Alec
Conroy wrote:
> There is now an ever-growing consensus that BADSITES is rejected,
> and that linking to "badsites' for encyclopedic purposes is
> permissible in some circumstances.
Setting aside the question of the block for a moment, I'm curious
about the incident that triggered the block.
If I understand rightly, [[Robert Black (professor)]] is a respected
Scottish law prof who is from Lockerbie, who has taken a great
interest in the Lockerbie case, and was involved in setting up the
Lockerbie trials of the Libyan agents.
In response to recent activity in the case, in early July he set up a
blog to discuss it. We briefly mentioned the blog and added a link to
it. That link stayed in place until a few days ago, when he gave a
one-sentence mention of the allegations that SV "systematically
altered"
the Wikipedia Lockerbie articles, mentioning what some claim is her
true name. He doesn't claim that they are true, just that they are
interesting.
The link was removed within 24 hours by a newly created account
called "Privacyisall", which has only edited around this, and shows
enough instant facility with Wikipedia that the account could well be
a sock. The edit summary: "Remove blog which outs and attacks our
editors as per
Arbcom ruling."
So if I got that right, it seems to me that here we have another case
along the lines of Micheal Moore.
Prof. Black is an intentionally public figure talking about a topic
on which he is a credentialed expert. He starts an official blog,
which seems relevant, so we mention it. We include a link, both
because statements in articles should be verifiable, and because if
somebody is interested enough to read about Robert Black, they could
well be interested in reading his blog.
However, once Black mentions something we personally don't like, we
remove the link. He's not attacking anybody, the mention is clearly
pertinent to his field of interest, and the link on Wikipedia
couldn't possibly have been included as part of an attack. But still,
putting the
link back is considered a serious enough offense that the account
involved is blocked, and there seems to be a fair bit of support for
the
blocking.
If we can have this much drama, it sounds like we don't have enough
consensus yet. What can we do to create more?
William
He has published defamatory information when he admits he's not sure
it is valid. Why would we link to defamatory information?
Huh? Do you mean Black has done so? Saying "X claims that Y" is now
"defamatory
information" that we can't link to even if it is a link we'd otherwise
have in article space? What if it weren't Black but the New York Times?
Or what if it were Black but the information was about an editor of say
the German Wikipedia or a non-Wikimedia project?
Finally, I do hope you realize what this would look like to the general
public;
Wikipedia will censor any links that even mention the possibility that
another site outed a Wikipedian. Are we trying to look like something
out of Catch-22?