Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Attack sites

Case Opened on 20:45, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Case Closed on 20:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist all case pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Please do not edit this page directly unless you wish to become a participant in this case. (All participants are subject to Arbitration Committee decisions, and the ArbCom will consider each participant's role in the dispute.) Comments are very welcome on the Talk page, and will be read, in full. Evidence, no matter who can provide it, is very welcome at /Evidence. Evidence is more useful than comments.

Arbitrators, the parties, and other editors may suggest proposed principles, findings, and remedies at /Workshop. That page may also be used for general comments on the evidence. Arbitrators will then vote on a final decision in the case at /Proposed decision.

Once the case is closed, editors may add to the as needed, but closed cases should not be edited otherwise. Please raise any questions at Requests for arbitration.

Statement by Phil Sandifer
After the initial (failed) proposal of WP:BADSITES as policy, a successful attempt was made to add language to No personal attacks that forbids references to off-site attacks on Wikipedians. Although well-intentioned, this language is being construed by its advocates as banning mention of sites that attack Wikipedians in the article namespace, as in articles like Judd Bagley and Overstock.com. In these cases, NPOV coverage of the subject requires consideration of the website antisocialmedia.net. This website is, it should be noted, a despicable site devoted to ugly smear campaigns against people, including Wikipedia editors. However it is a relevant part of discussion of Overstock.com, and to remove mention to it is to violate our basic standards of being an encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, attempts to clarify NPA about this matter have met with resistance, and editors are repeatedly removing even the mention of antisocialmedia.net (not even links to it - just mentions that this is the website's name) from the article space.

NPOV is a Foundation issue and is non-negotiable on en. No policy may be written to supercede it, no matter what consensus of editors on the talk page of that policy might form. As the very nature of this problem is that an attempt is being made to "discuss" and "vote" on something that is inherently beyond the realm of discussion and voting, I see no recourse other than taking the matter to the arbitration committee to rule on whether removal of material such as the name of the antisocialmedia.net website can be justified under any policy whatsoever.

Addendum

And now an involved administrator, User:Tom harrison, has blanked the Judd Bagley article while the deletion debate is ongoing and protected it from editing.

The conduct of those supporting BADSITES and its derivative policies is crossing lines all over, and furthermore that conduct stems directly from a poorly thought out arbitration ruling that did not put any bounds whatsoever on the idea that sites that contain harassment should not be linked to. This is an unholy mess with personal feelings running hot and being hurt. But basic policy is being thrown to the wayside in an increasingly frenzied attempt to trade writing a thorough, NPOV encyclopedia in for an end to harassment. The phrase "The operation was a success, but the patient died" springs to mind.

I implore the arbcom to take this case, for more or less the same reasons they accepted the Badlydrawnjeff case - because there is no other body on en.wikipedia who is capable of sorting this mess out. Phil Sandifer 15:34, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Statement by User:Tom harrison
We have policies, not operating programs for admin-bots. The way to deal with this is to apply the policy with reason and good sense. Dispute resolution exists to deal with people who are not doing that. In some cases dispute resolution has not yet been tried; in another, it is in progress. Tom Harrison Talk 14:57, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Statement by Samiharris
The title of this section is a misnomer. "Badsites" would have prohibited linking to sites containing attacks, and I agree that could have been too broadly interpreted. But what is at issue here is a link to a website that consists in large measure of attacks on Wikipedia editors. Click on the website and you get an attack on an administrator who offended the "nauseating" (reliably sourced) Bagley. The article did not suffer nor was made less "neutral" by removal of a reference to the article.

The editors pushing this issue are behaving almost as if NPOV requires addition of such sites to articles in order for them to be neutral. This is nonsense.

For many months the Overstock.com article has a brief and neutral reference to this same smear site without mentioning it. Over the past day or two, without seeking consensus over what he knew was a highly charged issue, Phil Sandifer and other editors repeated inserted the name of the site in the Overstock.com article. They did so knowing that NPA didn't allow references to that site, and they also knew or should have known that the site contained on its front page an attack on a Wikipedia administrator.

Not even the numerous Overstock.com cheerleaders and Bagley fans made a serious effort to include specific references to that website. The actions of editors who had not previously edited that article, adding the name of the site and making other hasty changes (such as removing and then reinserting a section on board departures), was disruptive.

