[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Marc Riddell]

on 10/16/07 3:41 PM, Matthew Brown at morven at gmail.com wrote:

> 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.

Yes, we are better than that!

> Such sites as Wikipedia Review, Encyclopedia Dramatica and
> Antisocialmedia are best *ignored* as irrelevant to our real job of
> writing an encyclopedia.
> 
Absolutely! And very well said, Matthew.

Marc Riddell