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(a)doctors.org.uk
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