[WikiEN-l] Encyclopedia Dramatica

[Ken Arromdee]

Disclaimer: I don't actually use ED and what I know of it comes from mentions
on the talk page and here, which seems to be quite enough to understand this:

Summary: This site is a controversial site that is often considered an attack
site, but we have an article about it anyway.  The site shut down and the
users of the old site restarted it at a different location.  Wikipedia has
decided that site should be considered defunct and the new site ignored
because 1) the new site is for harassment and we shouldn't link to harassment
(even though the same is true of the old site, yet we have an article about
it), 2) the new site is a copyright violation of the old site and we're
not supposed to link to copyright violations (even though the claim that it
is a copyright violation is based on selectively using one of two
contradictory copyright notices from the old site), and 3) we have no reliable
source claiming the two sites are the same.

It seems obvious to me that this is being excluded because either the editors
don't want to link there and find this a good excuse, or else are simply
blindly adhering to rules even when they make no sense (I recall a case where
an open-source project was restarted by the same people under a new name and
we couldn't have an article about it because we had to provide separate
notability for the new version of the project).

We also may want to rethink the rules about copyright violations.  It's one
thing to ignore a site because it contains a bootleg copy of Star Wars.  It's
another to ignore a site where there's a copyright dispute and Wikipedia has
to actually decide the dispute in order to call the site a copyright
violation.  It especially makes little sense when the same people are
involved in the "copyright violating" site who were involved with the original
site--shouldn't it make more sense to treat it as the same site if it has the
same content and the same people, even if its copyright status did change?