On 11/27/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Part of the problem, Guy, is that when you say "link to external harassment" you stretch things considerably. There is no meaningful sense in which a citation sitting innocently in an article is transformed into such a link just because someone puts up some content elsewhere on the site to which someone on Wikipedia takes offense. Other links are perhaps not so innocent, but the work needed to dig them up really takes the sting out of them. It's also an overstatement to claim that whatever mutterings go on at WR are harassment, even if word of them leaks out to Wikipedia. Indeed, BADSITES in practice has itself served as the vehicle for harassment. That was certainly the way the TNH episode progressed: she was badgered into erasing the comment to which Will Beback took offense by holding links to her site hostage. The rub is that the offensive comment was pretty difficult to find, even if you knew it that it was there. The only way that I found out was because WBb waved the BADSITES flag in erasing the links, and even then it took some effort to find. Of course, if he hadn't said anything, the erasures would have been quickly reverted; but since he did, everyone knew to look. In all of these episodes I have yet to see a single link that was created for the purpose of harassment. I have seen a fair number of user page links with no explanation of what is at the other end, and plenty of otherwise innocent links which ran afoul of someone's animus against some content on the site. I'm sure it happened in the past, but now it's the erasures that are the harassment. As for shouting from the rooftops: it matters which roof. WIkipedia is a far more effective amplifier of abuse than a comment buried in a blog or even a diatribe on WR.