Talk:Kiwi Farms

Why isn't Chris mentioned by name?

It's very clear that the writer went out of his way to not name him. Not mentioning him by name is like calling Zuckerberg "a collage student" on the Wikipedia page for Facebook and intentionally refusing to say his name, Chris is the main reason the site was made, mention him by name or don't make an article on the site. Mudkipboy7 (talk) 02:55, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Agree. Kiwifarms is noteable and that makes Chris notable and should be named. Mentally ill or not, wanting to have notoriety or not, those are not relevant things to being documented on Wikipedia except maybe in extraordinary and extreme cases. We always see people getting attention in the media we don't think deserve any, like it or not they're relevant to the subject. 185.31.98.184 (talk) 04:42, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. The article has been written and re-written so many times, always with some hackneyed attempt to obfuscate the origin of the name, and by extension avoid the whole "CWC"-thing. It really does the article no good, as this isn't just "a mentally ill person", it's a prominent figure in internet culture, who, for several reasons (not just the 2021 arrest) has received a fair amount of mainstream media coverage. In general, I believe this CWC person is notable enough for an article of their own, based on the extremely unique circumstances of their life and their massive cult following. It wouldn't be too out-there, given articles of a similar nature (see Jessi Slaughter cyberbullying case as example) do exist on Wikipedia.

I understand that such an article would have to have a close eye on it, to prevent it from going off the rails, and that the topic itself has been sort of banned, since both CWC and their detractors used Wikipedia as a "battle ground" of sorts way back when, but I consider it a disservice to not at least have a brief mention of the namesake of this article, particularly since several of the listed sources provide this very information. A Simple Fool (talk) 17:34, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

This topic has been discussed to death. There would need to be consensus in a structured, formal, well-attended discussion (such as a Request for Comment) to change the community's current position. I notice that no comments in this section provide any evidence that there has been substantial coverage in reliable sources. — Bilorv (talk) 08:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure if these are reliable sources or not, but there are several articles to be found regarding CWC and recent events through a Google search. (1, 2.)

I don't think it's enough to create an entire new article, but I think it's worth a mention in the KiwiFarms article, especially as some sources mention KiwiFarms directly. JungleEntity (talk) 01:13, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

• The honest answer? There is, realistically, no way to write about the person in question without violating WP:BLP. I do believe they may satisfy WP:GNG, however, Wikipedia does not need an article on every notable subject, nor does every notable subject need a mention. It is easier (on everyone's sanity) to avoid it. -- Rockstone^{Send me a message!} 07:27, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

  It's also worth noting that a fairly strong consensus was built at WP:AN that there is pretty much zero chance of them having an article written. Primefac (talk) 07:45, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

I said a mention in this article, he is too significant to not mention by name. Mudkipboy7 (talk) 01:49, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Your continued misgendering of her is somewhat of a concern. Primefac (talk) 10:57, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, "Wikipedia does not need an article on X notable subject", and "it's easier to avoid it" screams laziness to me. It strikes me as odd that a place for information would basically pick and choose articles based essentially on how comfortable they happen to feel about a specific subject. It's just a bad look to leave gaps in information "just because", despite articles about similar (less notable, even) people existing seemingly without much issue. It's such an arbitrary rule, and it seems likely that most of the people enforcing said rule either know too little, or nothing at all about this subject A Simple Fool (talk) 22:07, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

The emphasis is on BLP, not on "easier to avoid". It is not people picking and choosing articles based on comfortableness, the point is that no one has been able to write an article that both meets BLP and establishes the notability. 0xDeadbeef 22:22, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm a little confused. Why can't we name them? We don't need a whole article, just add "Christine Chandler" or whatever after "webcomic artist." Riffraff913 (talk) 16:41, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Maybe because Chris Chan is such a complicated figure and bias, uncited sources and rumours are rampant, not least the so-called "troll armies" ready to editwar the article into unreadability, the topic is just too difficult to cover. Chris Chan may be a worldwide sensation, but maybe it's best their presence is confined to legend rather than Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by VariousStuffs (talk • contribs) 23:08, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I think his her name should be included. If the website's former name (CWCki Forums) is mentioned in the lead paragraph, I think the acronym's meaning (ie. C******-Chan, formerly C*******-Chan) should be mentioned. It doesn't have to shouldn't be a lot of discussion. But it just really irks me when a wiki article or even a company's "about us" history page repeatedly use an acronym but don't explain what the stinking acronym in their name means. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 01:40, 10 September 2022 (UTC); edited 03:51, 13 September 2022 (UTC) ; edited Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 17:56, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

• I think WP:AVOIDVICTIM generally applies here; most of her notability, especially in the context of this article, stems from others' actions. That would generally suggest that we should follow WP:BLPNAME and avoid naming her. --Aquillion (talk) 01:48, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

  Besides all the good policy-based reasons, it's my impression that we have an consensus that mentioning CWC's name would be bad for the wiki regardless of other policy. Loki (talk) 02:23, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

  @Aquillion @Loki I suppose so. I can see that there's considerable opposition to naming her, though I think there isn't consensus so much as lack of consensus with many still standing behind their points. But I respect that we ought to err on the side of less possible harm if there is lack of consensus. I still think there's value in at least defining the acronym CWC but I respect the consensus reached by previous editors.

  I'm of the opinion that much of her notoriety is from her own willful actions and that she saw public attention as resulting from her artistic pursuits (though there's also been many unwarranted things done to harass her). I think the line between victim and non-victim is very blurred but WP:AVOIDVICTIM wouldn't apply since her notoriety wasn't solely from a one-off incident but from her portfolio of work as well. She continued to produce content, a significant portion of which was about her own personal life, for public consumption and that content was notable to others. By comparison, if the internet and the rest of the world suddenly forgot about the viral videos of Jessi Slaughter in relation to the accusations against Vanity, I think she (Slaughter) would not have become so visible (barring a separate incident). Whereas with Cxxxx chan, erasing one incident from memory wouldn't diminish her notoriety considering the sizable portfolio of other stuff she had done/created.

  Is there mental illness involved in C*****-chan's complete misunderstanding of and embrace of a significant portion of the attention focused on her? Probably. But I think it's beyond the purview of editors to restrict mention of certain creators to spare them negative attention. In my opinion, it's like if articles chose to not name Tommy Wiseau as the director of his movies. He's notable for the atrocious movies he directed and it would be strange and a double standard if people withheld his name from reviews to solely to spare him public ridicule.

  Anyhow, that's just my thoughts. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 17:31, 10 September 2022 (UTC); edited 03:51, 13 September 2022 (UTC); edited Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 17:56, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

• I agree with others that there's no reason to mention her name here. She's not really mentioned in the article outside of the brief history section, and its inclusion is not really relevant. I also sympathise with the WP:AVOIDVICTIM concerns. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:29, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
• There is a very strong and long standing consensus that any mention of CWC, whether it's in a standalone BLP about her, or on this page, is a magnet for vandals and harassment. As other editors have stated, there is no way to write content about this individual in a way that cannot violate WP:BLP, particularly in light of WP:AVOIDVICTIM. Past discussions on this took place on:

As this has been a perennial discussion, across at least the last 3 years, community consensus is very strong that content on CWC cannot be included in any article. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:52, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

@Sideswipe9th Oh holy moly, I'm sorry for not seeing this. I searched on the talk page but didn't see or look into the archive. Thank you for taking the time to compile this.

Incidentally, as this topic has come up multiple times, is there any way to prevent any of the auto archiving bots from archiving a particular section? So it's easier for editors not familiar with an article's history to see any important things that were settled in the past. Something like the equivalent of a forum's "Sticky" post at the top of a section. I was looking for something like that but couldn't find any. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 02:29, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

We could add a FAQ section to the talk page header with this information in it, but the banners don't appear for many mobile editors. We also could add a summary talk page section at the top of the talk page, tag it with {{do not archive until}}, however as is demonstrated with this section, some editors often "necro" old discussions, and such a section would be a magnet for that. Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:36, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

@Sideswipe9th Sorry, I didn't mean to beat a dead horse or necro.

I think the value of having a {{Pinned section}} that says something like "Per extensive discussions, consensus is to not name this individual within the article per WP:AVOIDVICTIM and WP:BLPNAME; please see talk page and archived discussions here, here, here" outweighs the nuisance of having to rollback those edits to archived pages but I'm not the one having to do the rollbacks *shrug. (I also didn't know so many people edited talk pages which were archived smh) Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 03:51, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Now this has been established, I have sort of the reverse question: What's the encyclopedic value to even mentioning her initials? It's been years since they were called that, and the sum of the encyclopedic value of the initials to the article is "they were founded to harass a particular person and these are her initials". Loki (talk) 02:45, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

@Loki Do you mean the value of mentioning the old name or defining what the acronym CWC stands for? For the former, it's useful if someone reads an old source that mentions the forum's old name so they know it's referring to Kiwi Farms. For the latter, my natural inclination when I see an acronym is to want to know what it stands for (but I'm also a bit OCD so there's that). Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 03:51, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

No, my question is neither of those. I'm asking, what's the value of even having the acronym itself in the article? Why don't we stop calling it "CWCwiki" or calling her "CWC" and just talk around it like we talk around her full name? Loki (talk) 04:16, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Ummm, not everyone is talking around the name. Jasonkwe has just proposed to permanently inscribe it on this Talk page (which does not seem ideal). Newimpartial (talk) 10:43, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

@Newimpartial That's not what I was suggesting. The point was to have a sticky so that people know to not add the full name of that individual for whom the website was originally named. I did not know that use of that individual's name on the talk page was incorrect per WP:BLP-- I had only meant to be specific so other editors would not make this edit on the article mainspace.

@LokiTheLiar I think that was the first thing I had mentioned, "what's the point in mentioning the old name in the article". My reason was that there's probably some older sources which refer to the site only by the CWCki name and mentioning it provides continuity for readers so they know it's referring to the same thing. I imagine that if someone was doing research on cyberbullying and had seen mention of CWCki elsewhere, there's a chance they might not know it was the former name for Kiwi Farms. Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 17:46, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

@Primefac would you be able to delete edit 1110021882 from 04:03, 13 September 2022‎ from the article mainspace which I made in poor judgment? Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 18:15, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

No. As I said elsewhere (and a few other places in the past), the mere existence of her name is not the issue, and a commented-out note that eventually be buried in the history does not meet any of the criteria for removal. Primefac (talk) 19:21, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

@Jasonkwe I think including the original name of the site is also important as it explains the origin of the current cite name, which is a mispronunciation of the old one mocking someone for their speech impediment. Without knowing the history the site’s name sounds completely innocent. Ganondox (talk) 09:54, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Phrasing regarding the death of Near

Ginder's death still has not been validated through an official source, indeed the only "validations" we have are from a USA Today article which claims to have spoken with Ginder's employer and the Kotaku and PC Gamer articles which reference Hector Martin. While arguments have been hade regarding the validity of these claims, there is some phrasing that I suggest could be altered in order to reflect this. Regarding Martin's reports, the article mentions that he "reported on June 28 that he had spoken to police who confirmed that Near had died the previous day", the phrasing, much like the following part about the USA Today article, makes this seem authoritative, while in reality these are both sources which reference people who are either not citing any verifiable information (in the case of Martin) or have not had their claims independently reported in other sources (in the case of Beckett in the USA Today article). According to the principle of WP:V, the information must come from reliable sources, and while arguments for Kotaku and USA Today fitting this criteria have been made, the sources which these publications reference certainly aren't by any measure. The best thing would naturally be if a statement or other information could authoritatively conclude whether or not David Kirk Ginder is dead or not, ideally from the Bureau of Consular Affairs if Ginder was a U.S. citizen when this is supposed to have occurred. Tsumugii (talk) 17:09, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

It is the responsibility of USA Today, Kotaku and PC Gamer to do the direct research to verify if it is true or not that Near died. If they did not consult the Bureau of Consular Affairs, then we have no reason to. I don't see what reason we would have to trust the accuracy of some government database over Near's employer. — Bilorv (talk) 14:54, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

I read this and I thought, wait, aren't you just turning things around to say that you prefer to use primary sources that seem more authentic to you than to trust reliable, secondary sources that have conducted their own research from primary sources? 0xDeadbeef 15:04, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

I fail to see how a Twitter post and a Google Doc counts as a reliable primary source fit for any sort of research, only USA Today had any sources which weren't directly linked to social media. Tsumugii (talk) 18:18, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Tsumugii, Why do we need to traverse the sourcing graph to prove its reliability? If reliable, secondary sources say they are true, the Wikipedia article should also reflect that as truth. We care a lot about the sources we cite in the articles, while trusting the sources with their claims. I personally find it hard to believe that a search in a government database should overturn claims by several reliable secondary sources. 0xDeadbeef 18:37, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

This may be mitigated if we can find a reputable source that is reporting on the overseas death records. Good luck with that, though. Riffraff913 (talk) 16:44, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I also find it interesting how someone can suffer "lifelong abuse" from a site nine years old, but maybe that's just me... Winston von Ripplechip (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 00:32, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

It is a slightly ambiguous summary of what it says in the Kotaku source. I'll see if I can make it a bit clearer. DanielRigal (talk) 01:08, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Done. Does that make more sense now? DanielRigal (talk) 01:20, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

It also doesn't help that the only source is basically a GDoc and some guy saying "Dude, trust me", followed by Kotaku picking it up and saying "Yeah dude; trust him." Winston von Ripplechip (talk) 01:29, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like you have a problem with Kotaku, not with Wikipedia. Take it up with them if you want to. Unless they retract their article, we consider it reliable. DanielRigal (talk) 01:41, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that looking for death records is going to do anybody any good. As far as I am aware, we don't have any reliable source for Near's legal name and my understanding is that Japan does not recognise non-binary genders. Amateur sleuthing through the Japanese records is not going to yield any reliable sources that we can use. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack where the haystack is labelled in Japanese. The risk of incorrectly identifying unconnected people would be very high. Out of basic decency and respect more than anything, I urge people to just drop this line of inquiry. DanielRigal (talk) 01:39, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Offline

The forum is now offline. Somebody should edit that ImStevan (talk) 23:21, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

While I can confirm it's offline, it's too early to tell what the cause of it being offline is. We don't have any RS on the outage, and it could be for any number of reasons unrelated to the current call for Cloudflare to remove services from the site. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:31, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

You were right, seems it's already back up ImStevan (talk) 01:32, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

the kiwifarms site can be reached by its .onion and .top domains. itsme (talk) 11:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Minor edit request

Hey all, I've noticed that trying to get them targets fired from their jobs sounds odd. It would be nice if targets was dropped from there. Thanks!

-- Holzklöppel (talk) 16:27, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

 Done, Good call! Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:28, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed edit request on 29 August 2022

Slightly rephrase the following:

−

[[USA Today]] reported on July 23, 2021, that they had confirmed with Near's former employer that they had died.

+

[[USA Today]] reported on July 23, 2021, that it had confirmed with Near's former employer that they had died.

LightNightLights ^(talk) 11:58, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks for the suggestion, and thanks for teaching me about Template:Td. You're so close to 500 edits, and not needing to wait on us slowpokes! Happy editing. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:47, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Removing "Online-Status"

I think this is a useless thing to have in the infobox, considering how often the site's status fluctuates, making it just needless busywork for editors. If a reader really wants to check if the site is online or not, they can go to the site themselves or check something like DownDetector. I believe we should only put something regarding its online status in the infobox if the site goes permanently offline. Things like huge DDOS attacks that are happening to the site right now should be left to the History section, if it needs to be said at all. JungleEntity (talk) 00:05, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

+1, nothing to add. -- ferret (talk) 00:43, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. Pointless unless it's a sustained / permanent change. --Jack Frost (talk) 00:45, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

I've removed this per the emerging consensus here. Elli (talk | contribs) 00:51, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

As the website now appears completely offline (except via Tor) I think that qualifies as a sustained / permanent change that we should document IntUnderflow (talk) 10:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Cloudflare campaign

"a campaign was started to try to convince Cloudflare to stop supporting the site" -- should it be clarified that the objective of the campaign is to enable federal crimes (DDoS-ing) to take the site offline? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aardark (talk • contribs) 09:12, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Got a reliable source that says as much? GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 13:23, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

No, just common sense. Saying that Cloudflare is "supporting the site" is vague and misleading. They're not supporting the site ideologically or financially, they're just providing the same service that's available to everyone else -- protection against criminal DDoS attacks.

