[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[John Lee]

On 10/14/07, Will Beback <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I disagree that protecting our editors from harassment must come at a
> cost to the encyclopedia's content. We remove links, sources, and
> participants  day and night in order to improve it. Let me compare this
> to three other situations: spam, fan forums, and lawsuits.
>
> I remove dozens of commercial spam links to every week. Arguably, those
> many of those links could provide some benefit to readers. An article on
> recreational vehicles may, in some folks mind, be improved by providing
> links to stores selling RV accessories or used RVs. Yet we've decided
> that commercial links are inappropriate because they would overwhelm the
> articles and because they do not provide any actual content. Their harm
> outweighs their good. Likewise, links to external harassment that drives
> away valuable editors also cause more harm than good.


Is this an appropriate parallel to the official website of a famous person?

Fan forums and blogs are routinely deleted (with very few exceptions)
> because they do not provide reliable information for our readers whether
> used as a source or for further reading. Forums and blogs that engage in
> active harassment of editors of a reference work are even less reliable
> as sources for that reference work.


So michaelmoore.com is an unreliable source, period? Last time I checked
self-authored blogs were one of the few sources considered acceptable for
biographies.

Finally, we do not allow people who have said they are planning to sue
> the WMF to edit Wikipedia because they have an unavoidable conflict of
> interest. So does someone using harassment. The person in charge of a
> self-published site that is harassing Wikipedia editors is trying to
> affect the project in inappropriate ways. We can't stop them from doing
> so but we should not view them as neutral or even reliable sources while
> they pursue their agenda against the project and its volunteers.


Ironically, it is just as arguable that the person being harassed has a
conflict of interest as well.

In all three of these cases restricting inappropriate links, sources,
> and participation improves the encyclopedia instead of harming it.


Nobody's disputing that in some cases, these restrictions improve the
encyclopaedia. To assert that we improve the encyclopaedia by removing links
to any blog or forum which harasses our editors is a bit of a stretch,
nevertheless. In most cases, we don't link to these sites because there is
no good reason to; you are now asserting we should go further and never link
to them even if there is a good reason to.

Johnleemk

W.
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