[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 30 May 2007 at 20:10:47 -0500, "Slim Virgin" 
<slimvirgin at gmail.com> 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.

Given my own temperament and bizarre sense of humor, I might well 
react to it by linking directly to your attack myself, on my user 
page, along with a comment like "Look here [LINK], where Slim Virgin 
calls me a pedophile... amazing what lengths people will go to 
character-assassinate somebody they disagree with.  She's probably 
trying to get me to lose my cool and start lashing out at her so she 
can revel in my reaction, but she's wasting her time... such 
ludicrous accusations are worthy only of pointing at and laughing 
uproariously... certainly not taking seriously enough to raise a big 
stink about."

In fact, I did quite a similar thing back when Jeff Merkey had 
attacks of that sort on me (and other Wikipedians) on his own 
website... I linked to that, and to Brandt's hivemind page (which 
also included me), on my user page in a "point-and-laugh" manner, 
only taking down those links when they stopped working later.  Nobody 
objected at the time that I was "linking to attack sites", because it 
seems like this hysteria is a fairly recent phenomenon.

> 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.

I would hope that, being responsible journalists, they would seek and 
publish sufficient information to make it clear that the accusations 
in the site they were mentioning were entirely false.

> 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?

In that hypothetical case, where the site actually does become 
notable in the outside world, then yes... and I'd hope the article is 
factual and NPOV, and indicates the falsity of the site's claims.

> 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.

It would depend on their motives and explanations, wouldn't it?  If 
they said it was a "mixed bag" because "Dan Tobias may not quite be a 
pedophile, in the legal sense, but I think he does have an unnatural 
affection for young children and ought to be kept under scrutiny for 
this", then I'd likely oppose him for lack of good sense given that 
there's simply no logical reason to jump to any conclusion remotely 
like that.  On the other hand, if it was that "I disagree with the 
stupid and unfounded accusations Slim made there, but I understand 
the point of the experiment, however misguided, and perhaps it has in 
fact illustrated some flaws in Wikipedia's model whereby it can be 
disrupted by making silly accusations against editors.  We should try 
to fix those flaws, while also making it clear that pointing them out 
in this sort of destructive manner should not be tolerated.  I see no 
point, however, to shoving the whole thing under the rug by 
suppressing all links to this regrettably notable site", then I might 
choose not to oppose him despite the personal involvement.

-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
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