On 12/11/05, J.F. de Wolff jfdwolff@doctors.org.uk wrote:
For the last several weeks there has been a low-grade edit war, spanning numerous articles, over the suitability of one particular site in the "external links" section. The site in question is http://www.whale.to - a privately maintained collection of information not limited to vaccination and basically critical/suspicious of basically everything. A brief look on the site will reveal it is not the voice of any organisation, professional body, or even some collective, but one person collecting extremist material. Whether the site has any significant following is unclear. The front page boasts a 1 million hits/year Alexa ranking. The pattern is predictable: a small group of anonymous users inserts the link (into [[chickenpox]], [[shaken baby syndrome]], [[MMR vaccine]] etc). Several registered editors remove these links. One user, [[User:Ombudsman]] systematically puts the links back. The cycle then repeats itself.
This has gone through RFC twice, first in an RFC directed at Ombudsman ([[WP:RFC/Ombudsman]]) and now as an article RFC at [[MMR vaccine]]. Leaving out comments by anonymous users, most are in agreement that it is a very poor resource and has no merits over links to organisations usually present in these articles. Ombudsman is not participating in this discussion. There have been personal attacks from anons, and of course the whine of "censorship" and "suppression of views" (manifestly not the cases as other critical links are not removed).
I am taking this to WikiEN-L because I am not sure how to proceed. RFC has been unsuccesful. I'm a bit hesitant to take this to RFAr. Does anyone have an idea how we could best arrive at solid consensus here? What constitutes a "suitable" external link? Do we give in to a small band of anons pushing a link? And if the link is deemed unsuitable, is there any way for automatically blocking the link through the spamlist?
It is very plainly spam. I suggest it be put on the spam blacklist.
-- Sam