What happens if you let this go is that valued contributors feel isolated and quit because we seem indifferent to the attacks and harassment which is being made. These folks signed up to edit an encyclopedia not for battle.
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: Sheldon Rampton [mailto:sheldon@prwatch.org] Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 09:15 AM To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy
Fred Bauder wrote:
This sort of thing, banning links to external sites, if done at all, needs to be limited to sites that extend their activities beyond criticism of Wikipedia to actions that hurt individual Wikipedia users. The blog seems to focus on publicizing Will Beback's real name which she got from ED. She is offended at his interactions with her when she edits.
Actually, banning links to external sites should not be done AT ALL. I don't care if the external site in question is run by someone who has a personal dungeon where they flay Wikipedia users with flaming razors. Banning links to their site is just bad policy, no matter what they are doing. If they are doing something ILLEGAL that "hurts individual Wikipedia users," they can be prosecuted for it in an actual court of law, but banning links to their site just turns otherwise sensible Wikipedians into stupid bureaucrats and makes things worse. It also invites the question, "What makes Wikipedia so damn special?" As the essay that was recently posted here points out, Wikipedia has no problem linking to Nazi websites and a host of other sites that promote violence, hurt people and break the law. It's ridiculous and embarrassing to have a policy that says "we don't care who else you hurt as long as you don't hurt Wikipedians." Finally, the question of what it means to "hurt" someone is impossible to define adequately for the purpose of making this policy practical -- especially since some people can be very thin-skinned about criticism.
This is the sort of situation where I think it would be good if Jimbo stepped in and played God to put an end to this nonsense.
| Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever
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On 5/28/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
What happens if you let this go is that valued contributors feel isolated and quit because we seem indifferent to the attacks and harassment which is being made. These folks signed up to edit an encyclopedia not for battle.
Fred
If we have to choose between protecting their privacy and writing an encyclopaedia, which should we opt for? Fortunately this is not a problem ATM, because IMO most articles where this would be an issue are articles we can afford to not have, but as Wikipedia grows in importance, it's hard not to envision at some point in the future there being a site containing both useful information and an attack on one or more Wikipedia editors.
At the moment, the idea seems to be that protecting the privacy and reputation of our editors supersedes everything else, including informing our readers and informing our editors (how do you provide examples of personal attacks without linking to them?). Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, since this is just a clash of values, but I didn't sign up for a project to protect the reputation of Wikipedia editors. I signed up for a project to write an encyclopaedia.
Johnleemk
On Tue, 29 May 2007 00:06:14 +0800, "John Lee" johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
If we have to choose between protecting their privacy and writing an encyclopaedia, which should we opt for?
You note that this dichotomy has not yet been observed. I agree. In fact, it likely never will. In the event of an attack site becoming uncontroversially notable, we can quote its URL without liking if that helps soothe wounded pride, but the issue is not, I think, that of whether we should link attack sites in their own articles (since very few will ever have them), but whether we should allow them anywhere other than their own articles.
If BADSITES said no links other than a single link to the root in an article on the site itself, if that is considered by the community to justify an article, then I would probably have no problem with it and I suspect others may well agree.
The debate would, of course, then switch to whether the site is itself notable. Thus far, as far as I can recall, most of the really vociferous campaigners for articles on attack sites have been either militant inclusionists or trolls (or sometimes both). But that might just be faulty memory.
Guy (JzG)
I know this is petering out as a conversation, but I just had one semantic question for the BADSITES supporters, on something that's perplexed me. In the Making Light blog/Will Beback scenario, it was supported not linking back to Hayden's blog because Beback's alleged name was in the comments section of one post. It was not even a focus of the website; it was literally several sentences buried in a subpage.
If people began to salt 'names' throughout other notably accepted web sites or comments sections of other acceptable to link to sites, would they all become unacceptable to link to unless they were all scrubbed? Anyone could poison any website by doing this almost trivially. An hour on a message board, an hour travelling the major/notable blogosphere, even WP:RS news sites that allow Googleable/public comments on stories (ABC News, for example), Amazon reviews, and so on. Would any of them be then unlinkable unless all references to the alleged names of whatever editors were removed?
Regards, Joe http://www.joeszilagyi.com