joshua.zelinsky(a)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.
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.
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.
Will