[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Matthew Brown]

One issue is that, with lots of contributors and the place being too
big for everyone to know everything that goes on, new people regularly
rediscover blown-up controversy written in certain notorious off-Wiki
places and cause a fuss about it - in many cases because they don't
realize the unreliability and maliciousness of those accounts, and in
some cases because they do and like the drama, or like the fact that
the external site criticises someone they don't like.

We do need to shut down such things quickly; constant rehashing of
stale issues and false accusations is damaging, harmful and pointless.
 However, the best way of doing that seems to me to be (a) to document
somewhere that site <whatever> is a known malicious and unreliable
source and things there should not be trusted, and (b) to close such
discussions down politely and inform people why we don't want such
issues brought up again.

Wikipedia needs the minimal-drama way of doing this.  We have a job to
do, and that job isn't squabbling endlessly or obsessing constantly
about the minutia of our affairs and what others are saying about us.
Such sites as Wikipedia Review, Encyclopedia Dramatica and
Antisocialmedia are best *ignored* as irrelevant to our real job of
writing an encyclopedia.

-Matt