't make a good example.
Not coincidentally, you've picked a story that involves me. The fact that I'm an administrator has nothing to do with what happened, except that administrators are more likely to be the subject of harassment arising out of the actions they take on-Wiki. In this instance, working to maintain Wikipedia policies made me the target of a blogger prominent in the SciFi community. The blogger repeatedly asked me to stop interfering with her efforts to smear her opponents and to add positive material to the articles about herself, her husband, and their projects. When I persisted she turned to off-Wiki harassment, using her blog to first criticize using crude personal remarks, then to reveal private information. She found the information by digging through material deleted from Encyclopedia Dramatica - material ED had been conscientious enough to remove.
When I discovered the personal information I checked current WP policy and it said that links to attack sites may be removed without limit. I interpreted the combination of personal attacks and outing to be sufficient to categorize the blog as an attack site. I was probably wrong, based on the responses. I was also wrong in acting on my own as opposed to bringing it the community or at least an uninvolved editor. And it would have been far better to contact the blogger first to seek a diplomatic resolution, a resolution which was ultimately accomplished soon after.
The points I think we can take away from this is that we need a policy with clear definitions and clear procedures so that someone in my position knows how to proceed. It should include a procedure for having a 3rd party or group investigate the problem.
My questions for Will Beback, or anyone else in the future who proposes a new policy that forbids all links to "sites that contain attacks" are this:
#1. Do you agree that the Making Light case was an abuse of power (or at least, incorrect. .-- i.e. Do you agree Making lights should NOT have been purged)?
The blogger abused her power to harass Wikipedia editors. Should her self-published website have been removed as a result, or should she have been "rewarded" by adding more links to it?
#2. And if so, how will your new proposed policy prevent this sort of abuse when the old policy was unable to. That is-- if we all magically decided to enact your policy today, what's to stop you (or me, or anyone) from turning around tomorrow and having a complete repeat of this whole fiasco tomorrow.
Let me ask you - will your proposal prevent bloggers who edit Wikipedia from using their blogs to settle on-Wiki disputes?
-Will