On 5/30/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 5/30/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote: Dan, would you be okay with this scenario? I today create a website that outs you, says where you live, and accuses you of being a pedophile, with some alleged examples. I then start a discussion about it on various project pages, and every time I mention it, I link to it. I'm careful not to link to the actual page that gives your details, so I'm not linking to a personal attack. I'm just linking to the main page, and I link here and I link there, I link everywhere, in an attempt to increase my readership.
Would you be okay with that?
Let's take it a bit further. Let's suppose I'm a reporter and I write an article about my experiment for a reliable source, and let's also suppose it's a very notable newspaper, but not a good one, and it lets me name the website in the article. I don't name you, but I also don't admit that I made up the pedophile allegation. I just present the creation of the website as an experiment; veracity of contents to be left to the reader.
Should someone then be able to create a Wikipedia article about my site, and link to it in that article so that it ends up in a prominent place in Google?
See, I'm pretty sure if that happened, you'd be howling, and rightly so.
Then try to imagine how you'd vote in an RfA for someone who called my website a "mixed bag," and who didn't want a ban on linking to it.
You can do that with me, if you'd like. If someone libels me, it's -my- responsibility to sue them and require them to change that, not everyone else in the world's responsibility to avoid reporting on the incident. Now, of course, if a website is unreliable, it's unreliable. Web forums are unreliable, but we still might link to them in an article on the forum itself.
Okay Todd, but you're not addressing the first part of the thought experiment. What if there was no article, no reliable source, but I just kept raising the issue in Wikipedia project space whenever I could, and every time I raised it, I linked to the site which named you, gave your location, and called you a pedophile. You'd be okay with that?