[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[William Pietri]

Will Beback wrote:
> [story snipped]
>
> 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?
>   

My view:

We should not alter article content one iota in response to external 
badgering. The only thing that has changed is our view of them, not the 
NPOV view of them. Ergo, we behave exactly as if they were harassing

Editors in good standing should be able to link to the harassment to the 
extent that they believe it serves some legitimate purpose in 
furtherance of Wikipedia's mission. If they are linking for some other 
reason (e.g., or gossip or furthering the harassment) they should be 
dealt with through our usual mechanisms for miscreants and the 
clue-deficient.

We should tell the editor that we hope they understand that articles 
should not be affected in any way by internet drama. To the extent that 
the editor wants to take defensive legal action (like getting a 
restraining order) we should support them. And we should encourage them 
to ask for a fellow editor to take over maintaining the article(s) in 
question, hopefully from a pool of people with thick skins and 
diplomatic skills.

And in my opinion, we should always reach out to the offended party or 
community to at least make nice, and hopefully to work with them to the 
extent possible. A vast amount of this drama comes when all sides 
believe that we should have a great encyclopedia, and they just have a 
different idea of what that means than us. Often that's just because 
we've thought about it for years and they've thought about it for minutes.

William


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri