[WikiEN-l] Query for all harassment-related proposals: How are you different from BADSITES?

[Alec Conroy]

By and large, it seems like the BADSITES-equivalent proposals are
"mostly dead"--  I think everyone recognizes that "Never link to any
'site that is sufficently bad', deletion exempt from 3RR" has been
rejected by the community. (Rejected in the formal sense-- it's hotly
disputed, doesn't have consensus, and that isn't likely to change
anytime soon).

Such proposals may be mostly dead, but of course: "MOSTLY dead" isn't
"all dead". I see there's at least one BADSITES-equivalent proposal
still floating around here on the list, namely the proposal that says
"Any site that is sufficiently bad shall be declared unreliable, and
may not be linked to".   And, like any perinneal debate, I'm sure
there will be more such proposals for the  foreseeable future.

Therefore, I'd propose the following question to anyone proposing new
policies on this subject:

How would your policy prevent incidents like MakingLights  and the
MichaelMoore from happening again in the future?

----------------
DISCLAIMER:

Just to remind us all, I'll recap the Making Lights saga, but I won't
name the person who was involved, and I sincerely would ask everyone
else not to criticize someone today for something they did months ago.
 Seriously.  We've all made mistakes, they're over and done with, and
I _sincerely_ am not trying to relive this past saga--  I just don't
want to relive it in the future either.

Ordinarily, I'd use a hypothetical example here, but I've found that
in this debate, hypothetical examples are invariably dismissed when
someone says  "Oh, that could never really happen".  So I actually do
have to use a real-world example if we're going to talk about this.

----

The Making Light Story

MakingLights is a famous blog, run by a famous person.   People on
that site's forum got into a flamewar of some sort with somebody.
Some very-not-nice things were said, and apparently some personal
information was posted. (Ostensibly the person's real name  could be
found just by typing his username into google, but I haven't confirmed
that).

Unfortunately for MakingLights, the person who was flamed turned out
to be a Wikipedia administrator.  He came to Wikipedia,  declared
Making Lights an "attack site", and in less than two hours, he went to
23 different pages and deleted all the links to Making Lights and its
affiliated sites.  When members of the community objected to the
deletions and restored the links, the same admin performed 22 seperate
reverts in under two hours.

When questioned, the admin justified his actions by arguing, in part,
that the site's alleged harassment of him "calls the website's
neutrality into question. If the editor [of Making Lights] is engaged
in ongoing disputes with Wikipedia and its editors, can it still be
viewed as a reliable source?"  The admin also offered a quid pro quo,
whereby if the objectionable content was removed from Making Lights,
the Wikipedia links to ML would be restored, but if the content
remained on Making Lights, he promised to continue to remove the links
to ML indefinitely.

The whole experience was extremely upsetting for all involved, and if
you look around on Sci-Fi community blogs, you can see that Wikipedia
lost a lot of respect in that incident. Many in that sci-fi-blogger
subculture seem to have some harsh words for Wikipedia as a result of
the experience, and I'm sure we alienated a lot of people who could
have been valuable contributors.  The people who edit and read Making
Lights felt bullied, abused, and harassed.

Speaking as a reader/editors of Making Light, Sci Fi megagenius Cory
Doctorow  summarized the experience thusly:

"This is unseemly. You appear to be attempting to punish someone who
dislikes you by removing references to her site. This seems like
retaliation, not an effort to improve Wikipedia. What's more, the
repeated demand to change something posted to her site seems like
extortion, not an attempt to improve Wikipedia. TNH claims that
Wikipedians pursue petty vendettas at the expense of quality. Please
conduct yourself in a way that does not lend itself to this
interpretation of the project."

Ultimatlely, that particular incident came to an end when the disputed
material was deleted from ML, at least temporarily, and the links to
ML were restored.
------------------------------

Now, let's not obsess over WHO did this.  I swear, I'm not bring this
up to get in a dig at anyone.  The admin in question admits at least
having "overreacted", and as long as the behavior has stopped, it
doesn't matter WHO did this--  so by bringing this up, I'm sincerely,
sincerely not trying to pick on anyone.  We've all done things in the
past, on wikipedia or elsewhere, that we shouldn't be throwing stones
over this past thing right now.
----

But that said,  I can't help but notice that this sort of abuse seems
inherent to any  BADSITESesque polices of the form "no linking to
sites that are sufficiently bad".

My questions for Will Beback, or anyone else in the future who
proposes a new policy that forbids all links to "sites that contain
attacks" are this:

#1.  Do you agree that the Making Light case was an abuse of power (or
at least, incorrect.  .-- i.e. Do you agree Making lights should NOT
have been purged)?

#2. And if so, how will your new proposed policy prevent this sort of
abuse when the old policy was unable to.  That is-- if we all
magically decided to enact your policy today, what's to stop you (or
me, or anyone) from turning around tomorrow and having a complete
repeat of this whole fiasco tomorrow.

---

I believe any future policy, in order to be successful, must recognize
the past abuses of BADSITES, and must include reasonsable assurances
that the proposed policy won't lead to the same kind of abuses in the
future.

If an anthropomophic proposal's answer is "MakingLights and
MichaelMoore should have been deleted, and if I get enacted, I will
make sure they get deleted again if a similar situation arises", then
I personally think such a proposal is unlikely to ever achieve
consensus.
---

Alec