Quoting Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net:
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Will Beback wrote:
For some reason MichaelMoore.com seems to be the single example folks are interested in. But we also need a policy that can address non-celebrity blogs like ASM, forums like WP, wikis like ED, and any other self-published website that actively engages in harassing Wikipedia editor. Most of them are only usable as sources for themselves anyway, so the collateral damage of re-categorizing them as unreliable would be minimal.
However, that should not affect their use in talk pages, policy discussions, etc. (Though I suppose that technically they are being used as sources for themselves.)
I'm really tired of people saying "attack sites are unreliable sources for use in articles" and then using that to ban their use in places other than articles.
This doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a problem as the notion that attack sites are a priori unreliable. Michael Moore's website for example is a reliable source at minimum of what Moore thinks and likely of other things as well. We almost should not lose sight of the fundamental strangeness of having no links to MichaelMoore.com on [[Michael Moore]].
That said, I can more easily understand a ban on linking to problematic sites outside article space. In article space we may need them either for referencing or for external links. However, they don't serve nearly as useful a purpose on talk pages or elsewhere. The focus of the project is and always should be article space. What occurs in other spaces is only relevant in that context.