Quoting Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com:
joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
The problem with spam links at all is that even a few of them make people less likely to trust whether the external links provided are useful.
Yes, that's exactly the point. More is not better. Including links that offer slight benefit lowers the quality of the the entire collection. Articles are usually better with fewer links, and editors who go through and clear out excess external links are often thanked. Links aren't sacred: we add the ones we think are best and cull the rest.
Yes, but letting our personal goals get in the way isn't a good thing.
As long as the page which happens to have an attack on the Wikipedian is a relevant external link it is better and doing less damage to the article than a link about buying cars or a random blog.
Whoa, is that really what you mean? You'd defend the link to a webpage that contains harassment of a Wikipedia editors just because it was somewhat relevant to an article topic? And you think that such links are less harmful to Wikipedia than other, non-harassing blogs? I think we must be mis-communicating.
"Somewhat relevant" may be too low a standard here. If we have another link that could just as well go in the section that isn't there obviously we should replace it. For many articles we have many good links about the same issues and we can't include them all. In those cases, when we have no other way of deciding, I don't see anything wrong with deciding based on harrassement concerns. However, we're not talking about somewhat relevant links, we're talking about links to the official sites of the subjects.
And the vast majority, most likely all, the damage from harassing links will occur whether or not we link to the website. The end result of this also is to remove more and more to prevent harassement. For example, if someone keeps harassing an editor until the person's article is deleted, do we delete it? No, not any more than we would if the person in question had politely asked for their article to be removed as one of borderline notability. Nor do we make convenience alterations and remove pertinent information of notable people simply to stop their little campaigns on Wikipedia. We do remove information when the sourcing is questionable, but that's basically it. And there's no substantial difference changing that policy whether we change it for birthdates, external links, sourced criticism or anything else.
You are seriously misinformed about the extent of deletions made through the OTRS process. We quietly remove large amounts of sourced material, even whole, highly sourced articles.
I'm not misinformed. I should have added something like " content that is well-sourced but the individuals are not major public figures and would likely get deleted if it went to AfD, or they are such major public figures that we need to bow to them, minor well-sourced details about public figures that were not widely reported and maybe a handful of other circumstances" I've not done OTRS work, but in the times I've been peripherally or incidentally involved with OTRS, the reasoning for removals has generally been good, and when the person was genuinely notable a replacement article was eventually created that was often very similar to the original content.
And if we're really deleting much more than that we have much more serious problems than the external links policy.