On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Dude. Nobody's arguing against removing a poor source. We're arguing against removing valid, useful sources just because the same site contains harassment of an editor. THAT will cause us to violate NPOV.
Let's not get too hung up on edge cases. The bulk of the cases of interest are links to sites that are *literally* harasssment sites, through and through, and not valid references for anything at all.
The cases of interest that have turned up are such things as Michael Moore's page, which isn't a harassment site through and through.
But one of the big problems happens when the harassment site *isn't being used as a reference* (for anything except its own content). One of the most notorious examples is that in the original BADSITES proposal, people couldn't even point to any examples of why attack site links might be useful because the attack site links got deleted as per the very policy that was being discussed. That's an incredible catch-22.
There was also a case where a user was criticized for posting on an attack site and tried to give links to the attack site to demonstrate that his posts were innocuous. They were deleted.