On 10/19/07, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
RLS wrote:
On 10/18/07, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
How should a policy deal with this situation? Should we maintain our link to the chatboard (which could only used because it was the subject of the article). Should we link to the harassment as an example of that community's activism? Should we tell valued editor that the link is more important than his privacy or well-being?
As I tried to convey in the message I just wrote, none of the above! Removing the link from Wikipedia is hardly going to prevent the people already familiar with that site from seeing the harassing information. Removing the link also won't prevent people who come to the Wikipedia article with no prior knowledge from figuring out that they can use a search engine to locate the exact URL of the website the article is about. I mean, really, the article is about a particular website, its name has got to be in the article *at least* once.
All that removing the link is going to do is say "nyah-nyah, you were rude, we unlinked you, haha we win!" Put another way, removing the link is just a variation on WP:POINT. It reduces the objective editorial quality of an article to accomplish nothing useful except to be able to say "we don't link to harassment, and we're proud of it!" -- when the link is hardly required to figure out where the website is in the first place, if you have enough brains to use a search engine.
--Darkwind
Then what do you propose we do in these situations. While this is a specific example, this is the more common problem then the MM/THF example.
I propose that nothing at all be done! That's the whole point of what I was trying to say -- unless the pages that are actually linked change in some way, nothing at all needs to be done if elsewhere on a site there is harassment of an editor. If the pages that are linked DO change significantly, so that they are no longer useful as sources or links, then yes, they should be removed -- but that is ALREADY A PART OF WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING AS EDITORS. There's no need for a policy that says "remove links to unreliable or inappropriate pages" because that's already implied, if not explicitly stated, in [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:EL]].
Also, reacting in some way is just giving them what they want by starting the harassment in the first place. It's a variation on why one shouldn't feed the trolls - they're posting material they think one or more Wikipedians will find objectionable in order to prompt a reaction from the Wikipedia community. Why should we give it to them? Why should we let them influence the content of our encyclopedia?
--Darkwind