I think it's noteworthy that the "campaign" is an attempt to remove that protection, rather than simply getting the relevant authorities to shut Kiwi Farms down, if there is indeed any evidence that it is a criminal terrorist site as Keffals claims. Aardark (talk) 14:56, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

If you've got no reliable sources then you've got nothing and we are not going to action an entirely unsupported request. DanielRigal (talk) 15:05, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree that "supporting the site" sounds odd and is inaccurate. Neither of the sources cited say that Cloudfare support them, just that they provide services to them - I've reworded accordingly. SmartSE (talk) 15:30, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

More ambiguous than inaccurate but it was definitely good to clarify it. DanielRigal (talk) 13:43, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Cloudflare doesn't just protect websites from DDoS, they also act as a proxy that speeds up network traffic. The campaign is for Cloudflare to stop providing service to Kiwi Farm, not "stop protecting the website against DDoS attacks so we can DDoS them". If you understand wiki-speak, this is against the NPOV and OR policies. 0xDeadbeef 15:54, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Where are you getting that from? That's not what sources I can find say: e.g. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare provides DDoS protection services to numerous websites, including Kiwi Farms, effectively keeping them online.[1], and One of Cloudflare’s most popular services is anti-DDoS protection, which routes attempts to knock a web site offline by flooding it with traffic through its unique worldwide network. Without that service, it’s unlikely Kiwi Farms would be able to stay online.[2] Endwise (talk) 06:42, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

@Endwise: Cloudflare is, at its core, a content delivery network (CDN) which quickly serves users websites that they request through their web browsers. It also defends sites against attackers.[3] Secure and accelerate your apps, APIs, and websites in minutes by pointing your DNS to Cloudflare. Instantly turn on performance and security services, including: CDN, WAF, DDOS protection, bot management, API security, web analytics, image optimization, stream delivery, load balancing, SSL, and DNS.[4] I have used cloudflare for my websites, and it should be obvious that their DDoS protection is achieved by acting as a reverse proxy for your network traffic. If you do a nslookup for kiwi farms or other websites behind cloudflare, you will get cloudflare's IP. 0xDeadbeef 08:02, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure if that is obvious to people who are not familiar with how these services work but you are correct. In fact, a few days ago, I saw somebody falsely claiming that Cloudflare had nothing to do with KF and so, out of curiosity, I looked up their IPs and, of course, it was exactly as you say. Maybe there is some confusion as (iirc) their DDoS protection is not the same as their full CDN service but even mere DDoS protection clearly involves proxying the content. I'm not sure if it involves caching, although I'd be surprised if it didn't to some degree. If nothing else CF was hosting a custom error page for KF which, at one point, had a transphobic "joke" about suicide on it. DanielRigal (talk) 13:41, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. this and this would be an authoritative source on how Cloudflare works. 0xDeadbeef 13:50, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I've seen some musings (although not from any news outlets) that Cloudflare is only providing CDN for Kiwi Farms, and not DDOS protection. Because DDOS protection falls under the broader umbrella of Cloudflare's CDN, would it be worth changing the article from "Kiwi Farms uses DDOS protection services from Cloudflare", to "Kiwi Farms uses CDN services from Cloudflare"? However, If another source specifically states that Kiwi Farms uses Cloudflare's DDOS protection, I think it would be ok to leave the present wording. JungleEntity (talk) 22:47, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Ask and you shall receive! 'Anti-trans stalkers at Kiwi Farms are chasing one victim around the world. Their list of targets is growing.' - NBC News; (archive)

"Clara Sorrenti and those supporting her are hoping to open up Kiwi Farms to debilitating virtual attacks by demanding Cloudflare, one of its internet security service vendors, drop the site. Cloudflare has so far refused to budge."

Tweedle (talk) 22:14, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Even though NBC News is listed at RSP as one of the "generally reliable sources," I will have to disagree that this can be used for suggesting that the whole campaign is for Kiwi Farms to be DDoSed. The two page authors probably worded it as "debilitating virtual attacks" because they do not know what DDoS attacks are. 0xDeadbeef 11:40, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

OK then we can simply just use exactly how the source describes it as, a 'debilitating virtual attack', no? Regardless anyway I dispute the claim that the author's do not know what a DDoS attack is when at-least one of them, Ben Collins, has used it multiple times on their own Twitter page and on one occasion used it within an article they co-authored (the article). Tweedle (talk) 14:02, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh sorry, yeah. I would still disagree that the campaign's intention is to DDoS Kiwi Farms, but rather for Cloudflare to stop offering DDoS protection to Kiwi Farms. I don't know if that distinction makes sense, or maybe it is just about the wording. 0xDeadbeef 14:38, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

NBC appears to be implying something that the subject has not said. Are there other sources that say the same? Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 14:40, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Not to my knowledge however I have not looked further into it, I am sure they will be more sources in the future will state similar and someone more dedicated then myself would be able to find said sources. An implication regardless though it is still reliable enough to say 'NBC claims... ' Tweedle (talk) 18:02, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Tweedle above. NBC News is considered generally reliable as per RSP. Isabelle claims this may simply be an inference, and I agree as are hoping to doesn't seem like a direct quotation to me. I favor the NBC claims... phrasing. --Holzklöppel (talk) 08:27, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Shouldn't we say when in August the campaign was started? Xmp512 (talk) 02:05, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Dropped by Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 22:35, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Trevor Project spamming

Look, I don't like Kiwi Farms as much as the next sane person, but the source that BOTH of the "sources" yall are using for the claim that Kiwi helped with the spam of the Trevor Project does not mention Kiwi Farms, only 4chan. It doesn't matter what the secondary source says, the primary source (this tweet) only mentions 4chan. Why don't yall actually read before moving stuff about? Naihreloe (talk) 22:57, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Hmmmm. I've taken a look to see what other reliable sources have said about this, and the only others I could find were the Los Angeles Blade, and BuzzFeed News, who also attributed it only to 4chan. As such I now suspect that this is a mistake by NBC, so I'd now support removal. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:15, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. -- ferret (talk) 23:20, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

It seems like I've misread the sources and I apologize. Removal seems fine (and has already been done). Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 23:29, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Cloudflare just dropped Kiwi farms, and edit request

Cloudflare released a statement in their blog detailing that they are cutting services to kiwi farms and are blocking them. The current website is displayed with a cloudflare blocked message, and I would like to request that the current status of the website be changed to temporarily offline or blocked.

Cloudflare blog and tweet:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

https://twitter.com/Cloudflare/status/1566190024864964611

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/03/cloudflare-drops-kiwifarms/

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cloudflare-provided-security-services-kiwi-farms-blocks-website-rcna46219

https://www.rawstory.com/cloudflare-drops-controversial-far-right-website-kiwi-farms-after-public-backlash-site-is-down-report/

Good day or night, Randomdudewithinternet (talk) 23:48, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Your requested changes had already been made to this article; see the current revision. Funcrunch (talk) 23:50, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, just didn't refresh the article. Good day or night, Randomdudewithinternet (talk) 23:52, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Neurodivergent, not neurodiverse

At the end of the first paragraph under Harassment, the last sentence contains the phrase "neurodiverse people", and links to the article on Neurodiversity. However, the term should be "neurodivergent". Neurodiversity is just a concept that people's brains, or neurotypes, are variable, and that includes neurotypical people. With that in mind, it should be clear that saying "neurodiverse people" means the same thing as saying "everyone". What is actually meant in this context is "neurodivergent people", those whose are not neurotypical. Unfortunately, the whole article on Neurodiversity is a mess, and neurodivergent just redirects to that article, but at the least, the wording here needs to be changed. AndyRatchick (talk) 06:03, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

@AndyRatchick I've changed it to neurodivergent with this edit. LightNightLights ^(talk) 06:09, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Much appreciated. AndyRatchick (talk) 06:16, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Linking of the term 'lolcows' to Wiktionary

@Philroc (Tagging in order not to edit-war) I'd argue not that we shouldn't link the term lolcow to Wiktionary but that we shouldn't link it at all. The definition is mentioned right after the mention of the term (for reference, the definition is "people that can be 'milked for laughs'"). LightNightLights ^(talk) 06:49, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Intro is non-neutral self-promotion

Kiwi Farms may claim to be "dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities", but that's not what neutral sources say or what they are known for, it's self-promotion. Specifically, it's a slight rephrasing of their own description which is:

Community dedicated to discussing eccentric people

— https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=&q=kiwifarms%20Community%20dedicated%20to%20discussing%20eccentric%20people

What they are known for, and the actual reason for their existence, are their harassment campaigns.

See eg nymag (2016):

Kiwi Farms, a loose community [...] that specializes in harassing people they perceive as being mentally ill or sexually deviant in some way.

— https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html

Vice (2021):

a forum famous for being the center of internet-led targeted harassment campaigns

— https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbmam/notorious-website-kiwi-farms-loses-its-domain-registrar

The Guardian (2022):

Kiwi Farms, a community forum website that frequently targets trans people online.

— https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/04/cloudflare-reverses-decision-and-drops-trans-trolling-website-kiwi-farms

NBC (2022):

Kiwi Farms, a website associated with harassment campaigns against transgender people.

— https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cloudflare-provided-security-services-kiwi-farms-blocks-website-rcna46219

I propose to change the intro from:

American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs").

To:

American Internet forum dedicated to the harassment of trans people and other minorities.

To avoid having "harassment" twice, I also propose to rephrase "trolling, harassment, and stalking" to "trolling and stalking". Zukorrom (talk) 09:23, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

"and other minorities" does not seem to reflect the sourcing, and it's kinda awkward phrasing tbh. Would change to dedicated to the harassment of online figures or dedicated to Internet-based harassment. Equivamp - talk 10:53, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The entirety of the lede is dedicated to describing the website as a source of harassment of their targets, with the word already present three times. I think Equivamp's suggestion is better, but then some of the other sentences should also be change to avoid even more repetition. How about:

Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums (/ˈkwɪki/), is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxxing and real-life harassment. These actions have tied Kiwi Farms into the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.

We should also work to expand the lede in general. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 11:11, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I think there is value in naming the groups targeted by Kiwi Farms, as it's important information for understanding why they are doing it. "and other minorities" is already sourced in the main article ("particularly minorities, women, LGBT people, neurodivergent people"). The focus on trans people is sourced by the sources above. I'm also not sure "online figures" is exactly right, nor is the harassment only internet-based.

I'm very open to other phrasings though! Maybe something like "dedicated to the harassment of minorities, particularly trans people", "dedicated to the harassment of trans people", or "dedicated to the harassment of trans people, women, neurodivergent people, and LGBT people"? Zukorrom (talk) 11:14, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

@Isabelle Belato For my taste, that suggestion is still too close to the self-description. What does "discussion of online figures" even mean? I'd wager that a regular wikipedia reader imagines something quite different when reading that, compared to what is happening at Kiwi Farms.

imho it's also missing who they target (which implicitly explains why they are targeting them, which seems like important information).

I'd also avoid using their derogatory vocabulary (at least in the lead). It doesn't add any value, but denigrates their victims. Zukorrom (talk) 11:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

@Zukorrom: I agree with you on the removal of "lolcows" from the lede, as it adds nothing to the article, but am neutral on the other part, if anything because it would make the sentence a bit awkward. What if we added that in the second sentence, like this: "Their targets, usually transgender or neurodivergent people, are subject to... Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 11:48, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Zukorrom (talk) 11:58, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Agree with this change. At the very least, the site's focus on harassing trans and neurodivergent people needs to be somewhere in the lede. Jenny Death (talk) 16:01, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

We shouldn't be implicitly saying anything. Is "minorities" supported by the source? Is there a better term that can be used? I think the general audience would only associate that term with people of color when what you are seeming to mean is the mentally ill or developmentally disabled? --Equivamp - talk 12:38, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

"minorities" is already in the main article, supported by two sources. But Isabelles suggestion seems good to me, and I don't think there are any objections to it. It's definitely a huge improvement over the current phrasing. Zukorrom (talk) 13:54, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

These recommendations look good to me—the available sourcing has changed a lot in the past few weeks and this lead reflects that well. I think it's probably also worth adding something about Keffals to the lead, given how much of the coverage focuses on her and her campaign to draw attention to the site and pressure Cloudflare into dropping them as a customer. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 15:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

URL

Should we really be listing the current URL of a website as dangerous as this, after its primary domain was already taken down? Jenny Death (talk) 15:56, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Considering we do the same for 8chan, and all that's happened and is happening related to this website, I'd support removing their external link. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 16:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

We did that for 8chan because of concerns over child pornography. That seems to be nothing at all like what we're dealing with here. Endwise (talk) 16:14, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely should not be advertising alternative domains or assisting with people finding this site. -- ferret (talk) 16:15, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

But yet we "advertise" The Daily Stormer, Stormfront, VDARE, The Right Stuff etc. proudly in their infoboxes? Neo-Nazi epidemic on Wikipedia! Tweedle (talk) 22:54, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

If you're asking whether I think we should remove it from them as well: Yes. We should. -- ferret (talk) 23:01, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I'd be happy with excluding the URL. The sheer amount of leaked personal information on the forum (full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses) about vulnerable individuals is terrifying. Add in the frequent use of that information to harass people, actual threats to life via swatting and most recently a bomb threat in Northern Ireland [5], and the rest of the obscene and hateful content on the site, I don't think there's any good reason to publicise whatever URL they're currently using. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:19, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

As there seems to be a rough consensus not to include the URL, I've WP:BOLDly removed it and mentioned this section in the edit summary. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:31, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Definitely seems reasonable given the discussion so far. Perhaps we might want to start an RfC on it a bit later though. Endwise (talk) 16:41, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I was under the impression (from WP:ELNEVER/WP:ELOFFICIAL) that we only don't link to an official link to a website in cases where the material on the website is illegal/violates copyrights, or is serving malware, rather than being obscene and hateful? E.g. Nazi site The Daily Stormer is certainly hateful, and shock site Goregrish.com is certainly obscene, but we do link to both of those. Endwise (talk) 16:35, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Doxxing is, in many jurisdictions outside of the US, illegal. While the forum's servers might be hosted in the US, many of the active users and their targets are international. Swatting likewise is also illegal in many jurisdictions. Both of these things are frequent actions that arise on KiwiFarms. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:39, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Support removal per Sideswipe. That's true regarding 8chan, Endwise, but given the proliferation of doxing and violent threats on this platform I think a similar case can be made here. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 16:20, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

If we DO keep a URL, it should still be the main URL. Let readers see what Cloudflare has to say, until the site updates it's DNS records away from CF. -- ferret (talk) 16:21, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Not so fast! this is a major infobox policy. If you want to leave the url off, we should give it the attention and time it deserves. TeeVeeed (talk) 19:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Not representative of the site content the site is currently serving. Domain name doesn't matter (at least not in Infobox). A link to the site serving with their intended contents matter, this is for the credibility of Wikipedia. You must not dictate what readers should see because of Wikipedia censorship policies. Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 19:59, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Considering that KF keeps on changing service provider and domains, I think for now it's a bad idea to keep on finding links every time it goes down. Pyraminxsolver (talk) 03:23, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I'd say to keep it, doxxing is illegal is some jurisdictions, but so is hate speech is some parts of the world, which sites such as the Daily Stormer are guilty of, but still have their URLs displayed. I'm certainly not very much of a fan of the site's content, but in being consistent, I'd say it should stay. As for whether it should be the blocked main URL or online alternative URL, that should definitely be discussed. Wikicannibal (talk) 19:38, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I support removing the URL as this site has demonstrably incited real-world violence against marginalized people, and shows no sign of stopping this behavior. I propose that we take this to an RfC. (I'd prefer someone else start the RfC however.) Funcrunch (talk) 19:49, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm in two minds whether or not an RfC is necessary on this point. While it could be helpful, per WP:RFCBEFORE I do not think we've exhausted discussion here yet. However, even with a huge pile of WP:AGF, given the nature of KiwiFarms, I have a (I believe) reasonable fear that such a discussion could a target for off-wiki harassment and canvassing.

