On 30 May 2007 at 20:10:47 -0500, "Slim Virgin" slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Dan, would you be okay with this scenario? I today create a website that outs you, says where you live, and accuses you of being a pedophile, with some alleged examples. I then start a discussion about it on various project pages, and every time I mention it, I link to it. I'm careful not to link to the actual page that gives your details, so I'm not linking to a personal attack. I'm just linking to the main page, and I link here and I link there, I link everywhere, in an attempt to increase my readership.
Given my own temperament and bizarre sense of humor, I might well react to it by linking directly to your attack myself, on my user page, along with a comment like "Look here [LINK], where Slim Virgin calls me a pedophile... amazing what lengths people will go to character-assassinate somebody they disagree with. She's probably trying to get me to lose my cool and start lashing out at her so she can revel in my reaction, but she's wasting her time... such ludicrous accusations are worthy only of pointing at and laughing uproariously... certainly not taking seriously enough to raise a big stink about."
In fact, I did quite a similar thing back when Jeff Merkey had attacks of that sort on me (and other Wikipedians) on his own website... I linked to that, and to Brandt's hivemind page (which also included me), on my user page in a "point-and-laugh" manner, only taking down those links when they stopped working later. Nobody objected at the time that I was "linking to attack sites", because it seems like this hysteria is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Let's take it a bit further. Let's suppose I'm a reporter and I write an article about my experiment for a reliable source, and let's also suppose it's a very notable newspaper, but not a good one, and it lets me name the website in the article. I don't name you, but I also don't admit that I made up the pedophile allegation. I just present the creation of the website as an experiment; veracity of contents to be left to the reader.
I would hope that, being responsible journalists, they would seek and publish sufficient information to make it clear that the accusations in the site they were mentioning were entirely false.
Should someone then be able to create a Wikipedia article about my site, and link to it in that article so that it ends up in a prominent place in Google?
In that hypothetical case, where the site actually does become notable in the outside world, then yes... and I'd hope the article is factual and NPOV, and indicates the falsity of the site's claims.
Then try to imagine how you'd vote in an RfA for someone who called my website a "mixed bag," and who didn't want a ban on linking to it.
It would depend on their motives and explanations, wouldn't it? If they said it was a "mixed bag" because "Dan Tobias may not quite be a pedophile, in the legal sense, but I think he does have an unnatural affection for young children and ought to be kept under scrutiny for this", then I'd likely oppose him for lack of good sense given that there's simply no logical reason to jump to any conclusion remotely like that. On the other hand, if it was that "I disagree with the stupid and unfounded accusations Slim made there, but I understand the point of the experiment, however misguided, and perhaps it has in fact illustrated some flaws in Wikipedia's model whereby it can be disrupted by making silly accusations against editors. We should try to fix those flaws, while also making it clear that pointing them out in this sort of destructive manner should not be tolerated. I see no point, however, to shoving the whole thing under the rug by suppressing all links to this regrettably notable site", then I might choose not to oppose him despite the personal involvement.