Phil Sandifer wrote:
On May 29, 2007, at 8:38 PM, Gabe Johnson wrote:
Exactly. I have yet to see a single example of a revelation of personal identity on Wikipedia Review, and I know that is certainly frowned upon by the authorities there. Just cause they don't like us is no reason to not be able to link to them.
We, ummm, are talking about the same Wikipedia Review where people conspired to call the police in my town to try to get me harassed because of fictional stories I was posting to a blog, right? And the one where people actively speculated about how they could get me kicked out of my PhD program?
I just want to make sure. I'd hate to get this magical happy site you mention here confused with the one that tried to ruin my life.
And here we have a fine example of the problem caused by refusing to link to pages on or say the name of sites where people do things we don't like. When I went and took a brief look at Wikipedia Review, what I saw was yet another internet forum, somewhat more negative in tone and with a higher proportion of kooks, but otherwise not very different than what I'd expect in the comments section of one of Nicholas Carr's columns about Wikipedia. Undermedicated people with an internet forum? Or gibbering demons with sinister plans to destroy Wikipedia? Beats me.
There's another example in Gracenotes' RFA. I saw someone concerned that he had posted on Wikipedia Review. And I saw another person suggesting we shouldn't even mention the name Wikipedia Review. Was Gracenotes' alleged post a reasonable attempt to reach out to and engage our critics, something I routinely encourage? Or was he leading a conspiracy to eat babies with grapefruit spoons? Did he post at there all? Who knows.
Pretty much any other time people make an accusation of nefarious behavior on Wikipedia, we investigate it to death, with links galore, so that any reasonable person can find the truth of things. We, as a community, are *amazing* at that. I think that commitment to collaborative, reasoned judgment is one of our deepest strengths, and one of the things that has allowed us to scale so massively.
So when eventually somebody tells me what the proposed policy is (despite repeated requests, nobody has yet), I still think we'll never come to lasting consensus on it because information needed to make good judgments is being actively suppressed.
William