[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Steve Summit]

Will Beback wrote:
> I find that many folks in this debate already engage in binary choices: 
> caling all attempt at solving this issue as "BADSITES". I asked you what 
> you though we should do about it and your answer appears to boil down to 
> "nothing". So one way of splitting the issue is those who want to do 
> something and those who want to do nothing.

But I think that's a false split, too.

I believe that everyone involved in this debate wants to do
everything we can to minimize and reduce the impact of harassment
of our editors.  The essential difference is what we believe
the extent of "everything we can do" to be.  Some of us have
concluded, sadly, that it's a nearly empty set, and we're not
willing to go and do something that (a) makes no sense or (b)
doesn't actually help mitigate the harassment or (c) does hurt
the encyclopedia, just so as to seem to be doing *something*.

In particular, I have a real problem with this style of thinking:

1. Site X is behaving really obnoxiously towards our editors.
2. But they're not doing anything that's, like, actually
   actionable in the Real World's legal systems.
3. They won't stop being mean when we ask them nicely; in fact,
   they laugh in our face and just act meaner.
4. There's nothing else we can do, so they leave us with no
   choice but to go for our nuclear weapon: "We're not going
   to link to you."
5. And if you keep being mean after that, we'll not link to you
   even more.  So there.

Off-wiki harassment is a real and significant problem, no
question.  But I don't believe that banning links to it
does anything to help the problem, and the attempts at bans,
as we've seen, lead to all sorts of significant new problems.