To justify his actions, Phil Sandifer and others cite NPOV. I don't see the connection. The Overstock article is not more or less neutral because it contains the name of the site. Neither is the Bagley article. At the present time, because of BLP concerns, the article is now a stub that is a sentence long and is protected as a stub. Thus there is no live dispute concerning that article.

As for the Overstock article, there is no dispute other than what was caused by editors rushing in and, disruptively, adding the name of the site to make a point. If you want to make policy or change policy, go ahead and do so. But it should not be done by zealots disrupting articles because they feel that articles must include refences to such sites.Samiharris 16:33, 6 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Comment to User:LessHeard vanU: You are asking the Arbitration Committee to give editors sweeping ability to add links that attack editors. While I imagine this is a laudatory goal, there are already numerous restrictions on the links that can be added to the encyclopedia, ranging from WP:EL to WP:RS and a lot in between. I hope you are not suggesting that these restrictions be disregarded when a link "builds the encyclopedia" by attacking one of your fellow editors. Re your response to this comment: the Mongo decision covers just a small fraction of the restrictions on external links, which are covered in WP:EL, WP:RS and other policies. Editors do not have free reign to link to any site not attacking editors.--Samiharris 13:44, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Statement by Mantanmoreland
Currently WP:NPA authorizes removal of links or references to off-site personal attacks on Wikipedians. When he created Judd Bagley, Phil Sandifer placed a reference to a site called antisocialmedia as a subject header. This was directly against the policy and was reverted for that reason. He then edit-warred to keep it and did the same in Overstock.com. I was one of the reverters and I strictly abided by policy. Phil Sandifer did not.

NPOV did not "require" naming of antisocialmedia.net in either article. Whether it is named or not is an editorial judgment, and NPA plays into that. Antisocialmedia is a professional smear site operated by Bagley, the public relations director of Overstock.com, a company that is under SEC investigation. Wikipedia is one of its principal targets. A Wikipedia administrator is personally attacked on its main space, not in a post buried in a discussion somewhere. Overstock.com runs a Wiki called "OMuse" which makes it a competitor of Wikipedia, and Bagley has personally vandalized Wikipedia via numerous sockpuppets as User:WordBomb. This is his acknowledged Wikipedia screen name, so I am not "outing" him.

This makes antisocialmedia a unique case and is not comparable to any other website to which Wikipedia may link. The Judd Bagley article was highly negative and, while I thought it evolved into a thorough treatment of the subject, Bagley is simply not notable and it appears that the article is going to be deleted. Thus I expect that the issue is moot as far as that article is concerned. The subject of antisocialmedia was not ignored in Overstock.com; it was dealt with and given appropriate weight and without naming the site. Until the last day or so there was apparently no major outcry to name the site.

It is debatable at best if the external links section of WP:NPA is "broken" because it supposedly falls afoul of WP:NPOV. If WP:NPA is poorly drafted, it should be changed. Editors should not unilaterally edit war in violation of existing policy because they feel they are justified by WP:NPOV, the Bible or anything else. --Mantanmoreland 19:29, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Reply to Phil Sandifer: Tom Harrison's blanking of most of the article was because of BLP concerns and had nothing to do with so-called "Badsites" or the external links issue.--Mantanmoreland 20:12, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Statement by User:ElinorD
DennyColt started noisily removing links from archives where they had lain undisturbed, and wrote a "policy" which failed to differentiate between criticism and stalking, between realname editors and username editors, or between reputable newssites which might report someone's name and sites where trolls go through early edits of admins to figure out their identities. I emailed editors who had been harassed or were sympathetic to victims, and we assumed Denny was a good editor who had been outed under some previous identity. I urged him privately to be less zealous, feeling it was counter-productive and was making arbitrators think the MONGO ruling might not have been such a good idea.

In general, editors who support removing links did not support BADSITES as it was written: we supported something based on it, worded far more carefully, giving protection to editors, without compromising the encyclopaedia. We were accused of trying to suppress criticism (but there's a difference between calling me corrupt and publishing my address) and of favouring a policy that would ban links to the New Yorker (but Essjay confirmed his identity on his own page). Nobody except (apparently) Denny wanted to promote the wording of his page.

