joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
The problem with spam links at all is that even a few of them make people less likely to trust whether the external links provided are useful.
Yes, that's exactly the point. More is not better. Including links that offer slight benefit lowers the quality of the the entire collection. Articles are usually better with fewer links, and editors who go through and clear out excess external links are often thanked. Links aren't sacred: we add the ones we think are best and cull the rest.
As long as the page which happens to have an attack on the Wikipedian is a relevant external link it is better and doing less damage to the article than a link about buying cars or a random blog.
Whoa, is that really what you mean? You'd defend the link to a webpage that contains harassment of a Wikipedia editors just because it was somewhat relevant to an article topic? And you think that such links are less harmful to Wikipedia than other, non-harassing blogs? I think we must be mis-communicating.
And the vast majority, most likely all, the damage from harassing links will occur whether or not we link to the website. The end result of this also is to remove more and more to prevent harassement. For example, if someone keeps harassing an editor until the person's article is deleted, do we delete it? No, not any more than we would if the person in question had politely asked for their article to be removed as one of borderline notability. Nor do we make convenience alterations and remove pertinent information of notable people simply to stop their little campaigns on Wikipedia. We do remove information when the sourcing is questionable, but that's basically it. And there's no substantial difference changing that policy whether we change it for birthdates, external links, sourced criticism or anything else.
You are seriously misinformed about the extent of deletions made through the OTRS process. We quietly remove large amounts of sourced material, even whole, highly sourced articles.
Will