Steve Summit, you have made the following suggestions regarding links
to external harassment:
---------
1. If a link in article space is allegedly non-encyclopedic,
it needs to be assessed according to WP:V or WP:RS or whatever
the sourcing guideline du jour is.
2. If a link in non-article space serves to harass a Wikipedia
editor, it needs to be dealt with in accordance with WP:NPA,
which at times has (and IMO certainly should) treat such links
just as seriously as on-wiki harassment.
3. If an off-wiki page, not linked to from article space
or from non-article space, harasses a Wikipedia editor,
it should either be ignored, or dealt with off-wiki. Nothing
we do on-wiki can punish an off-wiki harasser, or force the
off-wiki harasser to remove their harassing words from the net.
Moreover, we need to keep these three cases -- especially
(1) and (2) -- *separate*. In particular, the decision to keep
or remove an article-space link needs to be made on the basis
of that link's contributions to encyclopedic content, *without*
any confounding arguments about what the linked-to page (or some
other page on the linked-to site) might happen to say about a
Wikipedian. Any attempt to conflate the two arguments invariably
leads -- as we've seen all too well -- to irreducible confusion.
(And has been pointed out, the number of pages that simultaneously
(a) provide useful encyclopedic content but (b) mention Wikepedia
editors -- in any light -- is really pretty vanishingly small.)
--------
Currently a number of editors are working on a guideline to deal with
this issue, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_harassment
What, if any, do you see as the differences between their work and
your own proposal? What deficiencies do you see in the guideline as it
currently stands?
(this is the version as of the writing of this e-mail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_har…)