We gradually began to trust Denny less, and to believe that he might be a banned stalker himself, trying to destroy the previously unchallenged practice of quietly removing links to sites that out editors. When he disappeared with his work done, we were sure. By now, I feel if someone posts a link to a site with SOPHIA's name and address, and MONGO removes it, someone will revert with an edit summary saying "BADSITES was rejected". The link will be posted at AN/I so that the community can be involved in the case-by-case decision, and they can all click on the link to see if it really does give her number. Perhaps they can even call it to check that it's hers before they agree the link is inappropriate. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. It's also my impression that as a result of DennyColt's work and some imprudent but forgiveable behaviour of harassment victims, arbitrators became less sympathetic than before towards victims.

Policies can be abused by trolls deliberately making them look bad or by good editors who genuinely misunderstand. We don't throw out BLP just because someone cites it to remove something legitimate. We don't reject the vandalism exception for 3RR just because someone invokes it when vandalism wasn't involved.

I'm unaware of any case where the harm done to the morale (never mind the safety) of victims by linking to sites that engage habitually in outing editors is outweighed by some comparable benefit to the encyclopaedia. None of the most vicious sites could possibly count as a reliable source that an important article would be seriously damaged without. Where editors need to be informed of material about them, they can be emailed or asked to enable email. Where evidence is necessary for investigating alleged misconduct, links can be privately emailed to ArbCom. Many featured articles have been written by harassment victims. Losing them and their future contributions is worse for the overall quality of the encyclopaedia than getting by without a particular link which might slightly improve an obscure article on an insignificant subject. ElinorD (talk) 19:30, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (6/2/0/0)

 * Accept. Is it being asserted that WP:NPA applies to articles? That's absurd. Mackensen (talk) 01:25, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Decline; I see no need for a new case here, as we can deal with this particular issue in the THF-DavidShankBone one. Kirill 03:16, 6 September 2007 (UTC) Accept. Kirill 16:28, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Reject . The Committee is appointed to deal with disruptive user conduct not to write policy. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 11:41, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * We're not being asked to write policy; we're being asked to clarify an earlier ruling. Mackensen (talk) 11:58, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Our rulings are case specific, intended to be a guide for similar situations, but not the law of the land. We do not need a new case to make this point. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 13:05, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept, to look at the behavior of all parties. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 17:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Reject Since James F. now supports the idea, back to my original thinking that handling this outside of a new case is better. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 14:30, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept. I disagree with Mackensen, however - the suggestion that NPA applies to articles is well beyond merely "absurd". James F. (talk) 12:35, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * As a post script, the MONGO decision definitely needs re-working. It was meant in good faith, but... James F. (talk) 12:44, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It now seems that we will deal with this as a clarification, below. James F. (talk) 14:12, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept. Clarification is good. --jpgordon&#8711;&#8710;&#8711;&#8710; 15:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept. We need to clarify & try to strike a sensible balance between competing interests here. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 18:42, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept Fred Bauder 19:42, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept Paul August &#9742; 13:27, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Temporary injunction (none)
=Final decision= All numbering based on /Proposed decision (vote counts and comments are there as well)

Freedom of Expression
1) Wikipedia attracts legitimate criticism. Nothing in this decision should be construed as to indicate that sites criticizing Wikipedia or individual Wikipedians must never be linked to. This decision is about actual harassment, not legitimate criticism.


 * Passed 9-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

No personal attacks
2) Personal attacks on other users are not acceptable; No personal attacks.


 * Passed 8-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Harassment
3) Engaging in a pattern of threatening or intimidating behavior directed at another user is unacceptable; Harassment.


 * Passed 8-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Linking to external sites as harassment
4.2) Linking to external sites which contain information harmful to another person so as to harass them is unacceptable.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Dealing with harassment but not of oneself
7.2) Users have the right to expect harassment of themselves to be combated. Users who are not directly involved are encouraged to achieve this through the removal of personal attacks, removal of links to external harassment, and, in extreme cases, removal of references to attack sites; these activities are not subject to revert limitations.


 * Passed 5-1 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Scope of Arbitration
14) The scope and effect of an Arbitration decision is generally limited to the situation addressed.