That said, if we are to hold an RfC, how would we phrase the question. Would a simple, straightforward Should we include or exclude the URL to KiwiFarms in the infobox and external links section? be sufficient and neutral enough? Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:07, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Well it is not just Kiwi Farms? Or should it be on an ad hoc basis? Prior to this, only 1 site had the distinction here on WP, so it is easy to keep track of that. But if we are going to allow individual talk page discussions to rule over this, that needs to be clarified or not. Agreed that changing policy like this at this point should undergo a formal process like RfC. TeeVeeed (talk) 20:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The illegal content of a site must be stated clearly and point out clearly where on the Wikipedia policies it breaks, and a clear consensus conclusions must be reached to remove it. Please no more bold moves, it's good that we have started discussion about this. If it the consensus cannot be reached here please don't change anything to "de-link" the site from Infobox other than updating it with a new domain name to the intended server. Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 19:59, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I've already done so above. The forum is notorious for its doxxing, swatting, and harassment of vulnerable individuals, actions that are illegal in many jurisdictions worldwide including the US, so covered under WP:ELNO#EL3. Sources for these actions are already present in the article text, and it obviously would not be responsible or wise for us to link to specific incidents on the forums ourselves. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:15, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

This sounds like a potential outcome of this discussion, but then again you shouldn't deploy based on a prejudication/rough consensus, the discussion is still ongoing and the final conclusion remains unclear. Such obscene contents served online have happened on 4chan too and we still provide a link to it as well as that happens to several other sites mentioned by several users and we have links for them. I'm not expert on what makes things illegal in the US that Wikipedia should take off the link so I'll leave this up to others to decide if an link should stay off. I'm still in the opinion of the link staying for credibility of Wikipedia.

Also I've come across the Wikipedia's blacklist that appears to include Kiwi Farms' older domain name and its variants, has it been agreed upon from elsewhere, like a previous discussion and such? Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 23:52, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I'd rather we don't waste contributor time when we have a rough consensus. The addition of official external links have always been done under best-practice guidelines; there is no policy that I know of that states we have to provide a link to the subject of the article. On the other hand, WP:BLPEL, a policy, states: External links about living persons, whether in BLPs or elsewhere, are held to a higher standard than for other topics. Questionable or self-published sources should not be included in the "Further reading" or "External links" sections of BLPs, and, when including such links in other articles, make sure the material linked to does not violate this policy. I believe WP:BLP should be heavily considered here, due to the activities Kiwi Farms promotes. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 20:08, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I disagree this is precisely the type of thing that we need to waste time with.TeeVeeed (talk) 20:20, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:NOTFORUM
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
And furthermore, I don't really want to power-level myself as a sometime visitor to KF here, but no one forces people to commit suicide, and no one forces them to look at KF. Personally, I know that I would have deleted a requested thread if someone was that distressed about it, but no one forces anyone to visit the farms so the "bullying" is like the suicide- self-inflicted. This is about culture wars, and preventing readers from having information to make their own decisions about their own opinions is not a good look. TeeVeeed (talk) 20:29, 4 September 2022 (UTC) ...so the "bullying" is like the suicide- self-inflicted. I'm honestly speechless. Isabelle 🏳‍🌈 20:35, 4 September 2022 (UTC) ...so the "bullying" is like the suicide- self-inflicted Wow. That is absolutely abhorrent. ...no one forces them to look at KF Aah yes, because the harassment on Kiwi Farms stays on Kiwi Farms. That people who have threads about them have been swatted, subjected to identity theft, and had personal information like full names, addresses, telephone numbers, employers, email addresses, is clearly immaterial because they didn't have to look at the site... Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:39, 4 September 2022 (UTC) The real world actions that you are talking about are scary and should always be reported to admin in my opinion. I have not seen anything like that when and if I view KF. Are they mean? Yes. Personally I feel like it is a stretch saying that KF is responsible for suicides. Telling them not to be mean does not prevent suicide though. What you are calling harassment is sometimes just taking-away the ability to control someone's narrative when that person has a public persona. Like The Butcher of Ardmore for example or other monetary or deviant interests that benefit from controlling the narrative.TeeVeeed (talk) 21:02, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

If it is still up for discussion, I am of the opinion that the URL should be reinstated, at least for the main page, for consistency. Fernsong (talk) 22:31, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

+1 support here. Tweedle (talk) 22:57, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

No, it really shouldn't. Most websites don't actively dox people and commit other crimes, so consistency is not an issue here. PBZE (talk) 23:21, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Except this is explicitly discouraged and any who do partake in these activities are punished. Fernsong (talk) 01:03, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Citation needed. Funcrunch (talk) 01:43, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

It's a little concerning that in this very thread we have editors, some with lots of edits, repeating Kiwi Farms propaganda. PBZE (talk) 03:13, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Literally just a glance at their "Terms and Rules" section.

"You agree to not use the Service to submit or link to any Content which violates any laws. You are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from, that Content or your conduct."

I would think that "dox people and commit other crimes" would fall under this. Fernsong (talk) 05:40, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

You could say whatever you want in your ToS but if you don't enforce your rules it's always as if you don't have rules. If KiwifFarms had indeed been against doxxing as you claim, a large portion of its users probably would have been suspended or banned and complaining about it on some other site. Hg3300 (talk) 22:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Support keeping the URL off of Wikipedia. Thanks to everyone who's been trying to keep Wikipedia safe. Stix1776 (talk) 01:10, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

It's not just a matter of keeping Wikipedia safe. The content of Wikipedia infoboxes show up at the top of Google and other Internet search results, so our decisions have broad impact. Funcrunch (talk) 01:43, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

At least two editors (maybe more, I'm just aware of two) have active threads dedicated to them there. One had their home address posted. Seems pertinent... --Chillabit (talk) 02:04, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

• I'll start up an RfC in a sec, as disagreement still seems to be persisting. Endwise (talk) 03:54, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

We currently have a discussion on Wikidata about the same issue. I encourage everyone here to join

@GorillaWarfare, Chillabit, Funcrunch, Stix1776, Fernsong, TeeVeeed, Isabelle Belato, Sideswipe9th, Hemiauchenia, 0xDeadbeef, Dumuzid, FormalDude, and NightWolf1223: --Trade (talk) 15:15, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

RfC on linking to Kiwi Farms

Should we provide an external link to the Kiwi Farms website on this article? If yes, should we use their secondary domain while their primary domain is down? Endwise (talk) 04:09, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose linking the website in any way. Per WP:ADV: Choose which pages to link based on the immediate benefit to Wikipedia readers that click on the link. There is no immediate benefit to Wikipedia readers by including the link on the article. 0xDeadbeef 05:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose per Deadbeef above. Current Cloudfare issues aside, while I don't think every time such a link was clicked it would result in harassment or associated awfulness, I think it would be more likely than with just about any comparable link. We absolutely need to cover this. We do not need to enable it. Cheers, all. Dumuzid (talk) 05:23, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose including any external links to the Kiwi Farms website. This site is dedicated to mocking and harassing marginalized people, and the site's users have repeatedly and demonstrably caused real-world harm. And as I commented in the previous section, Wikipedia infobox contents top the results of Google and other search engines, so our decision here has broad impact. Funcrunch (talk) 05:29, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong oppose per above. ––FormalDude (talk) 05:32, 5 September 2022 (UTC) (Summoned by bot)

Strong oppose per above. PBZE (talk) 06:38, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Addition: It is speculated that Joshua Moon is collecting referer headers to track people who visit the site. So linking to it from Wikipedia may be endangering our readers and editors. PBZE (talk) 17:16, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose We should not link a site dedicated to the harassment of online comunities. NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 13:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose linking, per Sideswipe9th's comment above: The sheer amount of leaked personal information on the forum (full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses) about vulnerable individuals is terrifying. Add in the frequent use of that information to harass people, actual threats to life via swatting and most recently a bomb threat in Northern Ireland [5], and the rest of the obscene and hateful content on the site, I don't think there's any good reason to publicise whatever URL they're currently using. That aside, their recent deplatforming from Cloudflare and then from DDoS-Guard makes clear they will have increasing difficulty staying online (as acknowledged by Moon in a Telegram post), and so it seems likely it will become logistically difficult to keep any URL up-to-date. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 13:59, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose: inclusion would violate WP:BLPPRIVACY (doxxed private information), WP:COPYVIOEL (consistent copyright violations and lax enforcement), and WP:ELNO WP:ELNEVER#2 (website currently on the spam blacklist). Pilaz (talk) 15:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose: In line with what every other commenter has said, I strongly oppose having a link to Kiwi Farms in this article. It not only violates Wikipedia rules, but inclusion of its link will lead to more harassment and threats. Historyday01 (talk) 16:16, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Support: Reasons: 1) An article about a website should include a link to the website. It should include the primary, well-known link, not any recent workaround URLs, because the primary URL is the one that was notable (e.g. this is the one which will be findable in web.archive.org). 2) WP:NOTCENSORED. We remove material based on policy violation, not personal distaste. Removal would be inconsistent with the longstanding practice of including links to distasteful (yet notable) websites. 3) Addressing the reasons for opposition: WP:BLPPRIVACY is not violated merely by including a link to a site. It is not clear to me why the site would violate WP:COPYVIOEL. Links "to an official page of the article's subject" are explicitly exempted from WP:ELNO. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:35, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

With respect to WP:COPYVIOEL, Kiwi Farms has an infamous section called "Take that off the internet!" which is filled with takedown notices emails, many of which are made on copyright and DMCA grounds, and to which the owner of the Kiwi Farms responds often with dubious counter-claims. To me, that fulfills the If there is reason to believe that a website has a copy of a work in violation of its copyright, do not link to it. line of COPYVIOEL. As for ELNO, I actually meant to link to WP:ELNEVER #2, which prohibits linking to websites on the spam blacklist without exception. Hopefully that sheds some light on my reasoning. Pilaz (talk) 21:02, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@Pilaz: I don't think that either of those prohibit us from linking to the main page. Sci-Hub is blacklisted and contains copyrighted information but we still link to the main page. WP:COPYLINK says In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site. WP:ELNEVER #2 states that it is purely technically prohibited, not inherently prohibited - it just needs to be whitelisted. SmartSE (talk) 21:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose per above, particularly per Pilaz. ser! ^{(chat to me - see my edits)} 17:32, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Support per Barnards.tar.gz, for me it is 1): consistency with Wikipedia's other pages and 2) while this might seem trivial to a extent, it does have encyclopedic and notable value (albeit miniscule I guess) having the URL to a website in their respective Wikipedia page infobox - Tweedle (talk) 17:39, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Support The link to Kiwifarms is relevant to this page, and is consistent with other articles on websites. Many of the responses in opposition seem to be WP:Advocacy against linking to hateful websites, but other websites commonly described as hate websites have their links in their infoboxes, such as The Daily Stormer. Even websites of terrorist organizations, when known, have been linked on Wikipedia. As to which link to use, I am not sure. They still own the .net even if not used, but it would seem to be that the .onion link may become more of a primary link depending on how long the situation lasts. So I would either list both the .net and the .onion or just the .onion. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 18:00, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Support per Barnards.tar.gz and Tweedledumb2 above. Other articles like The Daily Stormer and Parler, both of which are more notorious than Kiwi Farms (and in the case of The Daily Stormer, possibly even more dangerous), have their respective URLs in their infoboxes. There is no reason not to link the .net URL of Kiwi Farms in the infobox, especially when there is already a precedent against removing it. JungleEntity (talk) 18:04, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Lean oppose because linking a site that includes doxing/harassment of other editors may be aiding the sort of behavior that violates global WMF policy. I would usually lean in favor of inclusion of basically anything that doesn't host child sex abuse materials (i.e. things that are illegal to even view in pretty much any country) since there are a number of sites nonetheless in the public interest which contain behaviors illegal in some countries that still yet don't implicate the viewer (e.g. anti-government, true contents deemed libel, educational pirated materials, etc.) but I don't think this is something we can ignore. --Chillabit (talk) 19:03, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oppose per my own justification in the subsection above: The sheer amount of leaked personal information on the forum (full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses) about vulnerable individuals is terrifying. Add in the frequent use of that information to harass people, actual threats to life via swatting and most recently a bomb threat in Northern Ireland [5], and the rest of the obscene and hateful content on the site, I don't think there's any good reason to publicise whatever URL they're currently using. I'd also add that, at the time of writing this !vote, the alternate domain is currently offline due to DDoS-Guard removing service from the site earlier this afternoon, and the site is currently only accessible through TOR. I think it's reasonably safe to assume that if the site does maintain a presence online, its domain will be significantly unstable for quite some time. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely Positively Completely Certainly Definitely 100% Oppose per Sideswipe9th's reason for opposition. I also don't think any far-right URL should be on Wikipedia whether they're offline, going offline, or not. Even if a Nazi site has been offline for ages, people can still find out what the sites were like through archives, I don't think we should help them do that per what Sideswipe9th said. Stephanie921 (talk) 21:02, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Strongly oppose Concur with Stephanie921 and Sideswipe9th. That includes removing The Daily Stormer and other such sites' URLs. Jenny Death (talk) 21:14, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong oppose Per deadbeef and Stephanie921. Vacant0 (talk) 21:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Strongest oppose The idea that "for consistency" is considered by anyone a sufficient argument is absurd. That argument locks the status quo in place forever, "Other pages do it, so we must do it here." We can certainly be inconsistent. We can have no infobox at all! Such is allowed. In the face of valid reasons not to support this site in the least, including the active doxxing and harassment of our editors, "other pages do it" is laughable. -- ferret (talk) 21:26, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment "We can have no infobox at all!" is a rather silly argument, because it has nothing to do with whether or not there can be a link on this article. It would just be put under "external links." The site still exists whether or not it is linked on this article, and it serves the article no good to not link the subject of the article. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 22:53, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

If you want to misread what I'm saying, that's on you. We are NOT required under any basis of "consistency" to have this link. Not a single policy or guideline requires we keep it. -- ferret (talk) 22:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Support per reasons already stated. Consistency being one, but also I have yet to see any solid argument that the site explicitly encourages or supports criminal activity. Fernsong (talk) 22:30, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong Support: Echoing Barnards.tar.gz, "An article about a website should include a link to the website." This is what Wikipedia does with other sites that host unpopular speech, including The Daily Stormer. Consistency is very important. We are building an encyclopedia and we should follow consistent standards for inclusion. Consistency helps safeguard against making knee-jerk, emotional decisions which can only degrade the quality of our work. With consistency in mind, I am not sure I understand the argument against. If we were to refuse to include links to any site with odious user-generated content, we would be forced to remove links to notable sites such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et cetera. Or is the argument that they ought to get a pass just because they are more mainstream? By way of example, my understanding is that there was a death threat posted on Kiwi Farms and within about 30 minutes it was deleted and the user who posted it banned. This is fairly consistent with the track record of mainstream companies - for example, Facebook took about thirty minutes to remove the Christchurch shooting livestream. If we're going to develop a policy to refuse to include links to sites, it should be a policy that applies equally to all websites including mainstream ones. In any event, such a policy does not seem to exist - and as I mentioned at the beginning of this message, Wikipedia has historically included links to websites with content that many find to be objectionable.CelebrateMotivation (talk) 00:25, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Well, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit aren't inherently hate websites. But Kiwi Farms is. Hate speech is a systemic problem on social media that the companies do not take care of and mainstream companies absolutely do not have track records like u described. And if u think that Kiwi Farms is run the way u described I suggest u re-read the article - especially considering how important the discussion is - because your claim is contradicted by every sentence in it, which are well-sourced. Death threats are a feature of the site, not a bug. Kiwi Farms isn't a normal site with a few rotten apples.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Stephanie921 (talk • contribs) 0:44, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Whether or not the site is hateful or not is quite frankly completely irrelevant to whether or not it's URL should be listed on an article about itself. Pretending like it's link doesn't exist and not putting it on this article reduces the quality of the information provided by the article, leading to an inferior encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not a platform for advocacy on what types of speech should be permitted, or what type of behavior is acceptable outside of the encyclopedia, and even if it was, refusing to put an otherwise easily findable link to the article's subject is not a particularly effective method of doing so. The link otherwise violates no Wikipedia policies which apply to links to the subject of an article. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 02:05, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Well, at the time of writing this reply, the site is only intermittently accessible through Tor, and is completely inaccessible on the surface web. Unless you know the .onion URL, or someone shares it with you, finding the site is surprisingly difficult at this time. Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:09, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment With respect, I am not terribly interested in whether or not a site is a "hate website" (a rather nebulous and ill-defined category as best as I can tell). I do not think it has much to do with running an encyclopedia or, more specifically, whether or not a webpage should have its link on Wikipedia or not. Are you proposing a policy by which any "hate website" is not allowed to be linked from Wikipedia? This would be an extreme divergence from existing policy and I think, ultimately, would reduce the quality and credibility of this encyclopedia. It raises many questions. Who gets to decide what a hate website is? What is the criteria, exactly? It is nebulous enough that I could easily see (and in fact, have seen) people arguing that various mainstream political views (anti-abortion, etc) constitute "hate speech" and as a result those sites should not be linked from Wikipedia. Let's not go down this road. I think Serafart said it best above - by removing links to whatever it is that people find objectionable, all we're really doing is editorializing and "reducing the quality of the information provided by the article, leading to an inferior encyclopedia." Very well put.

Regarding your comments about how mainstream companies are run - I made a very specific reference to the Christchurch shooting, in which Facebook took at least 29 minutes to remove the livestream. Multiple RS (and Facebook itself!) say that the first user report for the livestream didn't even come in for 29 minutes. The point I was making is that websites with user generated content cannot reasonably be held accountable for the actions of every single one of their users, especially if lawbreaking users are dealt with in a swift manner by the moderation teams (which is also what happened on KiwiFarms). It's also worth discussing whether this should matter to Wikipedia at all. We're building an encyclopedia, not making moral judgments - hence the reason why we link to sites like The Daily Stormer and far worse.

Regarding your comments about how Kiwi Farms "is run" - my claim is that the death threat was actioned within thirty minutes (message deleted, poster banned). Are you suggesting this is not the case? There is nothing in the article that contradicts this. You are welcome to put this information into the article if you can find RS saying so, but as far as I can tell such a thing does not seem to exist.CelebrateMotivation (talk) 02:13, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

There's some disagreement over interpretation of WP:NOTCENSORED, but I think it's definitely safe to say that Wikipedia is *not censored* on the basis of something being "hate speech", which is a subjective concept anyway. I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about KF directly inciting violence and whether that precludes linking to it. But on the basis of "hate speech" or "defaming marginalized people". Big nope on that one. As biased as I see some of the leanings in editorial policy currently, it's still (hopefully) *Wikipedia*, not *Wokipedia*.Peter G Werner (talk) 08:42, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong oppose including any link to the website. According to Talk:8chan, "Most editors agree that our moral obligation to not facilitate access to a website notable for containing child pornography overrides any benefit to the project derived from giv[ing] the reader the opportunity to see what the subject says about itself." A web URL is arguably less encyclopedic and more instructional information, and if moral obligation is a factor at all, then a site being an active hate and stalking platform should be weighed very heavily against providing instructions to find it. Kiwi Farms has made a great many people's lives less safe for a long time. Autumn on Tape (talk) 02:14, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Strong oppose: KF is notorious for hosting people's private information (doxxing). Its whole raison d'être is centered around bullying, harassing, and doxxing individuals deemed to be "special." Sure, all of these things can be found on pretty much any social media, but what sets KiwiFarms apart from most of the others is the fact that its primary purpose is for these behaviors. But most importantly of all, a former FBI official compared the website's activity to a potential terrorist threat, seeing the Keffals situation, which is actually part of the reason why the Russian domain got removed. Cloudflare was right; it is a threat.
• Side question: what's the precedent on Wikipedia for deciding whether to link to defunct websites on their Wikipedia articles, by the way? Do they still get linked? I believe they do, but with a parenthetical note of (defunct), etc. on the side. Dennis Dartman (talk) 04:08, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Kiwifarms is not defunct, and the site is still active at the onion link. Defunct sites, however, are usually linked, such as: Silk Road (marketplace). Serafart (talk) (contributions) 04:27, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  There's a 0% chance we're linking the literal dark web over Wikipedia. Dennis Dartman (talk) 11:27, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  Quite literally that was done for the Silk Road, check the previous diff's of it, here is one in 2012 when the site was still online. Tweedle (talk) 12:00, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  well we already do it for other articles, this should be no different. besides, they are hosting on the clearnet again on a domain they already owned Serafart (talk) (contributions) 13:32, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support Wikipedia is not censored. When Wikipedia has an article on a topic then we provide the most relevant available resources. For websites, one of those resources is a link to either the site itself or an archive of it. If a site is down and it is easy to link to a secondary site then we should, but we are not obligated to maintain quickly changing links or verify dubious mirrors. We need to keep the link because Wikipedia is a resource for journalists, researchers, policy makers, and thought leaders, and it is essential that we provide access to those audiences so that they can examine media and make decisions for themselves. I recognize the opposition's concerns that this is a hate-based media channel, and that by increasing public access to the website we inflame negative sentiment. However, I disagree that hiding media is an effective strategy for countering those views, and instead think that making it available avoids censorship, gives the people who enjoy that content an opportunity to reflect on what they are doing along with Wikipedia's other information, and gives critics access if they need it. Bluerasberry (talk) 11:19, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  Comment: My concerns are about the activities promoted and enacted on the forum, which, as covered in the article, are known to be implicated in at least three deaths; not just the sentiments of its users. A lot of editors voicing support for including a URL seem to miss that point and view this as a matter of disagreeing views that may be defused by providing information. Wikipedia's inclusion or non-inclusion of a URL here could have a real effect if Kiwi Farms moves permanently to a less intrinsically findable onion service. Journalists who report on extremism have other sources for such information, and many of them would agree that deplatforming works. Autumn on Tape (talk) 18:48, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

@User:Autumnontape completely agreed Stephanie921 (talk) 18:54, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

@@Autumnontape and Stephanie921: Your claim is believable. Suppose that I accept your claim: "this website is a tool for bringing death and violence into the world". Why do you think that reducing access to the website is a better strategy for countering this than increasing access to the website? I know the situation is complex, but often, misconduct thrives when others hide it from view and protect it. Why do you feel that transparency is not the safe response in this case? I do not see obvious sources in deplatforming that support this strategy. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Why do you equivocate on my premise like that when it's covered as a matter of fact in the article we're currently discussing?

Harassment campaigns by Kiwi Farms users are known to have contributed to the suicides of three individuals. The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide, and has celebrated such deaths with a counter on the website. They have used social media reporting systems to mass-report posts by harassment targets in which they've expressed suicidal thoughts or intentions, with the goal of reducing the possibility their targets receive help.

The article is of high quality and very detailed. It's not hiding the site from view or protecting it just because it doesn't help readers to visit it. I feel that transparency is an excellent response to a community like Kiwi Farms that long relied on manipulating their own image in order to reach a wide audience with their libelous claims, but that kind of valuable transparency, capable of reducing their ability to do harm, does not come from the main page of Kiwi Farms itself but from sources that document its history and impact. Autumn on Tape (talk) 20:42, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

@Autumnontape: I accept your claim exactly as you state it about the site's murderous history. There is no disagreement on that point.

I question your conclusion that the effective strategy to contain the danger of the website is to restrict access.

Another question - suppose that I agreed that we should omit the URL. How would that look? Would it simply not be in the Wikipedia article, or in the place where the URL goes, would we establish and link an internal documentation page, perhaps WP:CENSORED SITES, where we disclose the list and the discussions that decided each case? Do you want to hide the URL, or do you want to both hide the URL and the explanation why we are hiding the URL?

If you are proposing to openly censor the site then I find that easier to support because the community can regulate how long and to what extent; if you are proposing to secretly censor it then I find that much more problematic. Bluerasberry (talk) 12:04, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Again, you're asking for a level of transparency that Wikipedia already provides. Talk pages aren't secret. When a decision about an article's content is made that's likely to surprise some editors, a permanent note is often left at the top of the talk page. This is what was done when it was decided not to include a link to 8chan in the article about it.

Moving a note like that into the article itself and creating a centralized list of articles for which such a decision was made would be extraordinary steps to take. Such things aren't done when information is omitted under WP:BLPPRIVACY, for example. That would paint a huge target on the pages in question, and it would do so specifically for people who disagree with the policy and want to pick fights about it. Autumn on Tape (talk) 21:57, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

@Autumnontape: Wikipedia's rules of engagement say "no censorship". I recognize that censorship is a powerful weapon and that if we wield it, then we can solve problems with it. I fear your proposed solution because you show no recognition that Wiki editors and readers whom we support have been and will again be the targets of censorship, and when this happens, then they are consistently helpless and defeated.

Some countries have two political parties at odds with each other, and because Wikipedia is global, we are always at odds with multiple countries and parties. Right now we can avoid a lot of politics by saying that we do not censor. Avoiding politics prevents some of the attacks on our editors with the weapons of censorship. I think that is best, because in general, the bad guys are more powerful attacking with censorship than the good guys are defending with it. I do not see this case as comparable to anything Wikipedia already provides like BLPPRIVACY. I am fine with coming up with some new rules, and would support a ban on linking to harassment websites if we defined them. We block spam with Wikipedia:Spam blacklist and we block low quality media with Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. We could revive the failed Wikipedia:Attack sites proposal and start banning attack sites, and I would not call that censorship.

When we call out this one site and block it without due process, that seems like censorship to me. The due process I want is 1) a blanket rationale for blocking that applies to all sites and 2) published documentation for how this site meets that rationale.

I looked up the 8chan link discussion you referenced - Talk:8chan/Archive_2#Inclusion_of_the_link_to_8chan. It seems that the rationale in that case was that promoting 8chan is a violation of United States law. I do not have an opinion about 8chan's administrative process, but in any case, I do not think violation of United States law is the rationale for avoiding a link to Kiwi Farms. "Illegal linking" could be yet another rationale for not linking to a class of sites, but again, I do not think there is any harm in having a published record of due process when we make such judgements. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:15, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

When we call out this one site and block it without due process, that seems like censorship to me - I did not realise that a month-long highly-attended RFC was not considered "due process" (regardless of which way opinion ends up swinging). Primefac (talk) 15:54, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

@Primefac: Thanks for the comment. To me this one-month discussion seems like a one-off ad hoc process. I am not a lawyer, but if there were a "due process", I imagine that there would be some general rule we could apply to other such cases and make an assessment about whether attacks and harassment happened. I notice that many people have different reasons for supporting and opposing, and I do not see the conversation converging to a simple reusable rationale for blocking that we can apply to other cases. I think there might be such a rationale in here somewhere, maybe no WP:Attack sites, but I am not sure. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:44, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment In addition to my previous support, I would like to mention this village pump: [[6]], where there was a pretty clear consensus that links to extremist organizations, which many who are against the inclusion of the link say Kiwi Farms is, should be allowed on the wiki, especially on their articles. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 14:41, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. WP:ELOFFICIAL protects this kind of external link from many otherwise valid reasons to remove, but does not mandate inclusion of official website links. WP:NOTCENSORED would apply if the rationale for exclusion were based on the site's content being offensive or objectionable, but I do not see that mentioned by any Opposers so far. The fact that Cloudflare dropped services for the site due to "imminent threats to human life" is a sign that we should not be linking to the site. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:00, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment It's true that Cloudflare said without evidence that there was an "imminent threat to human life" but should we necessarily take them at their word? Cloudflare is a for-profit company under a tremendous pressure campaign and, as such, are anything but a neutral party here. This is a corporate press release and should be treated as such (i.e., dubious until proven otherwise). Echoing my previous comment, my understanding is that the death threat on Kiwi Farms was deleted within about thirty minutes and the poster banned. This is a very similar timeframe to how long it takes mainstream websites with thousands of employees to remove illegal content, threats, and even livestreams of shootings (e.g. the Christchurch shooting on Facebook). How are we as Wikipedians to have a consistent policy if we give mainstream sites a pass for the exact same sort of results? Basically, I don't think that Cloudflare's statements should be treated as gospel. I'm not convinced there was any credible threat to human life in the first place, and ultimately I don't believe that Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, should care one way or the other. Let's lower the temperature and be realistic here - linking to a website is not going to kill anyone even if the threat was as dire as Cloudflare's (frankly dubious) claims might indicate.CelebrateMotivation (talk) 15:53, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

This is a fair point as far as it goes, but essentially you're asking us to disfavor Cloudflare's explanation in favor of...Kiwi Farms' own attestations and those of some individuals online? Combined with the NBC news piece where Kiwi Farms is said to be "synonymous" with both doxxing and swatting, I think it's fair for observers to draw inferences. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 16:02, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

It feels to me that the job of evaluating the “imminent threat to human life” claim should fall to the police, not to us. I believe the site to be within the jurisdiction of US authorities, and I am not aware of any attempt to arrest the site operators or use the US legal system to take down the site. The inference I draw is that the site is operating legally, and until the relevant authorities make a ruling we have no reason to think the alleged threat is credible. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:35, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Stochastic terrorism is notoriously difficult to prosecute in the U.S. thanks to First Amendment protections (not saying that's a bad thing). For me, simply arguing that the site is not malum in se does not lead to the conclusion that a link should be included, but reasonable minds may differ on the point. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 16:40, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I offered the comment not as a reason for inclusion but as a counterpoint to a purported reason for non-inclusion. My reasons for supporting inclusion are stated up-page. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:53, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

There has been US lawsuits filed against Kiwi Farms, but as far as I know they've all haven't gotten anywhere or were dropped. I don't think any news sources report on this, but Kiwi Farms has published warrant canaries uploading the legal action taken against them in years past. JungleEntity (talk) 19:21, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment I'm not suggesting we take Kiwi Farms' word for it. I'm suggesting we should be reasonably skeptical of everyone involved in this situation, especially statements from a publicly traded company ("NET") whose main goal, presumably, is to increase its profits and avoid scandals. I'm making very specific claims here - that there was a death threat posted on Kiwi Farms, and that it was taken down in short order. Anyone can see for themselves that it was taken down and the poster in question was banned - we don't need RS for this (well, we do if we were to include it in the article, but not for the purposes of this conversation). The only question, really, is how long it took for it to be taken down. They claim ~30 minutes and I don't see any reason to question that claim, personally. I'd be skeptical of it like everything else, but I haven't seen anyone at all denying this specific claim. So if we want to be consistent - and as an encyclopedia, we do! - then the question becomes "how long should a website take to remove user-generated illegal content." Again, mainstream websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have illegal threats and worse on them all the time. If Wikipedia is going to get into the business of refusing to link to any site that temporarily hosts illegal content, then we would need some kind of policy that clarifies what scenarios this should happen in. Is thirty minutes acceptable? An hour? Two? Perhaps it's whether or not the site encourages that kind of content? How do we decide that? I've been to KF and there are disclaimers all over the place saying not to post illegal content and that they are against swatting. Maybe that's just for show - I don't know. But it makes me wonder how we can reasonably make such a determination, or if indeed Wikipedia should be in the business of making such a determination. Personally, I think all of this is more a job for the police. And for what it's worth I would not agree with any of those potential policies, but for consistency's sake I think that is what would be required for any of this to make sense. Best regards!CelebrateMotivation (talk) 20:04, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Respectfully CelebrateMotivation with your focus on a single threat that was purportedly taken down, I feel as though you can't see the forest for the trees.

The issue isn't that Kiwi Farms has had only a handful of one off incidents of doxxing, or threats to life posted, it's that the site regularly has such content posted. While that one comment may have been deleted, though I don't know for sure if it has neither Null nor the forum's moderators are particularly reliable, there are countless other threads dedicated to harassing countless other individuals, which are still live now (at least when the site isn't offline). Another editor has commented elsewhere in this discussion that at least four participants in this discussion presently have threads about them, and one of them has had personal information leaked on that thread. The link to the site isn't objectionable because of a single death threat made against a person, it is objectionable because of the sheer volume of other threats, and regular doxxing that accompany it on it. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:24, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment A forest is made up of trees. I am using this particular incident as a gauge for how KF handles these situations. Either the site allows death threats or it does not. This is important because it seems to be the primary justification for this RFC, or at least the most emotionally compelling argument that people are making against inclusion of the link. It is rather perplexing to me that you persist in using words like "purportedly" in reference to this incident. If you wish, you could personally visit the site and see for yourself that the comment isn't there. It was deleted - this is provably factual and anyone can see it. If the site says it doesn't allow death threats, and it deletes death threats within hours or even minutes when they are reported, then the strongest stated justification to remove the link from Wikipedia - which I think was weak to begin with - vanishes entirely. As for a handful of one-off incidents of doxxing or threats to life - I would wager my entire net worth that mainstream sites like Facebook and Reddit have far more users posting this sort of content. As such, the policy should not be special cased away (i.e. a pass given to mainstream sites but not others) solely because some editors find a particular website to be objectionable.CelebrateMotivation (talk) 23:30, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I am not proposing to use Cloudflare as a source, but yes, I believe them that there existed imminent threat to human life. I am not aware of any reliable source contradicting that point, and if there is one, I'd be glad to know about it. If I'm reading the end of your comment correctly, you are suggesting that you'd advocate for including the link even if the site definitely includes imminent threats to human life. I strongly disagree. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:33, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

You say you haven't seen any RS contradicting that point. The problem with that statement is that the burden of proof is on the entity making the claim. Cloudflare is claiming without evidence that there was an "imminent threat to human life." That is a big claim, and big claims require big evidence. I haven't seen any. There are no RS for or against the claim, really - just RS stating that Cloudflare said it happened. Yes, I am advocating for including the link even if the site definitely had death threat(s) on it. It is clear that a death threat was in fact posted on the site, but it's also clear that it was quickly removed (anyone can navigate to the site itself and see that it's gone, so I don't think anyone can really reasonably contradict that it was removed). My point is that death threats are posted on mainstream websites all the time and are subsequently removed, and that's exactly what happened here. As an encyclopedia it doesn't make sense for us to treat Kiwi Farms or any other website as a "special case" just because some or even most editors may find its other content to be especially objectionable. Frankly, even if the site had a death threat on it which was not removed I would still advocate for linking to it. I refuse to believe that a Wikipedia link is going to put anyone's life in danger. Here's my reduction to the absurd: governmental militaries don't just talk about killing people, but actually do kill people all the time - and we still link to their websites. Why? Because this is an encyclopedia. We're collecting the information of the world and presenting it. We are not editorializing or making moral judgments.CelebrateMotivation (talk) 20:04, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I can tell you right now that there is an active PSNI investigation into at least one individual in Northern Ireland relating to the threats directed at Keffals from users on Kiwi Farms. However because of how such investigations work here, due to our history with such incidents, the incident involving the imminent threat to life is likely to be under reporting restrictions for a considerable period of time. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:36, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Strongest Support: The website is well-known enough to have an entry here so it is also well-known enough for this page to not be the point of origin for the vast majority of visits to it. Purposefully censoring external linking to the website is a silly display that ultimately benefits nobody and harms those later attempting to document the history of events. All external links should be maintained and indication of whether or not they are active should be periodically reviewed, just like for any other website. Anything of critical importance should be archived as appropriate so that it is not lost. External links and archives are neither hosting nor endorsing content found at Kiwi Farms. People know how to get there. Making that more difficult for a handful of visitors, by comparison, benefits no one. So, again, I give my strongest support to maintaining external links. Xenomancer (talk) 16:35, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose a clickable link. This is a criminal website in a great many ways, including hosting copyright violations. Having a link which an innocent user might click on and trigger all manner of logging is irresponsible. Having a link which a less innocent user might click on and be seduced by is also irresponsible. I think it is sufficient and acceptable to say what the domain names are without actually linking them. We are not censoring or withholding information if we do that. Anybody, who really wants to, can copy the name into their URL bar but that's such a deliberate action that that's 100% on them if they do. If we are to have a clickable link at all (and we definitely shouldn't) then it should go at the bottom of the article so that nobody clicks it without having seen the article first. (An existing article that does this is goatse.cx, which is about a site which is offensive but not as dangerous as this one.) A clickable link absolutely cannot go in an infobox as if this was a normal website. It isn't. --DanielRigal (talk) 17:34, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

  I think this is a good idea, but it's worth noting that consistency between articles should try and be maintained. Some sites hosting copyrighted content such as Library Genesis have the URL in the infobox non-clickable, while other's like the more notorious The Pirate Bay have theirs clickable.The Daily Stormer, which most in this talkpage would consider worse than Kiwi Farms, has its link clickable (disregarding the discussion here about The Daily Stormer having a link). This is even muddied further by YouTube's link being clickable, which also hosts copyrighted content. You could argue that in the case of YouTube, hosting things that goes against U.S. law goes against their ToS, but to my knowledge, that is the same for Kiwi Farms. I think this just highlights that we need to work on a policy that makes URLs consistent across articles, and if linking to controversial sites should be allowed on Wikipedia. JungleEntity (talk) 21:00, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong oppose as an WP:IAR hack to prevent real-world harm. I agree that in almost all cases an article about a website should have a link to the website. However, KiwiFarms by itself abundantly justifies the "almost". Regardless of all other Wikipedia policy, and certainly above mere "consistency", it would be nuts to link to a site whose sole purpose is to dox and harass non-public figures, often with the express stated purpose of driving them to suicide. Loki (talk) 20:58, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose based on its deliberate facilitation of doxxing of private persons. NBC News' recent piece describes Kiwi Farms as being directly involved in doxxing and swatting; I visited Kiwi Farms a few weeks ago and easily found a thread holding up a private figure for ridicule, with participants helping each other doxx her and her family and others making provocative and actionably libelous claims about her. Such behaviors are not mere advocacy of vile ideas but are a form of ideological terrorism inimical to a free society. I don't think policy forbids linking, but good judgment counsels against it in this case. Rebbing 22:55, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose the FBI literally called it a potential terrorist threat. If it’s on the dark web it’s beyond our metaphorical pay grade as far as I’m concerned. Dronebogus (talk) 00:59, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  Comment the FBI absolutely did not call them a potential terrorist threat. A former assistant director did. Even if they did, there is previous consensus to support linking to terrorist organizations and the such on their articles. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 02:18, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  If a site promotes violence against civilians I’d strongly support not linking it. Kiwi Farms does. Dronebogus (talk) 15:59, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia acting as an arbiter of morality, as long as there's a working link to the site I think it should be linked.--Ortizesp (talk) 01:47, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose any link to Kiwi Farms. I'm generally reluctant to support removing any links when the article is on the website fearing there will be pressure to take it too far. For that reason I'm unconvinced and probably will not support removing links to Stormfront, V-DARE, The Right Stuff and I suspect most of the sites people have named (although for those extreme examples I'm not sure I'll oppose it either). I feel that Kiwi Farms is somewhat unique though as Chillabit and others have mentioned and I mentioned on BLP/N [7]. Most of the other sites are general sites, I'm not going to visit them but from descriptions I've seen they advocate incredibly harm ideas and actions but these are often of a general character. For example, they may target people as a group due to their race or ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, national origin, religion etc. This is disgusting but while I'm not personally opposed to trying to prevent people seeing harmful ideas, but it's not really the Wikipedia way to handle things. According to previous discussion Stormfront and maybe the other sites have also been used to organise attacks and murders. Again while very concerning, I'm still not sure it's enough for us to not link to them as it's not likely we'll have in any way reduce that. By comparison a key purpose of Kiwi Farms is to dox, attack, demean, disparage identifiable or identified living individuals based on whatever characteristics their users think is enough to warrant that. Their site was even named after that originally. These individuals are often not notable or barely notable by our standards and are often already vulnerable given the characteristics that makes Kiwi Farms users target them . This is something fundamentally against our BLP policies. For clarity I agree anyone who's really interested in Kiwi Farms isn't going to not visit because we don't link, I'm sure they'll find the site anyway. But there are likely to be a small number of people who are just curious, who'll visit when they see the link but won't when they don't. Most of these will just be disgusted and navigate away, but a small number may have some sort or morbid curiosity and stick around. I don't think it even matters though since IMO we shouldn't contribute to even one more person seeing that content who wouldn't otherwise. From what I've read before, while people seeing the content is often a small factor, it's often still a factor in the harm people suffer. So while a tiny contribution sure, it's IMO a worthwhile one to make a contribution to less suffering by those living persons targeted by the site via less eyeballs seeing the disgusting content targeting them. Noting again I'm not going to visit the other sites to check, while I assume they may occasionally do similar things, it doesn't seem to me one of their key purposes and so I assume is a lot less common. I suspect even when they do target individuals, it's more commonly fairly notable ones. I'd note that Kiwi Farms has been linked to suicides which also seems to support the differences between what these sites generally do. Nil Einne (talk) 02:04, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  TL;DR version of the above, I oppose linking to Kiwi Farms since a key purpose and so much of their content seems to be material that directly harms specifically targeted often non notable or barely notable living people who may already be vulnerable, so I feel it's in accordance with BLP. This doesn't seem to be the case for other sites people keep citing where the material may be incredibly harmful, but in a more general sense rather than directed at specific individuals and especially not non notable or barely notable ones. Nil Einne (talk) 02:18, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose per GorillaWarfare, Pilaz, and Firefangledfeathers. Alyo (chat·edits) 14:16, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Support and comment Many users seem to be arguing that from a moral perspective it should not be included or "promoted", and not from a wikipedia policy standpoint. Ananinunenon (talk) 14:54, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

That's a fair point, but if ever there were a case for ignoring rules, preventing harm would strike me as a pretty compelling one. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 14:57, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

• Comment On a whim I checked the first 5 references and 3 of them provide a link. I haven't checked them all so am unsure whether that's representative of what all the reliable sources have chosen to do, but I suggest that the Wikipedia approach should (as with all content) follow the reliable sources. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:37, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  In contrast, every recent source I've looked at does not provide a link. I found a few sources that mention one of the newer urls, and even those did not link them. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:49, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  Would those three happen to be from before this year and all the recent developments? If anything, I see a pattern with recent articles avoiding linking to them. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 16:51, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

  If those three are from this year, especially in the last month or two, it could be that the authors found there was no suitable URL to link in the article, as the site has gone down intermittently. JungleEntity (talk) 22:35, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support as someone with WP:NPOV like, seriously, what happened to NPOV? I see everyone is running around wikipedia policies to apply, then carry on to scream how awful this website is. Not every policy has equal effectiveness of application.

The domain name of this site is a perfectly valid input for website oriented infobox template, and so per my previous comment the url should be a link to an intended server. You cannot beat correct technical information. Skewing or removing it runs a breach of WP:NOTCENSORED, it is required that information of a site to be correct and up to date regardless of how awful the website can become. If it's any comfort to the opposers, a new domain name would come up none in search result and archive web, and readers should know well ahead when clicking that link; article gives plenty of space to read. It's just a cute little detail in the infobox that's nothing more than a domain name. I'd be willing to oppose putting a link anywhere else beyond that.

I can understand 8chan just isn't getting one, by definitions at WP:ELNO #3, such a link gives you and the readers the possibilities of a "direct possession" to an illegal material like child porn, whereas kiwifarm is just an "incident" or "reference" to illegal stuff, like many other questionable sites. This should go the same for piracy sites for a possibility of a "direct possession" to pirated materials but for some reason we're giving them links.

But that's just my definition of illegal to access contents described at ELNO #3. The "reference" to an illegal stuff can only be handled other than just a taking the domain name off from article that will have no effects doing so anyway. It's no use what we as editors can do but to break WP:NOTCENSORED, censoring ourselves is no better.

As always, WP:NPOV. Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 21:30, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I will be the first to say WP:NPOV is somewhat confusingly named, but how does representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic really inform us one way or the other as to whether to include a link? Dumuzid (talk) 21:34, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

The link must be correct but not "required to be present" asked by Ferret. But honestly the domain name is too bareboned to look at. Whether it's good to include or not is down to WP:NOTCENSORED if not for other good policies that's not too far fetched for this url. Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 19:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

But you haven't stated any policy that requires an external link to be present. NPOV doesn't require it. NOTCENSORED doesn't require it. EL itself doesn't require it, simply presents recommendations. Nothing REQUIRES us to have a URL. On the other hand... NOTCENSORED does say to exclude things that violate our policies, including BLP and NPOV, or the law of the United States. WP:DOXXING and WP:OWH (as well as the fuller WP:Harassment it is part of) is a policy. This site is known to dox actual active Wikipedia volunteers. That's really the end of it, in my view. -- ferret (talk) 21:37, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Didn't said that link is required, just saying the link must be correct and up to date. I didn't know there'd be harassment on wikipedia volunteers in this site, but that doesn't change my standpoint.

Unless you could find a link for that then that policy would apply, the domain name is too bareboned to make it worthwhile. A website (any website e.g. Reddit) is bound to have questionable information buried deep that would break wikipedia policies. This website is full of things, and I think it should be about "direct possession" vs "reference" that I mentioned and I wish we would have a discussion about that. I guess that whatever outcome this discuss might be updating WP:ELNO would be appreciated because people reaching out all possible policies against this website means there's something wrong. Rukario-sama ^ㅈ^ -(...) 19:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

"like, seriously, what happened to NPOV?" Well, it's taken a back seat to a culture of safetyism and the flat-out POV-pushing of self-proclaimed "allies of marginalized groups". Not all of us who contribute to WP think that's a good thing. Peter G Werner (talk) 08:35, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose on numerous grounds. It clearly violates WP:ELNEVER in that, as part of its doxxing, it contains large amounts of copyrighted material used without the permission of the copyright holder, with no reasonable fair-use exception; it has refused to take these down when contacted, and insufficient benefit exists to readers to justify ignoring this clearly-defined policy. Likewise, while this article is not itself a BLP, the last sentence of WP:ELBLP, separate from the requirements for the rest, says Do not link to websites that are not fully compliant with this guideline or that contradict the spirit of WP:BLP, emphasis mine; it is difficult to imagine a source less compliant with the spirit of BLP than one that exists for the purpose of harassing specific named individuals. Finally, I'll note that per WP:ELBURDEN, even without this the burden is ultimately on the people who wish to include it to justify inclusion, and the arguments for inclusion are weak (essentially just WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS coupled with WP:NOTCENSORED - the latter being meaningless not only because there clearly are policy violations, but because it only allows and does not require inclusion.) Additionally, note that the reason Cloudflare dropped them is because they concluded that the increasingly-specific threats the site was hosting were illegal in nature ([8][9][10].) --Aquillion (talk) 02:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

  Regarding the copyright issue, WP:COPYLINK says that In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site (cf. pages on copyright-violating sites like Library Genesis, which provide the site URL in the infobox but don't link to pirated works therein), so just including the domain here doesn't seem to violate the copyright rules. - LaetusStudiis (talk) 00:58, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support. As per the arguments provided by Barnards.tar.gz. Wikipedia should generally be consistent across its articles. This is not a policy/guideline, and in some cases, there are valid reasons that consistency is not possible because the situation is unique for a specific article. In this case, the uniqueness stems from what appears to be a personal dislike of the website; this reasoning because of dislike (hosts copyrighted material/doxes people/etc.) and a desire that readers not go to the site would violate Wikipedia's no WP:advocacy policy through omission of standard information. Any appearance of advocacy by Wikipedia of a cause should be avoided, since this damages the public's trust in the impartiality of the encyclopedia.--Guest2625 (talk) 09:06, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
• Strong oppose we should not link to it. Those who oppose above have put it better than I could.

Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 09:19, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose Linking to troll sites is not part of an encyclopedic mission. WP:EL is the guideline and linking to known-attack sites is not among the reasons a link should be provided. Apparently some other websites provide the links but Wikipedia is never required to copy what other websites do. Aquillion provided further policy-based reasons for non-inclusion, including that we do not link to copyright-infringing sites. The copyright situation is conclusive, regardless of what people might think about the site. Johnuniq (talk) 09:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
• Currently neutral on kiwifarms, ardently oppose using as basis for removing links on other scummy websites - So kiwifarms are assholes of the lowest order. So the question is instead more "how does our singular cause of providing knowledge to everyone" stack against either deplatforming or providing protection in cases of physical threats to users. The first is completely unacceptable - that a site is distinctly unpleasant and calls for worse, doesn't mean we should remove the link. Obviously we should remove links where the US courts have indicated such. KF is apparently holding a small bubble where they are basically enabling threats to specific individuals as their raison d'etre (rather than as a set of specific threads but not a website's purpose, as might be the case on, say, 4chan). As such I place some value on the protective side, (hence the neutral), but not the broader precedential value as indicated by @Hemiauchenia and Funcrunch: et al Nosebagbear (talk) 09:52, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. I'm really torn here. On one hand, I can see the encyclopedic value since it can help show the history of how they were dropped or otherwise had to go to different providers over time. On the other, there's a lot of potential for real world harm here. The site not only contains personal information but also private photos and videos. Some are sexual, some are not. I believe that there may also be photos of individuals self harming, but I'm admittedly not certain of that. Some of the images are ones purchased through places like OnlyFans or Patreon, which poses a copyright issue. Others were obtained through methods ranging from social media posts to tricking them into giving up the images to illicit means. In many cases the images were never intended to be publicly shared. These images aren't rife through the site, but they are common enough to where this should be considered. I think that if it is included it should at least not be clickable, although GW is correct in that the URL is likely to be dynamic and not really be stable enough to keep up with unless someone wanted to specifically keep on top of that. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 13:57, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
• Support inclusion. Facts, not feelings, people. Kiwi Farms is just the latest pitstop on the superhighway traveled by impotent man-children for decades, from SomethingAwful to 4chan to 8chan to KotakuInAction. Linking to them as we do for any other article based on a company or website or web forum or whateveer does not promote or validate the content found there, it is just a simple piece of information. Blacklisting or prohibiting links like this should be reserved for the utmost of extreme conditions, such as malware or actionable illegal content being hosted there. Zaathras (talk) 22:16, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

  8chan isn’t a good example since it was URL banned for hosting child porn. Dronebogus (talk) 22:48, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

