[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Steve Summit]

Dan Tobias wrote:
>> The way I see it, there has been vastly more disruption to Wikipedia 
>> coming from attempts to suppress links to sites than has ever 
>> occurred by the presence of such links.

Three or four people said this in rapid succession, so let me just
say: fifthed.

Will Beback wrote:
> The aim of creating some kind of policy or guideline to cover the
> issue is to give editors a road map of how to handle this type
> of problem to minimize the disruptions that have resulted from
> off-site harassment. Simply saying it doesn't exist doesn't help.

No one is saying off-site harassment doesn't exist.  But since
it's off-site, there is by definition nothing we can do about it
directly, at least not within the confines of our Wikipedia sites.

I may be very stupid, but I'm still not seeing why we need more
policy here.  We've already got WP:NPA, which says that that a
link which serves as an attack (my means of pointed reference to
an off-site attack) is tantamount to an on-wiki personal attack,
and is prohibited.  We've already got WP:RS, which works hard
to define what a reliable source is, and which says that blogs
generally aren't.

So what more do we need?  Which elements of the policy formerly
known as BADSITES do we need to preserve, and why?  What is the
cost (in false positives, unexpected consequences, or general
inconvenience) of those elements?  What is the cost (in terms
of potential editor harassment, or other imagined travails)
if we don't adopt those elements?

I'm aware of three such elements, are there others?

1. WP:NPA only talks about links which serve as attacks.
   But we need to ban *all* links to attack sites, even when
   the links aren't meant to attack, even when they're to pages
   on the attack sites which aren't attacks.

2. WP:RS only talks about links in article space.  But we need to
   ban links to attack sites from anywhere, including talk and
   project pages.

3. Removal of any links covered by the policy formerly known as
   BADSITES should not be subject to the three-revert rule.

(Me, I disagree pretty vehemently with at least the first two of
these elements, but the arguments against them have been posted
ad nauseam, so I'll not rehearse them here.)