[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[William Pietri]

Will Beback wrote:
>> 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. 
>>     
> Why would we support an editor in getting a restraining order, but not 
> support them by doing any restraining ourselves? What form would this 
> support take?
>   

Will, you keep going back and forth on this. I asked you explicitly if 
removing the link was supposed to have some effect on the outside site, 
whether it was punitive. You said no. Instead, you have said both a) 
because they were now so unreliably deranged we couldn't link to them, 
or b) it made the editor feel bad.

Now you're back to what I suspected and you denied: it is intended to 
have an effect on the harassers. My prediction is that it will have 
exactly the effect that it did before: it will make us look like 
self-serving, vengeful people who are willing to manipulate encyclopedia 
coverage to get what we want. It will not restrain them; it will 
infuriate them.

However, even if it did work, we should not do any restraining ourself 
because we are not the police and we are not vigilantes. The 
encyclopedia is not ours to hold hostage to petty squabbles with petty 
people. Not ever.


>> 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.
>>     
> So you're saying that if an editor is harassed by an outside group then 
> the editor (and Wikipedia) should give in to that harassment. And you 
> think that won't affect the POV of a topic? If a group succeeds in 
> driving off one editor after another, how many thick-skinned editors are 
> there willing to take their places?
>   

I'm of course not saying we should give in to harassment. As I said a 
whole three paragraphs before the one you quote, "We should not alter 
article content one iota in response to external badgering."

I'm saying we have a ton of good editors, and that if there is some 
personal conflict, we can afford to move people around. We can afford to 
replace one editor in a dispute with one or several solid editors with 
no personal history.

I think this is a good idea not just out of theory, but because I've 
tried it. It was a relief to get a problem article off my watchlist, and 
things have gone fine since. Was the problem me? Was the problem them? 
Was it a weird confluence of the two? Or did they just settle down when 
they saw a fresh face? I don't know and I don't much care. It works.


> Let's think about it long enough to come up with a formal policy or 
> procedure to handle it. You make some good suggestions, but mail-list 
> posting don't write policies.
>   

I'm not feeling a personal need for a policy. I think our article-space 
policies are fine. I think outside of article space we need to be better 
about following things like WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL, and WP:COOL.

And I think we need to make it clearer to prospective editors and admins 
that getting seriously involved in the world's 9th most popular web site 
makes you a quasi-public figure, with all that entails. E.g., [1] and [2].

William



[1] Gabriel's Theory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
[2] "Everybody Sucks", http://nymag.com/news/features/39319/
-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri