[WikiEN-l] Unsuitable external links

Sun Dec 11 09:07:29 UTC 2005

For the last several weeks there has been a low-grade edit war, 
spanning numerous articles, over the suitability of one particular 
site in the "external links" section. The site in question is 
http://www.whale.to - a privately maintained collection of 
information not limited to vaccination and basically 
critical/suspicious of basically everything. A brief look on the site 
will reveal it is not the voice of any organisation, professional 
body, or even some collective, but one person collecting extremist 
material. Whether the site has any significant following is unclear. 
The front page boasts a 1 million hits/year Alexa ranking.
The pattern is predictable: a small group of anonymous users inserts 
the link (into [[chickenpox]], [[shaken baby syndrome]], [[MMR 
vaccine]] etc). Several registered editors remove these links. One 
user, [[User:Ombudsman]] systematically puts the links back. The 
cycle then repeats itself.

This has gone through RFC twice, first in an RFC directed at 
Ombudsman ([[WP:RFC/Ombudsman]]) and now as an article RFC at [[MMR 
vaccine]]. Leaving out comments by anonymous users, most are in 
agreement that it is a very poor resource and has no merits over 
links to organisations usually present in these articles. Ombudsman 
is not participating in this discussion. There have been personal 
attacks from anons, and of course the whine of "censorship" and 
"suppression of views" (manifestly not the cases as other critical 
links are not removed).

I am taking this to WikiEN-L because I am not sure how to proceed. 
RFC has been unsuccesful. I'm a bit hesitant to take this to RFAr. 
Does anyone have an idea how we could best arrive at solid consensus 
here? What constitutes a "suitable" external link? Do we give in to a 
small band of anons pushing a link? And if the link is deemed 
unsuitable, is there any way for automatically blocking the link 
through the spamlist?

Jfdwolff

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    jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk
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