[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[RLS]

On 10/19/07, Will Beback <will.beback.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Wikipedia becomes known as a volunteer job that leads to off-site
> harassment that the community will do nothing to stop then that might
> tend to reduce the appeal of editing too.
>
> I again dispute that removing poor sources harms NPOV.

Dude.  Nobody's arguing against removing a poor source.  We're arguing
against removing valid, useful sources just because the same site
contains harassment of an editor. THAT will cause us to violate NPOV.

How you're coming across is that you want us to pull all links to
http://www.example.com/aaaa.html, http://www.example.com/bbbb.html,
http://www.example.com/cccc.html, and
http://www.example.com/dddd.html, just because
http://www.example.com/zzzz.html contains some verbal harassment of an
editor.

There is no reason to remove the links to aaaa through dddd if those
pages haven't changed and they're still relevant to the articles
they're linked from.  We just don't need to link to zzzz.html, and
it's hardly likely to be a useful source for an article anyway, unless
we're writing a neutral encyclopedic article *about* the harassment,
and that isn't very likely either as it probably won't pass WP:NOTE.

When someone at example.com posts their harassment at zzzz, we need to
NOT freak out and remove all the other good links to example.com.
That's what will indeed draw undue attention, and compromise the
articles about aaaa, bbbb, cccc, and dddd unnecessarily.  And yes, I'd
like to know where you get the idea that removing links to aaaa, bbbb,
cccc, and dddd will make the harassment at zzzz harder to find, or
accomplishes anything else useful.

If example.com changes their pages at aaaa, bbbb, cccc, and dddd to
compromise their content and replace those pages with harassing
content, then yes, the links to those pages need to be removed.  The
content is no longer a reliable source, editorially speaking.  In a
case where the actual content remains valid, but they add verbal
harassment to the bottom of those pages or something like that, then
that bridge needs to be crossed ***IF WE EVER GET THERE.*** It is
*not* something that we can make a value judgment on, or write a
policy on, here and now using hypothetical examples.  It's something
that we as a community need to look at if it ever happens.  The actual
harassment, its severity, its location and placement on the pages, and
the value of the sources to the articles all need to be taken into
consideration.  We cannot write a black and white policy on this,
without agreeing in advance to compromise our editorial principles.  I
don't know about you, but I'm not willing to do that.

--Darkwind