  Which is a very unique situation, which absolutely does not apply to Kiwi Farms. The only real example of a situation where we have decided not to link to a website was in a case where the content potentially violated United States law by distributing child pornography, which Kiwi Farms does not. Serafart (talk) (contributions) 03:23, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

• Just to be clear, part of the reason Cloudflare dropped Kiwi Farms is because they believe that there was likely actionably illegal content on it, describing "immanant threats to human life." ([11][12][13]). Would you consider updating your position in light of that? What would you consider sufficient evidence that a site hosts actionably illegal content, if not? --Aquillion (talk) 09:51, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

• As Cloudflare is neither judge nor jury, and is simply acting in what they perceive to be their best self-interest for their business model, no. Unchanged. Zaathras (talk) 02:33, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose (unless linkage can be made nofollow). Do be aware of my conflict of interest, but part of how Kiwi Farms harmed people over the years has been poisoning Google and other search engine results for their targets. By having a link from high-Pagerank Wikipedia to Kiwi Farms, it boosts Kiwi Farms' ability to harm marginalised people by defaming them and having the defamation appear in results for that person's name. --Lizthegrey (talk) 15:19, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

  As far as I'm aware, external links on Wikipedia use the nofollow attribute value, which means that they have no effect on how high the website will appear on a Google search. Endwise (talk) 15:48, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

  I can't find a clear answer to whether English Wikipedia links use nofollow by default or not. The earliest evidence I can find is this email saying it was requested to be turned back on by Jimbo in 2007. As I understand from the Meta-Wiki's nofollow page, it was completely disabled as a link attribute in 2006 as we preferred to use the URL blacklist instead. JungleEntity (talk) 19:00, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

  All external links on enwiki use nofollow. If you're not convinced, just check. Elli (talk | contribs) 21:20, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

  I don't know why I didn't think to check the page source. After checking a few Wikipedia pages like YouTube, DreamHost and Pornhub, I can confirm that they all have the nofollow attribute. JungleEntity (talk) 22:42, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

  To be fair, while they have a nofollow attribute value, they have enormous value acting as a gateway between the website and the clear internet, as research highlighted in this month's Signpost has shown. Infobox external links have the highest clickthrough rate, too. Pilaz (talk) 21:30, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Strong Support: For reasons of WP:NOTCENSORED and WP:NPOV, with the reasons for opposing the linking seeming to me to have everything to do with the poltical bias of various editors. But given the long-established nature of bias in Wikipedia editing, an editorial policy in opposition to linking will carry the day. But it feels worthwhile to express dissent against it nevertheless. Peter G Werner (talk) 22:59, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

I will be the first to admit that I am biased against driving people to suicide, though that has never seemed particularly political to me. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 23:36, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

And I would respond that belief in moral panic-driven nonsense concepts like “stochastic terrorism” is maybe not a valid reason to make exceptions to WP:NOTCENSORED and NPOV.Peter G Werner (talk) 23:48, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

We are all entitled to our own values. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 23:55, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment: On the complaint that doxxing takes place on KF, if it was the case that we were talking about linking directly to a thread containing dropped doxx, I'd agree about not linking it. But the idea that means not linking to the site at all? Disagree, and it's rendering a POV about the site rather than allowing readers to get information for themselves, both from within the article and cited sources and from examining the site directly and coming to their own conclusions. And, yes, my view on how to treat this issue comes from a strong strain of anti-paternalism that's been out of fashion for the last few years, but maybe it's an approach worth reconsidering. Peter G Werner (talk) 08:55, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, I oppose this RFC having anything but the most narrow possible precedential value. Kiwifarms is IMO a special case where linking to it would cause such obvious real-world harm we just can't, even though it's ordinarily policy to. Loki (talk) 18:27, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

If you're talking about the current attacks against Clara Sorrenti, then I can see your point. However, I wonder if that justifies a permanent ban on providing the link to the KiwiFarms site, should it come back, or whether the immenent threat status should be revisted. Just a few months ago KF was not considered such a dangerous site that end users should be prevented from accessing it, and in fact, I can think of a few journalists who have admitted to using KF as a source of information in the past. (The latter point is something I should have included in my original argument, actually, it's one of the reasons I think normal, non-malicious users have some business accessing it.) So even if the current mobbing of Sorrenti justifies keeping information about KF's current whereabouts blocked right now, I think that's a decision worth revisiting later. Peter G Werner (talk) 21:55, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Sincere question -- given that the article currently lists three suicides associated with the site, and now the Sorrenti business, isn't that enough to draw an inference that such things happen at the site? Dumuzid (talk) 22:38, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Because I don't buy the "driven to suicide" claims as undisputed fact. These were likely unstable people to begin with, and claims that they were driven to it by the actions of one site are entirely speculative. There could be many reasons for there suicide, and sites like The Daily Dot are simply glomming onto the narrative they favor. The fact that Sorrenti is currently the target of a harassment campaign is well-established, and it's one of the few compelling arguments I see for at least temporarily making an exception to the usual WP:NOTCENSORED guideline. But I don't think Bad tendency* alone should be enough to make an exception. *(I realize "bad tendency" is a term that comes from American free speech law and WP is not subject to that. I do think "bad tendency" is a useful concept, however, and worth differentiating from "incitement".) Peter G Werner (talk) 10:14, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Declaring them unstable is equally speculative and frankly inappropriate. --Pokelova (talk) 11:45, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

It's not just the current attacks against Clara Sorrenti. It's the huge number of doxes up on the site. Linking to KiwiFarms is, IMO, equivalent to linking to a revenge porn site. Loki (talk) 03:04, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose - Several !votes here describe this as a censorship issue. I do not accept that, as it seems simplistic to me. Framing this as some sort of philosophical obligation is trying to make the page into a cause instead of an encyclopedia article. Grayfell (talk) 06:16, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

  Why is it "simplistic"? If there's a "cause" here, it's the safetyism implicit in prohibiting the inclusion of a link. Presuming that the site goes back up and stays at a stable URL, I don't see any reason under existing Wikipedia rules and guidelines, of which WP:NOTCENSORED is very much one, of not stating that information in the infobox or external links. Bottom line is I don't think Wikipedia is under any obligation to participate in the coordinated deplatforming of any internet site. If we're going to, as a rule, disallow linking to sites for "moral" reasons, I think that should be an actual global-level rule that's agreed upon by the Wikipedia community as a whole. Peter G Werner (talk) 10:04, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

  Is putting scare quotes around "moral" supposed to make it into a bad thing? It appears to me that you arguing that your interpretation of policies allows us to include the link. I disagree with that interpretation, (as I think this has tipped over into WP:ELNEVER) but let's go with it. If you think this is a slippery-slope issue, or will otherwise set a precedent you disagree with, I find that to be simplistic. For one thing, citing policy to preserve the status quo regardless of context harms our ability as editors to improve the article. Sources do not treat Kiwi Farms like every other website, and we, as editors, can make judgement calls same as always. Almost everything about Wikipedia is decided on a case-by-case basis. Calling this censorship doesn't really explain why it's a special case.

Further, I don't think it's meaningful to say this is part of a coordinated deplatforming. Even if I did accept that, I don't see why that would be a reason to include it. We're don't keep garbage around just because other people agree that removing it is a good idea. Grayfell (talk) 21:44, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

• Comment I would like to comment that <removed by ferret> is now back up, and if it is to be linked, it should probably be to that url Serafart (talk) (contributions) 14:09, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
  • Throughout this RFC and related discussions, linking and providing the URL has been discouraged and removed due to the blacklist. I've done so here as well. -- ferret (talk) 14:18, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

    @Ferret: It is not forbidden to link to websites on Wikipedia's blacklist; I don't think it's appropriate for you to edit other people's comments in that manner. If there is an ongoing RfC about whether it is acceptable to include it in the actual article itself, it is clearly not such a flagrant violation of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines to even mention it on a talk page that you'd need to censor any comment that has "kiwifarms" + "[insert any TLD here]" in it. Endwise (talk) 14:51, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

    I did not begin the practice, I am simply continuing it. Regardless, this isn't a site that is blacklisted for spam reasons. It's a site blacklisted for doxxing, harassment, and outing concerns and issues. -- ferret (talk) 15:43, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

    @Ferret: When you write <removed by admin>, you are doing this removal as an admin action, which I understand to mean something like "take this to AN if you disagree, otherwise you'll be blocked", and is not something that has been done on this talk page before. You are not correct that we have established this as a practice, btw, it was something that PBZE did, and was asked to stop doing by Doug Weller; a followup BLPN discussion on it did not resolve in favour of the practice either. I think it would be best if you revert your edit of Serafart's comment. Endwise (talk) 15:55, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

    I've adjusted the comment to indicate it's not an admin action. I will not retract though. PBZE was warned for edit warning, and the BLPN discussion doesn't make any real determination anymore than this RFC not being concluded. PBZE's edit was later repeated by a different editor with no contest by you, so. -- ferret (talk) 16:43, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

    I actually didn't notice it at first, but I was planning to remove it anyway because their domains were rapidly shifting around, so it was no longer accurate. I don't see how me choosing not to revert because it was an edit I wanted to make anyway means there is a community-wide consensus that it is forbidden to mention any url that links to the Kiwi Farms forum. Endwise (talk) 03:17, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

  And a couple of hours later, it was down again, and another of their recently acquired alternate domains was seized by the registrar. With the site now burning through alternate DDoS mitigation platforms, and now two alternate domains revoked, any domain that we could theoretically pick to link could go offline within a matter of minutes or hours. Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:30, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

• Comment Can someone link me to the website so I can look at it myself? Thriley (talk) 18:39, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
  • Throughout this RFC and related discussions, linking and providing the URL has been discouraged and removed due to the blacklist. I'm confident that you, as well as any other reader, can locate it via Google or other methods. -- ferret (talk) 14:18, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
• Support Wikipedia should not decide whether or not to link a website based on if it likes it or agrees with its values. The website follows US laws and should be linked, regardless of Wikipedia editors' opinions of the site. Mrmariomaster (talk) 20:09, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
• Strong support: Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED, does not WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, and as per consistency. We give links to illegal websites such as ExHentai/E-Hentai, The Pirate Bay, Z-Library, or Library Genesis; we also give links to forums not well regarded, such 4chan; the official websites of the National Alliance (United States) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and other groups considered as extremists are also given on Wikipedia. Same goes for small, weird or extremist religious sects, they also have their websites added on their Wikipedia articles (e.g., Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles, which notably threatens to excommunicate their faithfuls who took certain COVID vaccines). The current (secondary) domain should be used if the main one is down. Veverve (talk) 18:00, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support: The harm caused by the site which some opponents say they want to prevent is (if I understand correctly) harrassment, doxxing, SWATting, etc., committed by the site's users and organized on the site itself; whether that continues depends on whether the site stays accessible in a form its current users can find and access. Thus, WP's inclusion of the URL is unlikely to have any nonnegligible effect, since users of the site will find it as long as it stays up, while WP readers, like the general population, tend not to be interested in obsessively stalking and harrassing minor celebrities and therefore are unlikely to join in even when they find the site. If that issue is not something our choice has a significant effect on, and the copyright concern is not applicable (since, per WP:COPYLINK, In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site, as in e.g. The Pirate Bay), then the main remaining reason for opposition given here is that editors (understandably) dislike the site, which seems to fall under WP:NOTCENSORED: Discussion of potentially objectionable content should usually focus not on its potential offensiveness but on whether it is an appropriate image, text, or link, which a link to a site on an article about that site generally is. - LaetusStudiis (talk) 00:44, 17 September 2022 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose - WP:GRATUITOUS describes why WP:NOTCENSORED should not necessarily apply here, and the possibility of real-world harm resulting from a link to the website should be an unimpeachable reason to refrain from doing so. Hatman31 (talk) 00:53, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

Can we remove the domain names from the RfC question please? Leaving aside for a moment the broader discussion on whether we should or should not link to the site in the article space, presently all KiwiFarm URLs that are not on TOR are down. DDoS-Guard, their drop in replacement for Cloudflare, has just terminated service to the site (no RS on this yet but Kevin Beaumont is a SME), and over on their Telegram Null has put up a post saying that it will be at least a week before any resumption of service can occur. Excluding the specific secondary domain from the question at this time does not change the nature of the question, and arguably gives more freedom for any editors who support adding it to the external links and infobox as it leaves it more open ended during a time period of instability for the site. Sideswipe9th (talk) 14:33, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

• Comment The consensus developing here is the exact opposite result of the same discussion that was had about the Stormfront URL, see Talk:Stormfront_(website)#URL, which has been linked to the same sort of stuff (and worse) Kiwi Farms has. That RfC was quite heavily contested and in the light of this RfC maybe a new discussion is warranted. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:46, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Maybe so. I'd definitely support the removal of the stormfront url from that page for the same reasons I support removal of links to Kiwi Fams on this page.Historyday01 (talk) 16:16, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Same. That other dangerous websites have their URLs included is not, to me, sufficient reason to keep the Kiwi Farms link. The Stormfront URL discussion was over a year and a half ago, was not listed as an official RfC, and had a non-admin closure. If reopened, I would !vote to remove that URL as well. Funcrunch (talk) 18:33, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm honestly a little baffled that people on both sides here are focusing on the question of whether or not we should link to "hate sites" or "extremist sites". That's not really what makes Kiwi Farms unique; there are plenty of extremist or hate sites. What makes it unique is that it dedicates threads to compiling sensitive information about individuals it doesn't like, even leaking revenge porn sometimes (as in the case of Keffals, at least according to the text of this very article & an attached source). Further as I mentioned, there are Wikipedia editors who have dedicated threads there, and at least one of those has sensitive personal information leaked on it. I mentioned there were two such active threads, I've now been made aware of two more. I can't make people care about this aspect over any other. But to reduce it to a simple question of whether or not to host "hate sites" strikes me as missing the point... sure, that's something the site is. But that's not what makes it stand out. --Chillabit (talk) 20:00, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

• @Zaathras: given that you have expressed your opinion on this topic at BLPN, would you like to restate your opinions in the RfC? Hemiauchenia (talk) 10:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
• @Indy beetle: you too. Hemiauchenia (talk) 10:48, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

  @Hemiauchenia: why did you selectively ping these participants but not others who were also involved in the same discussion at BLP/N, and who haven't participated yet (Mako001, Masem, Animalparty)? Surely, you must be aware of WP:CANVASS? Pilaz (talk) 21:44, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

@Pilaz: Please don't baselessly accuse people of canvassing. I pinged them they clearly expressed a strong opinon on the topic. The others did not, or had already voted in this RfC. Pinging two people is not going to sway the outcome of this RfC, so I don't possibly see how this could be votestacking, the only thing that this would really qualify under Wikipedia:Canvassing#Inappropriate_notification. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:53, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Please review WP:APPNOTE. All had contributed to the topic, and selectively picking "strong opinions" on the topic is by definition canvassing. A couple extra pings go a long way to even the playing field. If in doubt, ping all or none. Cheers. Pilaz (talk) 23:07, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

You clearly have no fucking idea what canvassing is then. Canvassing would have been if I had selectively notified individuals with a specific leaning, while not notifing others, which I did not deliberately do. If there had been other users who had expressed clear opinions to not include the URL who had not previously posted in the RfC, then I would have notified as them as well. Notifiying two people doesn't count as selective canvassing. Just fucking drop it and move on. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:43, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Apologies if this brushed you the wrong way. I do not have omniscient powers to determine if one wishes to canvas or not - at any rate, try to ping all next time you ping some. I'm seeing IPs pinging random people on here, so caution is warranted. And on a semi-public RfC like this, remaining WP:CIVIL goes a long way too. Pilaz (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Masem has not participated in this RfC at all and they did not suggest to include the URL. On a separate note, notifying users "who have expressed strong opinions" is biased as it excludes users who might !vote Oppose but did not express so directly on BLPN. 0xDeadbeef 05:06, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

I’m really trying not to have my comments show up twice, but the way this section is structured is a total mess! Peter G Werner (talk) 23:53, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

• Revive Wikipedia:Attack sites? We have a 2007 proposal to regulate attack sites. Should we revive this to apply to cases such as this one? So far as I know we have no active policies which regulate how we respond to attack sites. I am imagining that we could regulate attack sites in a way comparable to how we list and present evidence for regulating the Wikipedia:Spam blacklist and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:25, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

  While I understand the impetus here, and would agree that there are other sites that represent dangers of one sort or another, to my mind each is so sui generis that a broad policy or shotgun approach is less desirable. To my mind, while this category exists, it's constituents are rarified enough that we can and should handle them individually. But, as ever, reasonable minds may differ on the point. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 16:05, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

• Comment: I'm not sure how much longer the RfC needs to run but I note that events are rendering it increasingly moot as KF is unable to keep a website up for more than a few days at a time on any given URL. --DanielRigal (talk) 01:33, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

  I don't the recent inability for Kiwi Farms to keep the site up renders this RfC moot at all. Currently the site is experiencing a campaign against them to it down, so it shouldn't be unexpected that the site be down. That doesn't change the fact that Kiwi Farms might come up again with a stable permanent URL. If they ever get a stable URL, we still have to decide if we should link it or not on Wikipedia. I think it's best to leave the RfC open until Kiwi Farms gets back on its footing, or until it's plainly obvious that it never will. JungleEntity (talk) 02:48, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussions

Related discussions: Talk:The Right Stuff (blog)#URL, Talk:VDARE#Link. These websites are similar to Kiwi Farms, have URLs in their infoboxes and were brought up earlier Stephanie921 (talk) 21:24, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

• Same discussion on Wikidata - d:Wikidata:Project_chat#Linking_to_Kiwi_Farm_on_Wikidata. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:46, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Past tense?

