William Pietri wrote:
Will Beback wrote:
[story snipped]
How should a policy deal with this situation? Should we maintain our
link to the chatboard (which could only used because it was the subject
of the article). Should we link to the harassment as an example of that
community's activism? Should we tell valued editor that the link is more
important than his privacy or well-being?
My view:
We should not alter article content one iota in response to external
badgering. The only thing that has changed is our view of them, not the
NPOV view of them. Ergo, we behave exactly as if they were harassing
Editors in good standing should be able to link to the harassment to the
extent that they believe it serves some legitimate purpose in
furtherance of Wikipedia's mission. If they are linking for some other
reason (e.g., or gossip or furthering the harassment) they should be
dealt with through our usual mechanisms for miscreants and the
clue-deficient.
We should tell the editor that we hope they understand that articles
should not be affected in any way by internet drama. To the extent that
the editor wants to take defensive legal action (like getting a
restraining order) we should support them.
Why would we support an editor in
getting a restraining order, but not
support them by doing any restraining ourselves? What form would this
support take?
And we should encourage them
to ask for a fellow editor to take over maintaining the article(s) in
question, hopefully from a pool of people with thick skins and
diplomatic skills.
So you're saying that if an editor is harassed by an outside group then
the editor (and Wikipedia) should give in to that harassment. And you
think that won't affect the POV of a topic? If a group succeeds in
driving off one editor after another, how many thick-skinned editors are
there willing to take their places?
And in my opinion, we should always reach out to the
offended party or
community to at least make nice, and hopefully to work with them to the
extent possible. A vast amount of this drama comes when all sides
believe that we should have a great encyclopedia, and they just have a
different idea of what that means than us. Often that's just because
we've thought about it for years and they've thought about it for minutes.
William
Let's think about it long enough to come up with a formal policy or
procedure to handle it. You make some good suggestions, but mail-list
posting don't write policies.
Will