[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[RLS]

On 10/18/07, Will Beback <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> How should a policy deal with this situation? Should we maintain our
> link to the chatboard (which could only used because it was the subject
> of the article). Should we link to the harassment as an example of that
> community's activism? Should we tell valued editor that the link is more
> important than his privacy or well-being?

As I tried to convey in the message I just wrote, none of the above!
Removing the link from Wikipedia is hardly going to prevent the people
already familiar with that site from seeing the harassing information.
 Removing the link also won't prevent people who come to the Wikipedia
article with no prior knowledge from figuring out that they can use a
search engine to locate the exact URL of the website the article is
about.  I mean, really, the article is about a particular website, its
name has got to be in the article *at least* once.

All that removing the link is going to do is say "nyah-nyah, you were
rude, we unlinked you, haha we win!"  Put another way, removing the
link is just a variation on WP:POINT.  It reduces the objective
editorial quality of an article to accomplish nothing useful except to
be able to say "we don't link to harassment, and we're proud of it!"
-- when the link is hardly required to figure out where the website is
in the first place, if you have enough brains to use a search engine.

--Darkwind