[WikiEN-l] When Websites Attack

[Armed Blowfish]

On 26/08/07, 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.

It's about creating a supportive environment for contributors. Nothing
silly about that.

> 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.

Being publicly accused of being a pedophile, by name or pseudonym,
could be highly damaging to one's reputation, which would be problematic
if one is not indeed a pedophile.

> * 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.

If it seems odd, that is only because personal attacks are a regular
part of the dispute resolution process.  Better availability and usage
of private dispute resolution would help this problem.  In any case,
Wikipaedia's reluctance to even blank such attacks (and other
offensive material that might very well have been well-intentioned)
in many cases, even after dispute resolution is over, is quite
reminiscent of ED.

> * 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).

Bad things can happen to you off-internet when you reveal your
off-internet contact info online, causing some people to regret not being
pseudonymous.  If they want to change, why not help them?  The
question you should be asking is how can you better help them so a
retro-active change actually works.

> * 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.

Which doesn't mean said remarks aren't there.

> 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.

Wikipaedia doesn't suppress enough.  Wikipaedia has high Google
rankings, no need to screw over people lives by being a tabloid on
private individuals.

> 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.

Heh.  A blanking is not a sanction.  Blocking someone for adding a link
would be problematic, since they might very well not understand it is
harmful.  But blanking and deletion?  No need to get upset, and so much
to gain.

> Anyway, the policy is clearly not factually accurate, given that
> somebody *did* get blocked for 3RR over removing one of the links
> mentioned above.

The person should be applauded.

> 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.

Well, Wikipaedia might be an attack site too, but not removing links
to attacks on other websites will only make it more of one.

> --
> == Dan ==
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