On 10/19/07, Will Beback will.beback.1@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