Since KiwiFarms got taken down by Cloudflare and the outcry succeeded, and AFAIK there are no plans for the owner of the website to re-host it, when would it be permissible for all the verbs in this article to be changed to past tense? Dennis Dartman (talk) 21:04, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

ETA, I'd put the word "harassment" before "discussion" in the lead part (see above discussion). Dennis Dartman (talk) 21:05, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Follow the sources. If they start talking about KF in past tense, we should -- Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 21:15, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The website is still online on an alternative domain, just that nobody wants to link to it. Wikicannibal (talk) 23:02, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The server (185.178.208.168) has remained online. The URL DNS records routed through cloudflare were blocked (kiwifarms.[CENSORED]/, kiwifarms.[CENSORED]/, and kiwifarms.[CENSORED]/) as of Sep 4, 2022, but as they propagate to DDoS-GUARD (like the russian domain kiwifarms.[CENSORED]/) they will presumably resolve again. I would never post to that website, and the people who do seem horrible, but Wikipedia is uncensored and those are the facts as of right now. Correction: Wikipedia is censored. Editors receive the following message: "Blacklisting indicates past problems with the link, so any requests should clearly demonstrate how inclusion would benefit Wikipedia. The following 4 links have triggered a protection filter: kiwifarms.[CENSORED], kiwifarms.[CENSORED], kiwifarms.[CENSORED] and kiwifarms.[CENSORED]". Interesting. A historic precedent on Wikipedia has occurred. Habanero-tan (talk) 03:18, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

This isn't a "historic precedent"; there are lots of other sites on the English Wikipedia blacklist. Funcrunch (talk) 03:29, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry if I just kicked off another one of those massive free-speech political debates... but I'm sure that the site restrictions on obviously hate-posting and violence-inciting communities or propaganda can hardly considered "censorship," now, can it?

Wikipedia did not "become censored" because of this moment, but we all know how bad the people who say so are at checking their facts, now, do we? Dennis Dartman (talk) 03:37, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Looking forward to the argument about how we should allow Wikipedia to become overrun with spam, porn, and phishing links all in the name of free speech... GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 14:03, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Well if it’s a mainstream, notable porn site with no malicious code or malware I don’t see how it wouldn’t be protected under WP:NOTCENSORED. Dronebogus (talk) 20:54, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we should ever link spam or phishing links, but Pornhub has a clickable link in the infobox, and we all know how the ads on THAT site can be suspicious... JungleEntity (talk) 23:03, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Edit request for the wording of the lead

I'd put the word "harassment" before "discussion" in the lead part (see above discussion). Dennis Dartman (talk) 03:39, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Edit request: update

The DoS guard server is down. Looks like the farms are gone for good now. Dennis Dartman (talk) 16:05, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Source in Russian newspaper Kommersant (a reliable source per WP:RSP) [14] ″Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:07, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Added. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:08, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@User:Hemiauchenia @User:Dennis Dartman in accordance with this, I have edited the infobox to say they're defunct and changed their pronouns to was/were. Stephanie921 (talk) 20:11, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

And I've reverted because Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_crystal_ball. Give it like a week or maybe a month and then we'll say whether or not the forum can be called defunct. At the moment it's simply too soon. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:15, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

They're still on the Tor network. It's not defunct. --Chillabit (talk) 20:16, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't trying to be hasty cos I thought the reliable sources like the one linked above say it's defunct. But now that I think about it, I think it's a good idea to wait a bit - although one week seems like it'll probably be too much time and I don't see why we'd need to wait a month at all. Why do you think so? @User:Hemiauchenia Stephanie921 (talk) 20:18, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Because being offline for a few days or weeks isn't necessarily "defunct", there's a good chance that they will come back online, the longer they are offline though the less likely that becomes. If it's still active on Tor then I don't see how we can call it defunct. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:21, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@User:Hemiauchenia good point, ty. And I didn't know they were still active on Tor Stephanie921 (talk) 20:25, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Didn't the owner of the website himself say something to the effect of, like, "KiwiFarms is going the way of 8chan, and for the foreseeable future it is pretty much dead"?

But the thing is, he said it on the website, so it's currently only accessible using Tor. Does that meet the requisites for a reliable source, or would this have to be published in some external reputable publication (which, by now, it probably already has)? Dennis Dartman (talk) 22:47, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@User:Dennis Dartman Yes he did say it was dead but it being on the website is an absolutely unreliable source, since it's biased (coming from them) and far-right. Also, we're currently having a discussion over whether the link to Kiwi should be excised, so this would exacerbate that convo. We should wait till a reputable publication says they're dead Stephanie921 (talk) 22:53, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Didn't we already come to a conclusion that KiwiFarms links should be treated as links to other hate speech websites, like 8chan, and not linked here?

If not, I fully support this. Especially after that ex-FBI agent compared KiwiFarms's activity to terrorism.

And yes, of course KiwiFarms is a very unreliable source... but what about direct statements from the people in charge? Wouldn't they still be primary sources? Dennis Dartman (talk) 22:59, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

We didn't come to a consensus, and you can take part in the ongoing RFC here: Talk:Kiwi Farms#URL on the section entitled 'RFC linking to Kiwi Farms'. And, they'd only be reliable if in a reputable other source Stephanie921 (talk) 23:01, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Well, do you still believe that "there's a good chance that they will come back online"? Did you say that aware of Null's announcement? Do you believe he's being sincere in his announcement, or is he just talking out of his rear end like so many alt-rightists do (idk, to get Keffals to shut up)? Dennis Dartman (talk) 11:31, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes they are back now on the clearnet on the Chinese domain of .top, and again, being on the darkweb does not mean that your site is 'offline'. - Tweedle (talk) 12:33, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

If it’s on the dark web it means they’re officially so radioactive no mainstream provider wants to touch them, probably because of their hate group and borderline terrorist status, ergo we shouldn’t link to them if that’s the case. Dronebogus (talk) 20:52, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

And now the .top domain has gone down. IDK about Tor. (God bless Keffals and her campaign!) Dennis Dartman (talk) 04:02, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

@User:Dennis Dartman Keffals pronouns are she/her, so please can u correct ur msg? Stephanie921 (talk) 04:09, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

If it’s on tor it’s not down. Dronebogus (talk) 15:57, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry about that, Hemiauchenia, totally misread the source and didn't see the discussion here until just now. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 23:04, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Y'all need to stop edit warring about whether Kiwi Farms "is" or "was". Yes, the site's been up and down in various locations the last few days and that may or may not continue, but we can't keep changing the lead every five minutes. Funcrunch (talk) 20:13, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. Count me as a voice in favor of present tense for at least the next week or so. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 20:15, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

How about we wait two weeks starting from now to be absolutely sure they're dead - and if they are at that time - we past-tense them? Is everyone okay with that plan? Btw @User:Funcrunch and @User:Firefangledfeathers cheers for tryna mediate, crackin' muckers both of ya Stephanie921 (talk) 20:22, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

https://domainincite.com/28220-kiwi-farms-domain-lands-at-epik heres a source that says that they have moved to a new domain Pyraminxsolver (talk) 02:21, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Having been following this campaign off-wiki, and the immediate aftermath of having had services removed by Cloudflare, the forum has now gone through three or four domains in as many days. The one linked by Domain Incite appears to be offline at present, redirecting to a standard Nginx error page while returning the HTTP 418 error code due to a misconfiguration. Sideswipe9th (talk) 03:08, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

The article is back to past tense and it hasn't been two weeks. Have we agreed on a consensus? Dennis Dartman (talk) 04:01, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

No we haven't agreed on a consensus but we aven't agreed on a two-week waiting period either. I proposed that but no-one's agreed to it Stephanie921 (talk) 04:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Should we make another RfC just to agree on past or present tense?? (Not entirely kidding...) I'm undecided on the waiting period, which is why I haven't weighed in on that. Funcrunch (talk) 04:35, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, the .top/VanwaTech/Eranet domain has been up and down, and their onion service has still been continuously online (is that correct?), so if the forum is still up and running and people are still posting etc. then I don't see why past tense would make sense. Endwise (talk) 05:02, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm fine with Stephanie921's two week proposal. To be clear, if a stamped of RS come in with "KF down 100%, never coming back we swear" I'm not stuck to the timeline. In the meantime, I intend to revert changes to past tense if I catch them first and link to this talk page section. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 05:16, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Edit request: Cloudflare campaign

Hi all! There's consensus emerging on this in Cloudflare campaign, so I'd just like to make an edit request while we're at it:

Following Kiwi Farms' harassment campaign against Sorrenti, in August 2022 a campaign was started to try to convince Cloudflare to stop providing services to the site. (some references here)
+ NBC News claims this was done in order to enable "debilitating virtual attacks" against Kiwi Farms. <ref>{{cite news |first1=Ben |last1=Collins |first2=Kat |last2=Tenbarge |date=2022-09-02
|title=Anti-trans stalkers at Kiwi Farms are chasing one victim around the world. Their list of targets is growing. |work=NBC News |url=https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-keffals-anti-trans-rcna44834|access-date=2022-09-06}}</ref>

Holzklöppel (talk) 09:01, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Done! Tweedle (talk) 12:07, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Holzklöppel (talk) 10:57, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Extended protected edit request.

Can someone please add an inline citation of refenrence 35 and 36 on "In September 2022, Kiwi Farms' DDoS protection, provided by Cloudflare, was cancelled after users engaged in doxxing and swatting of transgender and pro-LGBTQ people." It probably needs it for verifiability. Ananinunenon (talk) 09:11, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I think it would be more reasonable to cite cloudflares official reasoning, that being increasing threats of off site violence. BJackJS talk 22:35, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

September 4

The article says that the website was back online "intermittently" on September 4 with the Russian-based service provider DDoS-Guard. There is no mention of September 4 in the source. This looks like an original research. Xmp512 (talk) 01:43, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I added that, it's from this AP article. It says "Sunday", which was Sep 4. Chillabit (talk) 01:53, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

exclusion from archive.org

see https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=List_of_websites_excluded_from_the_Wayback_Machine&diff=48927&oldid=48925 itsme (talk) 11:18, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I thought wikis weren't considered reliable sources. Dennis Dartman (talk) 12:37, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

You are quite correct that they're generally not, but I did not understand this to be a proposal for inclusion in the article--more of a general data point. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 12:42, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I read it the same way. It's particularly relevant as some respondents in the RfC have referenced the possibility of including an infobox link to an archived version of the site. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:47, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

You could probably just source it to wayback; it should probably say there that it’s been excluded if you look for it. Dronebogus (talk) 15:56, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Not just Internet Archive. At some point in the last twenty/thirty minutes, it seems that both Google's cache and the sentence extract they show next to the link have gone. The URL and thread/page name still appears, but not the rest of the content. No RS on this yet, but seems to be doing the rounds on Twitter. Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:14, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I saw it mentioned in gizmodo earlier, though that was a twitter cite. Still, the screenshot clearly shows this is an intentional exclusion and not “404 thing not found” Dronebogus (talk) 00:45, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Remove picture of Joshua Moon.

The source of the picture is from a youtube video which has been removed and is not available on the internet archive there fore making it unverifiable. Not to mention the potential copyright issues that comes with it. Ananinunenon (talk) 14:16, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

That's a Commons issue, which should be taken up by nominating File:KiwiJoshMoon.png for deletion if you feel it should be deleted. Primefac (talk) 14:18, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Just checked commons and someone has already marked it. Cheers. Ananinunenon (talk) 14:35, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Though the video itself is not archived, the actual licensing on the video itself is available on the archive. This clearly shows that it is under a CC license, which is non-revocable. There is no reason to suspect that the screenshot does not originate from the video in question. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:48, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I checked the archive and saw the licence, my bad. However the point still stands that it cannot be verified without the video. WP:BLP Clearly states to that such content must strictly adhere to verifiability. Ananinunenon (talk) 15:16, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

@Ananinunenon: There's nothing contentious about this picture. You might want to see WP:OI; it would be rather absurd to require images to be strictly verifiable, as many images of living people we use are not published in reliable sources. There's also File:Joshua Conner Moon.png that we could use, though I prefer the current image. Elli (talk | contribs) 15:22, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I see what you mean. File:Joshua Conner Moon.png should probably be used then, a picture of someone in such a contention article holding a bible may not be the best idea from a NPOV perspective. Ananinunenon (talk) 15:31, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• KiwiJoshMoon.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:37, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

"Revenge Porn"

I'm confused by the definition we're applying to the "leaking of explicit photos". In the forum, nothing private was leaked, simply a link to Keffals' former porn website was shared. To me that isn't revenge porn, rather finding someone's previous porn career and linking it. If she wanted the pictures and videos removed, she would have done so.

Before fiddling with the page though, I'd like to hear everyone else's opinions, as revenge porn tends to be the intimate leaking of photos or videos without the person's permission. Naihreloe (talk) 14:53, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

I'd say your issue in this instance is with the sources; The Hill uses the terminology explicitly and The Herald comes close enough that to my mind it is implied. Thus, for what it's worth, I think the wording should stay. Reasonable minds may differ, of course. Dumuzid (talk) 14:58, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I'm finding the sources are being quite off the facts for this, I've already had one issue with a source accusing KF of something when they didn't and another claiming KF is funded by Trump. It's a bit of a mess! Naihreloe (talk) 15:08, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

With all due respect, this doesn't strike me as a factual error. While I grant you that it is quite possible to disagree on whether the conduct falls into a strict definition of "revenge porn," at least two reliable sources thought so, and therefore I think it is appropriate for inclusion. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 15:22, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

There is no "if x wanted it to be removed, x would have done so" on the internet. Even we sometimes don't accept deleting an article just because the subject wanted it to be deleted. Besides, if someone posted their address somewhere online ten years ago and someone posted this address online in order to harass the former, I would call that doxxing and the "nothing private was leaked" is just a BS argument. 0xDeadbeef 15:07, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

true, i'm just saying the site is quite recent (2013 for the eldest stuff, last updated in 2020), which made me believe that it's something she's aware of and allowed to exist on the internet. Naihreloe (talk) 15:09, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree. I think there is a difference between you posting your address some place obscure online years ago and someone digging it up to harass you, versus producing pornography and selling it for public consumption. You could argue that it counts as revenge porn because now the author doesn't want it out there, but history (and Wikipedia) has many creators that later came to regret their work and tried to scrub it off the face of the planet. Of course, the pornography produced by Keffals' is still copyrighted, so Kiwi Farms' is still illegally using it. JungleEntity (talk) 22:03, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

It depends on how we're going to use the term. If it's in discussion here, then... maybe. If it's in the article, then probably not. There is strong evidence that they've obtained nudes and explicit videos from people who did not consent to them being shared/reposted to KiwiFarms. Not saying that they necessarily hacked anyone to get the images, just that they are using them in a way not intended by the creator. As far as them explicitly telling people to use them in trolling campaigns? That's where it gets shaky. They don't tell people to go out and target people, but at the same time they don't really discourage it in any effective way. They may tell someone that they should stop, but then still host images and information obtained by the person. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 15:54, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

The users on KF strongly and consistently discourage others from harassing or in any way even interacting with anyone they discuss on the website. - LilySophie (talk) 09:57, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Your take is not supported by the sources, LilySophie. --Pokelova (talk) 11:04, 11 September 2022 (UTC) Signature split from hatted comment below

Off-topic bickering. Discuss the content, not each other. Primefac (talk) 16:04, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

And that this is your first edit in several years after having previously been banned for a transphobic slur is concerning to say the least. --Pokelova (talk) 11:04, 11 September 2022 (UTC) What is concerning is your conduct, which is unbecoming of a Wikipedia editor. Personal attacks are forbidden, while assuming good faith is encouraged: see WP:NPA and WP:AGF. Please refrain from behaving this way further. Bad conduct aside, the fact I stated is supported by looking at the forum and the statements by ReaderofthePack are neither supported by sources nor by reality, hence why I decided to give some clarification to further the discussion of how to improve the article. - LilySophie (talk) 15:08, 12 September 2022 (UTC) Noting your past behaviour in specific relevant areas is not a personal attack. As for your "look at the forum" idea, that violates WP:PRIMARY and WP:OR. --Pokelova (talk) 15:30, 12 September 2022 (UTC) Calling someone "transphobic" is a personal attack. I ask you again to stop your personal attacks, or I will have to notify an administrator of your conduct. If you would like to familiarize yourself with the guidelines regarding conduct on Talk pages, you can see them here, including the rule to "comment on content, not on the contributor." Thank you. Discussing ways to improve articles does not fall under WP:PRIMARY - only including information in the article itself without it being taken from a reliable source would. - LilySophie (talk) 15:57, 12 September 2022 (UTC) Observing that you were banned for using a transphobic slur is not a "personal attack", I'm afraid. And your record of bans or blocks in relation to a relevant subject area is scarcely something you can suppress in this discussion by Karen-ing threatening to notify an administrator. Newimpartial (talk) 16:03, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Which makes me wonder whether we could get additional and better sources that more accurately reflect the situation. If anybody would like to help search, that would be wonderful. - LilySophie (talk) 16:12, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that the sources are fine, and accurately reflect the situation.

