[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[William Pietri]

Will Beback wrote:
> [...] 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.
>   

More specifically, I think spammy links are of more harm than benefit 
*to our readers*. That's not the case with links to harassment, which is 
about possible harm to editors.

But not all links to such material are harmful even to the targets of 
the harassment, so the parallel you draw is tenuous. Further, removing 
links to entire sites because of something on some of their pages is a 
huge step away from why we remove spam. If somebody spams a link to an 
NYT article about their company far and wide, we might block that link, 
but we would never remove all NYT links.

> 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.
>   

A forum or blog that harasses our editors shouldn't be linked to in an 
article not because of the harassment, but because it is a forum or blog 
lacking reliable information. There's no need to bring other factors in.

As for linking in places other than article space, your parallel doesn't 
apply at all; blogs and fan forums can be freely linked.

> 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 

Well, I don't think that's really why we block legal threat-makers. But 
even if a conflict of interest with Wikipedia were the sole issue, your 
comparison is still false. Just because somebody has an issue with 
Wikipedia doesn't make them an unreliable source in their areas of 
expertise.

If somebody is harassing Wikipedia editors, we might not want to use 
them as a source in an article about Wikipedia. But that's about as far 
as you can take it.

William

-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri