[WikiEN-l] When Websites Attack

[Daniel R. Tobias]

The last few days have seen a profusion of invocations of the alleged 
policy against linking to so-called "attack sites", with a variety of 
targets.  If this were being done by trolls trying to discredit the 
policy by making it look silly (as has often been alleged by its 
supporters when some ridiculous case or other comes up in that 
regard), they'd be doing a very good job in their trolling, but it 
seems like everybody involved in these recent cases is actually 
totally serious.  There's no need for trolling to make the policy 
look silly... the supporters of the policy do a perfectly fine job of 
it themselves.

Recent cases:

* Anti-pedophile site Perverted Justice set up a redirect based on 
HTTP referrers so that anybody following links to any page in their 
site from Wikipedia get redirected to a criticism page that blasts 
Wikipedia for not cracking down on pedophile editors.  This made the 
whole thing an "attack site" according to some who seem to think that 
anything that has anything critical to say about Wikipedia is an 
"attack" that must not be linked to.  The ultimate consensus was to 
make references to pages in that site non-live as links as a 
practical means of dealing with the forced redirect, but not to 
suppress all reference to the site itself (which has an article on 
Wikipedia due to notability).  Jimbo Wales even chimed in himself in 
the AN/I debate on this, saying "[WP:BADSITES]] is a rejected policy, 
as it should be. There is of course a noble concept behind it, and it 
is my belief that a more carefully formulated restricted version of 
the policy could in fact pass muster." He went on to call for being 
thoughtful about what one links to, and mindful of the hurt it might 
cause, but that we also need to be mindful of debatable criticisms of 
Wikipedia even if we feel them to be invalid.

* On the heels of this, with Jimbo's notes still present on AN/I, a 
thread opened up to discuss alleged sockpuppetry by SlimVirgin. The 
actual actions were fairly minor and a couple of years old, so this 
was perhaps "no big deal" as her supporters said... but, as with many 
scandals, the things that were done later to cover it up (such as 
oversighting many of the edits in question) were of greater concern 
than the original act.  Anyway, since a reasonably respected admin 
opened the thread, it didn't get immediately suppressed as "trolling" 
as attempts to criticize such well-connected editors as Slim usually 
are; but her clique *did* invoke the anti-attack-sites policy to try 
to suppress a link to crucial evidence in this case, because it was 
in a site run by a banned attacker.  The ultimate compromise was for 
somebody else to copy the evidence in question to another site that 
we *could* link to... and that site in turn included a link to the 
other "attack" site where it credited the source of the information, 
so it was just one more click away, but that seemed to placate the 
"no links to attack sites ever" crowd anyway.

* While this was still in full swing, the next big BADSITES flap was 
already under way.  Controversial filmmaker Michael Moore decided he 
didn't like how a Wikipedia editor, who also was a notable right-wing 
commentator out in the "real world", was editing pages related to 
Moore and his films.  That Wikipedian, who until recently edited 
under his real name and openly disclosed his occupation, 
affiliations, and outside publications, suddenly decided not long ago 
that he wanted to be retroactively anonymous, so he changed his 
username and insisted that all the various policies protecting 
editors against "outing" apply now.  Moore, not being a Wikipedian, 
didn't feel these rules had any application to him off-wiki, so he 
put on the front page of his official Web site a piece mentioning the 
guy by name and calling attention to his Wikipedia activity.  This 
led to frantic activity whereby some editors were insisting that 
michaelmoore.com is now an Attack Site and must be delinked 
everywhere (including on the [[Michael Moore]] article itself), and 
others opposing this as just plain silly.  Somebody involved in the 
debate claimed to be friends with a producer of The Colbert Report 
and to have talked with them about mentioning this flap, so it just 
might turn up on that show (which likes to make fun of both Wikipedia 
and Michael Moore, so might not resist a story involving both).

* And, finally (for now), a renewed attempt is being made to get 
Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog, Making Light, declared to be an attack 
site (something that was tried, and failed the laugh test, a few 
months ago).  This time, it's alleged that the blog published 
antisemitic remarks against a Wikipedia editor, though I haven't been 
able to find a trace of this myself when I look at it.