[WikiEN-l] BADSITES Overstatement

[The Mangoe]

On 11/27/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> True - but not the one you were thinking of.  There exists on
> Wikipedia a small group of people who will reflexively revert any
> removal of any link to external harassment, shouting "ZOMG!
> BADSITES!" and calling the world to come and look.

Part of the problem, Guy, is that when you say "link to external
harassment" you stretch things considerably. There is no meaningful
sense in which a citation sitting innocently in an article is
transformed into such a link just because someone puts up some content
elsewhere on the site to which someone on Wikipedia takes offense.
Other links are perhaps not so innocent, but the work needed to dig
them up really takes the sting out of them.

> For the victims of offsite harassment, this is a really bad
> atmosphere.  They have only two choices at present: leave harassment
> in place, or have it shouted from the rooftops.

It's also an overstatement to claim that whatever mutterings go on at
WR are harassment, even if word of them leaks out to Wikipedia.
Indeed, BADSITES in practice has itself served as the vehicle for
harassment. That was certainly the way the TNH episode progressed: she
was badgered into erasing the comment to which Will Beback took
offense by holding links to her site hostage. The rub is that the
offensive comment was pretty difficult to find, even if you knew it
that it was there. The only way that I found out was because WBb waved
the BADSITES flag in erasing the links, and even then it took some
effort to find. Of course, if he hadn't said anything, the erasures
would have been quickly reverted; but since he did, everyone knew to
look.

In all of these episodes I have yet to see a single link that was
created for the purpose of harassment. I have seen a fair number of
user page links with no explanation of what is at the other end, and
plenty of otherwise innocent links which ran afoul of someone's animus
against some content on the site. I'm sure it happened in the past,
but now it's the erasures that are the harassment.

As for shouting from the rooftops: it matters which roof. WIkipedia is
a far more effective amplifier of abuse than a comment buried in a
blog or even a diatribe on WR.