On 22/03/2008, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
large numbers of these. A search on *.tripod.com, for example, gives 10,000+ links, many of which are being used as references. africanelections.tripod.com alone is linked to 484 articles, and is being presented as a source in multiple templates.
At a glance, that site appears to be an excellent example of why simply mass-delinking Geocities and Tripod is a bad move - yes, it's a self-published resource, but it's a fairly serious and well-intended one; it seems to be on Tripod because the author finds that convenient.
A vast amount of the stuff on these sites is fluff, and I agree entirely it's a good idea to use the hosting as a bit of advisory information when you're looking at a link. But simply insisting on a blanket ban on *hosting sites* - not even on individual websites! - as inherently unreliable is... not helpful.
If he'd gone off and got some more discreet web hosting and put the site up as "africanelectoralresults.org", well, we wouldn't be proposing this. But the inherent reliability of the site wouldn't have changed one bit.