[WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

[fredbaud at waterwiki.info]

-----Original Message-----
From: William Pietri [mailto:william at scissor.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 05:31 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites

Durova wrote:
>> We do it for shock sites, and antisocialmedia.net is odious enough to
>> deserve not being linked.
>
> The purpose is that it reduces incoming traffic from one of the most
> powerful sources of link traffic on the Internet. If that discourages
> people from using their sites to intimidate particular editors, then so much
> the better. NPOV *is* harmed when good editors decide "this isn't worth it"
> and leave the project. 

The reason we don't link shock sites is not because *we* find them 
offensive. It's because we believe the vast majority of our readers 
would find them so immediately and pungently offensive that we want them 
to be sure they don't accidentally get an eyeful. I don't see 
antisocialmedia.net in the same category: we personally may find parts 
of it odious, but it will not cause most readers mental scarring. [1]

The question I keep asking myself about these proposals is: Who does it 
serve? Delinking shock sites serves our readers. Delinking sites that we 
don't like because of how they treat us most obviously serves ourselves 
at the expense of our readers. Your argument that it also has a subtle, 
long-term effect on our ability to serve readers is interesting, but 
unproven, and could just as well have the opposite effect.


William

_______________________________________________

You never seem to understand the issue. One suspects your sustained mischaracterization of the issue is not an accident. We have plenty on the site which shocks the average reader and are strongly committed to presenting such information without censorship. Harassment is attacks directed at our users. We support our users by minimizing the degree of harassment they are exposed to.
Fred