Quoting Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com:
joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com:
I can't speak for others, but that's not a fair summary of my position. I think that removing material is a standard part of editing. I think that the project has been improved by removing all kinds of material. I think that links to self-published sites actively harassing Wikipedia editors are not reliable sources and should be removed just as we remove other unreliable sources. Doing so makes for optimal encyclopedia content.
Will, this still misses the basic issue. There's no good reason to treat Michael Moore's self-published site which we link to on his article any different than say Richard Dawkins, or Jonathan Sarfati simply because one of them choose to harass Wikipedia users. If the concern is solely that these aren't reliable sources then we should be removing all of them. The site's reliability has nothing to do with whether or not it attacks Wikipedia users.
We use a variety of standards to decide if a source is reliable. I'm proposing an additional test. I don't know what you're referring to when you say "these". If you mean self-published experts then you may be right. The exception that allows them was controversial and maybe it should be revisited.
By these I meant the personal websites of Moore, Dawkins, Sarfati etc. If this is a proposal to add additional rules for evaluating what is a WP:RS then this is about as non-NPOV as we could get. It says that a source might be reliable, but if it has an extremist view about a Wikipedia editor then it is somehow less reliable. The arrogance of that stance is frankly astounding. Reliability has nothing to do with whom someone is feuding.
If I'm missing something here I'd appreciate being told so. The crucial step in logic seems to be that self-published source becomes less reliable if it attacks Wikipedians. If that is the idea I'd like to hear the logic behind that in more detail.