Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On 16 Oct 2007 at 23:55:24 -0700, Will Beback will.beback.1@gmail.com wrote:
Moore is notable as a filmmaker. He is not notable as a blogger. His blog is not encyclopedic. We are only providing a link as a convenience, and a very minor convenience because it it the first link that comes up on Google. So we are saving our readers about .5 seconds out of their lives. We aren't preserving NPOV, we aren't taking a stand against censorship, we're merely saving some readers a tiny bit of time. I don't begrudge anyone even half a second. But if the tradeoff we're looking at is linking to harassment of Wikipedia editors versus the slightest inconvenience (hopefully temporary) of our readers, then I don't think we should have a question. For completenes inthe article we can say the guy has a blog (who doesn't), but unless the blog is notable I don't see the overriding need to promote "convenience" above "no personal attacks".
Thus, the "tradeoff" is between a very minor convenience to people trying to get to the link... versus a very minor interference in the spread of harrassment that's already out there and well-indexed in Google. So we're all getting into a big lather over something that barely actually matters, one way or another... apparently, we're all motivated by the principle of the thing.
I think that external links to the subject's self-published sites don't add anything beyond a link to the subject's self-published site, which is usually the easiest thing to find about them. Omitting them in some circumstances does not harm the articles greatly, and if it would have a major impact in reducing harassment then the trade off would be worthwhile. WE can argue over how much of a positive improvement there'd be, but it's hard to argue that our articles are defaced by removing a link that isn't a source.
W.