[WikiEN-l] When Websites Attack

[Risker]

I have no trouble at all with the concept of removing links being used
specifically for the purpose of making a personal attack against a
wikipedian.  What I do have problems with is removing ALL links to a site,
regardless of the reason for the link's presence.  Particularly when those
links are used as references or are part of a relevant encyclopedia article,
deleting these links actually increases the drama and spreads the
hypothetical attack against the editor, because other editors will question
the reason for removal.

The section on external links currently embedded in NPA is inappropriate, as
most of these links are NOT personal attacks.  It should be replaced with a
prohibition on using any links for the purpose of making a personal attack.
The discussion of removing ALL or MOST external links to sites that may
harbour a personal attack against an individual Wikipedian is more correctly
done at WP:EL.

Risker


On 8/26/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> <snip>
> From all of this, it's obvious that the policy (currently embedded in
> [[WP:NPA]] after the attempt at a separate BADSITES policy failed) is
> highly flawed, and causes much more trouble than good, and also
> clearly doesn't agree with consensus given that none of the above
> attempts actually succeeded in suppressing the information they were
> trying to do, and all of them met with strong opposition including
> from admins.
>
> Particularly troublesome is the part of the policy that claims that
> the 3-revert rule doesn't apply to removing attack site links.  This
> is a destructive invitation to edit-warring, going against the very
> reason 3RR was enacted in the first place: everybody who edit-wars
> does it because they think they're right and the other guy is wrong.
> In true, noncontroversial cases of gratuitous personal attacks,
> harrassment, outing, and the like, this special exception is
> unnecessary; if somebody vandalizes a user page to reveal the true
> name and address of that user and invite people to stalk him/her,
> there will undoubtably be a whole flock of editors and admins rushing
> to revert the vandalism, oversight the personal info, and block the
> user who inserted it; it's unlikely that anybody would need to revert
> more than 3 times in this process, and even if somebody did, it
> wouldn't be punished given the obviousness of the case (it's the sort
> of thing that goes under WP:IAR).  It's only in cases where there's a
> real controversy over whether the policy applies to a particular
> case, and whether it makes any sense to invoke it, that there would
> be a perceived need to do multiple reverts, and those are the cases
> where discussion rather than edit-warring would be productive.
>
> Anyway, the policy is clearly not factually accurate, given that
> somebody *did* get blocked for 3RR over removing one of the links
> mentioned above.
>
> If the policy is not to have a stake driven through its heart (my
> preference), it at least needs a massive rewrite in accordance with
> Jimbo's stated principles, so it calls for a thoughtful, reasoned
> approach to potentially harmful links rather than an absolutist black-
> and-white "we're good, those sites are evil" zero-tolerance rule.
>
> --
> == Dan ==
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>
>
>
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