[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/10/2007, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> RLS wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Isn't this fairly rare, though?
>
> Let's not get too hung up on edge cases.  The bulk of the cases of
> interest are links to sites that are *literally* harasssment sites,
> through and through, and not valid references for anything at all.

But no-one is arguing that links which are obviously visible as
harassment (to any passing reader) are good. We're all happy with
those ones being taken out and shot on a case-by-case
let's-be-sensible-now basis, whether you call it an attack-sites
policy or you call it common sense.

The edge cases are the entire problem, and they're the most
potentially harmful. What people are *strongly* against is "these are
bad" being used to stealthily creep into "we can declare things which
aren't quite these to be just as bad". And experience shows that if we
leave loaded guns like these proposed policies lying around, some
overzealous (well-meaning) admin will happily shoot the project in the
foot with them.

We can manage just fine without any policy in this area, and a
community happy to do *sane* and *reasonable* things about obvious
harassment when obvious harassment happens, without consenting to
excessive and harmful demands from the victims or from their more
zealous flag-wavers. Which, you know, we have.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk