[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[John Lee]

On 5/31/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/30/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Slim Virgin wrote:
> > > On 5/30/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > > Dan, would you be okay with this scenario? I today create a website
> > > that outs you, says where you live, and accuses you of being a
> > > pedophile, with some alleged examples. I then start a discussion about
> > > it on various project pages, and every time I mention it, I link to
> > > it. I'm careful not to link to the actual page that gives your
> > > details, so I'm not linking to a personal attack. I'm just linking to
> > > the main page, and I link here and I link there, I link everywhere, in
> > > an attempt to increase my readership.
> > >
> > > Would you be okay with that?
> > >
> > > Let's take it a bit further. Let's suppose I'm a reporter and I write
> > > an article about my experiment for a reliable source, and let's also
> > > suppose it's a very notable newspaper, but not a good one, and it lets
> > > me name the website in the article. I don't name you, but I also don't
> > > admit that I made up the pedophile allegation. I just present the
> > > creation of the website as an experiment; veracity of contents to be
> > > left to the reader.
> > >
> > > Should someone then be able to create a Wikipedia article about my
> > > site, and link to it in that article so that it ends up in a prominent
> > > place in Google?
> > >
> > > See, I'm pretty sure if that happened, you'd be howling, and rightly
> so.
> > >
> > > Then try to imagine how you'd vote in an RfA for someone who called my
> > > website a "mixed bag," and who didn't want a ban on linking to it.
> > >
> > >
> > You can do that with me, if you'd like. If someone libels me, it's -my-
> > responsibility to sue them and require them to change that, not everyone
> > else in the world's responsibility to avoid reporting on the incident.
> > Now, of course, if a website is unreliable, it's unreliable. Web forums
> > are unreliable, but we still might link to them in an article on the
> > forum itself.
>
> Okay Todd, but you're not addressing the first part of the thought
> experiment. What if there was no article, no reliable source, but I
> just kept raising the issue in Wikipedia project space whenever I
> could, and every time I raised it, I linked to the site which named
> you, gave your location, and called you a pedophile. You'd be okay
> with that?


That's clearly a thinly veiled personal attack, and I see no reason why it
should be allowed. Saying "we should allow links to attack sites sometimes"
is a whole lot different from "we should allow all links to attack sites";
you are insinuating the former is the latter, when the two are different.

Johnleemk