 * Passed 7-1 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Malicious sites
15.1) Wikipedia should not link to websites set up for the purpose of or substantially devoted to harassing its volunteers. Harassment in this context refers to cyber-stalking, offline stalking, outing people without their consent, humiliating them sexually, or threatening them with physical violence.


 * Passed 6-1 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Don't over-react
22.1) Wikipedia users and administrators are expected to have made a realistic appraisal of the risks involved in volunteering for Wikipedia, to take appropriate precautions, and to deal with external pressures in a mature way. For example, it is predictable that Wikipedia and its users will from time to time be subjected to harsh, and occasionally unfair, criticism. This comes with the territory, and it is unseemly, even ridiculous, to react harshly to predictable phenomena.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Satire
23) Satirical treatment of Wikipedia, its users, errors and policies is to be expected.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Anonymity and conflict of interest
24) Allowing anonymous editing and forbidding conflict of interest is an obvious contradiction which necessarily is imperfectly resolved.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Investigation of prohibited links
32) If an editor believes that the content of a prohibited link reveals a serious violation of Wikipedia policy, they may forward the link to the Committee for investigation.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Error
37) From time to time, Wikipedia users and administrators err, engaging in inappropriate activities which may come to our notice through external criticism.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Fighting back
38) Persons aggrieved by Wikipedia and its users, those banned, subjects who don't like the content of their article, subjects, or notable people, who attempt to edit and feel harassed, etc., sometimes attempt to fight back, and in addition to legitimate criticism, engage in name calling, create critical websites, attempt to determine the real identity of editors, create links to edit a user's page, etc.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Struggle
39) Once struggle is commenced with Wikipedia, or one of its users, on an external site, Wikipedia users may attempt to respond with removal of links, or criticism of its initiator. This can rapidly degenerate into a struggle between aggrieved users and supporters of free expression or of the external site.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

NPA
40) WP:NPA is about conduct, not about content. Concepts that apply to user behavior have nothing to do with article content, regardless of the article subject matter. Article content should be determined in a disinterested editorial manner; applying community policies or guidelines not intended for article content, or allowing one's own opinions of, or experiences with, the subject of an article, to be a consideration, is inappropriate.


 * Passed 5-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

AntiSocialMedia.net
1) AntiSocialMedia.net, a creation of the banned user, is part of an extended campaign of harassment directed at several users.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Suppression of references to external sites
4) In a number of cases, editors attempting in good faith to protect themselves and other Wikipedians from harassment have aggressively removed links and references to external sites, as well as discussions associated with them.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Inappropriate application of policy
6) In a number of instances inappropriate attempts have been made to extend the principles of Requests for arbitration/MONGO to sites merely critical of Wikipedia and its users' behavior. Those principles and those applied in this case apply only to malicious websites.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorting out
8) Except for obvious cases, such as ED, it is difficult to sort out sites engaged in criticism of Wikipedia and its editors and administrators from sites engaged in harassment. Likewise, when information is provided about the alleged wrong-doings of Wikipedia users, it can be difficult to differentiate legitimate complaints from bogus ones calculated to cast a user in a false light.


 * Passed 6-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Remedies
Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

Policy matter remanded to the community
3.2) The community is encouraged to develop a policy compliant with Wikipedia's key policies regarding the circumstances, if any, under which "attack sites" may be linked.


 * Passed 6-2 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The community is encouraged to develop a policy
3.3) The community is encouraged to discuss and adopt a policy addressing the issue of disputed links to external sites, such as the ones discussed in this case.


 * Passed 5-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Editors encouraged
4) All editors are encouraged to show due consideration for the feelings of other Wikipedians, and to refrain from idly or frivolously making references to malicious sites.


 * Passed 8-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Scope of this decision
5.1) This decision applies only to links to AntiSocialMedia.net and similar sites which engage in malicious behavior toward Wikipedia users. Attempts to extend this remedy to sites critical of Wikipedia and its users' behavior are discouraged.


 * Passed 6-1 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Advice to aggrieved parties
7) If you are dissatisfied with the article on you or your project, or regarding how you are treated on Wikipedia, please communicate on our talk pages, use our dispute resolution procedures, or contact the Wikimedia Foundation itself.


 * Passed 7-0 at 20:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)