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.