[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

Steve Summit scs at eskimo.com
Tue Oct 16 19:17:19 UTC 2007


Will Beback wrote:
> Have you offered a solution?  Are the only two positions on
> this issue BADSITES or THICKSKIN? ... What elements do you think 
> would be included in a good policy on links to external harassment?

I was asking exactly the same question last night in this post,
which was on a distant leaf of the thread tree which perhaps no
one read:

			*	*	*

Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:18:38 -0400

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.)



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