With respect to Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her and made death threats, that is what The Hill, New Zealand Herald, NBC News, and RNZ state. All of these are reliable sources, so the statement seems both verifiable and due.

With regards to users on KF strongly and consistently discourage others from harassing or in any way even interacting with anyone they discuss on the website that is demonstrably not true. The site was originally founded, under a different name, to stalk and harass an autistic webcomic artist Insider, 2021. The rename from the artist's initials to Kiwi Farms was in part due to the expansion to include the stalking and harassment of others. Harassment from users of the site has been the direct cause of at least three suicides; Chloe Sagal, Julie Terryberry, and Near (all sourced in the article). While current coverage naturally focuses on the campaign against the site, and the background that lead to its popularity, older coverage (USA Today, July 2021, Gizmodo, July 2021, Daily Dot, December 2020, Kotaku, January 2020, Daily Dot, August 2019, New York Intelligencer, July 2016) all note the site's dedication to harassment of its targets. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:15, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Each of these statements is easily proven to be incorrect and one of the people mentioned as having died isn't dead. That's why I think it would be great to find some better sources, so that the article can be nudged further towards reality and de-emphasize articles from the low-quality sources you mentioned. - LilySophie (talk) 20:05, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

one of the people mentioned as having died isn't dead -- that would be a fairly big deal for our article, can you substantiate that claim? Dumuzid (talk) 20:12, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Sure! No suicide was reported by japanese authorities for a person matching the description of the person known as "Near," not at the time when suicide was supposed to have happened, nor anywhere around that time. This is one example of a fact for which it would be neat to find a reliable source to include in the article. - LilySophie (talk) 20:27, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I doubt very much that anyone on this Talk page is interested in reading your original research, since we can't use it to decide about article content. Newimpartial (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

And you have personally canvassed all possible records in Japan? Dumuzid (talk) 20:46, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

They are a matter of public record and have been canvassed quite easily, since the individual in question is not originally from Japan, and the number of suicides of persons living inside Japan but not born in Japan is very small and therefore easy to keep track of. - LilySophie (talk) 20:58, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

So that's a "no"? Dumuzid (talk) 21:01, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

LilySophie, your personal opinions - even things that you "know" or believe to be true - are irrelevant to the determination of Wikipedia content. What matters is the facts reported in the best available sources. Where your personal reality dicerges from the consensus reality documented in RS, WP only cares about the latter. Newimpartial (talk) 20:13, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh, for sure. I'm not certain what you're talking about with that weird "consensus/personal reality" stuff, but it will be important to find good, reliable sources to include these facts in the article with. Thank you for reminding me! - LilySophie (talk) 20:27, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

In future you might want to lead with sourced statements, rather than unsubstantiated assertions of things you believe to be true. WP:OR statements aren't relevant to establishing article content, no matter how convinced you are of your own perspective. Newimpartial (talk) 20:29, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I should lead a discussion on how to potentially improve the article with sourced statements? That would be a bit redundant, wouldn't it? Since it would be easier to just insert the information and source into the article straight away in that case? - LilySophie (talk) 20:58, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Actually, that is the best practice when it comes to controversial content. That you regard this as absurd doesn't reflect very well on your competence in this domain. Newimpartial (talk) 21:33, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

@LilySophie: We've been through this before, see Talk:Kiwi Farms/Archive 2#Suicide of Near. Please also read our policy on verifiability. Either drop the stick or provide reliable sources for your claims. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 20:44, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

You have been through trying to find better sources before? That's good, but I think that there is always a chance to find higher quality sources, especially since this is a recent-ish event still, and the discussion you linked was 15 months ago, so I wouldn't be surprised if better ones have sprung up in the meantime, especially as new information about that person came to light! - LilySophie (talk) 20:58, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

The onus is on you to provide the sources. If you aren't gonna, all we are doing is beating a horse that's been dead for 15 months now. Isabelle ^🏳‍🌈 21:18, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

LilySophie, it is past time to drop the stick on this issue. DanielRigal (talk) 23:21, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

• As far as the site discouraging trolls goes, that's kind of a yes and no type of deal. The site does have rules posted about trolling. However what this usually translates to is that the planning takes place off site and the results posted to the site, possibly under the guise of a troll "sending" them the information so that it appears that it was done by a second party. Kind of a plausible deniability/skirting around the definition type of deal, I suppose. If there are RS about how the site itself defines trolling and their rules to avoid it being actively planned on the forums, that would be good to add to the article. Especially if there are RS where it's compared/contrasted to how the term is often defined by others.

When it comes to Near, keep the old discussions in mind. The list used as proof that the death didn't happen is kind of OR. The public wasn't made privvy to the proof provided (talking to the friend and the employer, as well as likely other proof), so for all we know the proof could have been very definitive. Wikipedia has to go by what RS cover. Now if there are multiple RS covering KF's claims that Near is still alive, then a sentence could be added to the article. However given the claim and the obvious controversy that such a statement brings with it, we'd need some strong sourcing (ie, news articles and the like) and the sentence itself very, very carefully written. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 12:30, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

• Basically, the site pays lip service to the whole "don't troll on the forums", not because they want to stop people from trolling but because they want to avoid the culpability that would come from outright planning taking place on the site. In other words, it's likely just a case of the trolls still using the site but avoiding using "I" statements to identify themselves as such or discussing any active plans in a visible manner. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 12:35, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

  I think your theory that the rules regarding trolling on the site only encourage plausible deniability and for the actual planning to be off-site feels very much like the same line of reasoning people are using to deny Near's death. You have no proof that that is actually the "meaning behind" that rule, only what I assume a line of reasoning, that being "Kiwi Farm's says trolling/targeted attacks aren't allowed, but they still go on, so that rule must only be for show", much like the reasoning that Near is still alive, as in, "People say Near is dead, but this one governmental document says no American died in Japan during these dates, so he must be alive." The site's administrators could very well want the targeted trolling to truly stop.

  I think it would be best to make either a note or add in a sentence stating that Kiwi Farm's administrators maintain that trolling isn't allowed on the site, with a citation linking to that exact rule (when the site comes back up of course). I think this would fall under WP:ABOUTSELF, but I'm not sure if the site now on the blacklist would affect this. JungleEntity (talk) 21:55, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

  Your analogy works up to a point, but I would respectfully submit that there's a big difference between the proposition that "X is forbidden, but X happens nonetheless," and "It is claim X happened, but I am unable to find evidence of X." That said, a brief note of whatever rules as may be is probably warranted, I should think. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 22:02, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

I think that's a too charitable intepretation of Moon and his conduct to be honest. Just read the NYM piece from 6 years ago, long before the current controversy, it's very clear that harassment (like actual harassment, not just writing disparagingly about people) is inseparable from the nature of the forum and how it operates, and always has been. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:32, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

• My analogy was more trying to equate the Near conspiracy with what I understood @ReaderofthePack's claim to be, that "It is claim X (Kiwi Farms' rule discouraging trolling is only for lip-service and that harassment campaigns are still planned off-site, and those results are then posted on the site in a dishonest manner), but I am unable to find evidence of X.

  @ReaderofthePack may very well be correct in that trolling campaigns are planned off-site, with only their results being posted on the site, but they have no evidence for this or the notion that the rule discouraging trolling was only put in place for plausible deniability. In the end, Kiwi Farms' administrators have no control of their users do off site, so it's useless to speculate that they are somehow encouraging this behavior. JungleEntity (talk) 22:15, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:AVOIDVICTIM in sources cited

In the spirit of trying to do no/less harm, I noticed that the title of one of the sources used (list-defined as "Insider-Colombo" in the wikitext) specifically names an individual that we are trying to avoid specifically identifying any further. The title itself is rather long and I think it could be cut short as "Kiwi Farms, the forum that has been linked to 3 suicides, was made to troll..." and ended with ellipses which avoids the name while still mostly preserving the title's meaning. Feels a bit like cherry picking/out of context but I think it might be the lesser evil. Thoughts? Jasonkwe (talk) (contribs) 18:05, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

The existence of Chris-chan's name is not something we need to hide, and thus we do not need to be bending over backwards to pretend she doesn't exist. Primefac (talk) 18:12, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Far right?

Is this even a useful descriptor? "Far right" has a bunch of implications to the average reader, few of which as far as I can tell from reliable sources really apply to Kiwi Farms, though I'm open to changing my mind. There's no doubt that Kiwi Farms users engange(d)s in extensive harassment against various individuals and its userbase is (was) virulently transphobic and ableist, but they had threads dedicated to mocking far right figures (as mentioned in Le Monde). There's only been a handful of sources out of dozens covering the recent keffals story describing it as "far right", with most others omitting a political descriptor, and simply describing it as a harassment/stalking forum, which I think is clearer. I would be open to something like "Some sources have described Kiwi Farms as far right", but at the moment I think just describing it in WikiVoice as "far right" is undue. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:48, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Having look at some more sources, Gizmodo says Streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti was targeted by the alt-right portions of Kiwi because of the fact she is transgender (which implies that not all of Kiwi Farms is far right) The Spinoff says While members of the forum have different ideologies (they’re not universally “alt-right”) they are all interested in gossiping and posting personal information of the figures they fixate on.. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:54, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

From MSNBC [15] Probably the best way to describe the site’s users is terminally online people from a wide range of political ideologies, from far right and anti-trans feminist types to edgy lefties obsessed with consuming internet drama.. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:14, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it's a useful add-on in the lead. To what I know about the forum, The Spinoff is correct and different sections of the forum do tend towards different ideologies and targets. Null himself is probably far-right for what it's worth, just see the original parent company name I added to the article very recently. If RS describe him as such that would be informative to add, though not necessarily in the lead section.

Null has even suggested in the past only making the parts of the forum harassing right-wing individuals publicly visible in an attempt to get liberals off their back. Nick Fuentes & Tim Gionet are an example of right-wing pundits the forum has had long-running feuds with. That has attracted left-wing and liberal people to use the portion of the site dedicated to harassing those specific figures. Chillabit (talk) 22:15, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Whether there were some less extremist parts of the Kiki Farm ecosystem is like arguing that some Nazis were slightly less bad than other Nazis, in the end it is largely academic. If the far-right antics of some of its members is what gains the most notoriety and the most coverage in reliable sources, then I'm not going to be too concerned with the broad-brush approach of saying "Kiwi Farms is a far-right forum". Zaathras (talk) 22:16, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

What Zaathras said. And after a quick search, I am seeing it in NBC News, Vice, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, Crikey, and Gizmodo Australia. Strikes me as enough for Wikivoice, but reasonable minds may differ. Happy Friday to one and all. Dumuzid (talk) 22:26, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Half of the sources you linked do not say that it is far-right. I imagine you just did a google search for "Kiwi farms far-right" and didn't look at any of the sources you got as results? NBC News didn't say that, The Guardian said it only in the subhead (which is unusable; see WP:HEADLINE), Gizmodo Australia doesn't say it (and is probably a bad source anyway), and Crikey is a small, clickbaity, Australian commentary magazine; I doubt they're usable here. Endwise (talk) 22:37, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

NBC News implied it in the phrase trolls from Kiwi Farms and 4chan — with support from other far-right influencers, which struck me as close enough; The Guardian Gizmodo says Other far-right, often hate and conspiracy-filled websites, have faced similar fates in recent years, too — getting booted from mainstream hosting, only to reemerge elsewhere. Most recently, Kiwi Farms, an offshoot of 4chan and hate speech hotbed.... My apologies for thinking you might look at context. Dumuzid (talk) 22:42, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Are Kiwi Farms and 4chan "influencers"? I don't think that's what NBC News meant. The second quote (which is from Gizmodo Australia btw) is arguable, but to call something or someone "far-right" in Wikipedia's voice I don't think we should be using sources which one could argue imply they are far-right; we should be using sources which state it. Endwise (talk) 22:48, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

And you are perfectly entitled to your views. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 22:53, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Other options for description: "The forum is most notable for its far-right activity, though the forum is not universally far-right", or "The forum is most notable for its far-right activity" more briefly. I wouldn't dispute that is what they are best known for, but the article below the lead should be as nuanced as the RS covering it. Chillabit (talk) 22:34, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

As I said in my edit summary, we clearly have RS identifying the site as a fae-righr forum. Do any dispute this? Newimpartial (talk) 22:31, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

It's not, as I understand it, an issue as to whether there are reliable sources that call it far-right. The decision is whether it is WP:DUE to call it a far-right forum in the first sentence, given that the far-right descriptor is present only in recent sources (WP:RECENTISM), and that there are other recent sources that do not call it far-right. Somers-all-the-time (talk) 23:01, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Some sources Hemiauchenia linked above do. But I think the relevant question here should be whether sources generally call them "far-right", not how many sources there are which explicitly dispute it. For some OR context, while most of the userbase and Null himself is far-right, because the forum targets far-right figures like Ethan Ralph and Nick Fuentes, it can attract people who dislike their politics (i.e. people who are to the left of them), some TERF-type people are attracted to the forum because of the anti-trans stuff, and it also has sections for fatphobic harassment, which tends to attract less political fatphobes (e.g. lolcow.farm types). But this is largely besides the point. Endwise (talk) 23:09, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

• There's clearly sufficient sourcing to say it in the article voice. In addition to the above, [16] says: Joshua Conner Moon operates a neo-Nazi white supremacist hate group and cyberbullying website that targets disabled people, especially people with autism, Jews, Muslims, black people, Hispanics, transgendered, vulnerable people, ... Here is another source describing it as far-right specifically. --Aquillion (talk) 23:00, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Jews, blacks and hispanics?

I am at my 3RR, so I won't revert again, but I strongly disagree with @Aquillion:'s recent additions, especially the claim that Kiwi Farms specifically targets jews, blacks and hispanics. Out of the sources, the arxiv preprint [17] and SITES paper [18] says nothing on the topic, and again covers familiar territory from other sources about Kiwi Farms's harassment of transgender and disabled people. The main book on which the claim is based Perspectives on the Information Society is published by The Crocels Press, an extremely obscure Welsh publisher with no reputation for fact-checking or accuracy, essentially self-published imo. I don't see how it can be considered a reliable source in this instance. Lev Topor's journal article [19] only says Another site is Kiwi Farms, where a simple search of the term “Jews” will bring up various antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Nothing in that sentence explicity states that Kiwi Farms users specifically target jews. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:22, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Just to be clear on the scope of the dispute, you no longer object to stating that they target transgender people or neuroatypical people, yes? You say that the sources talk about familiar territory from other sources about Kiwi Farms's harassment of transgender and disabled people, but prior to the sentence I added we did not cover that aspect (ie. the fact that the site specifically targets those groups) anywhere in the article. Can I take it from this that you support the parts of my addition related to those (and perhaps even mentioning at least those aspects more prominently?) Beyond that, I disagree that Crocels Press would qualify as self-published; you cannot dismiss publishers simply because they are Welsh - self-published has a specific meaning, you have to show that they publish things indiscriminately. But the paper in question was published academically anyway as well, in the International Conferences on Internet Technologies & Society, so I'll cite it to that instead. Beyond that, in context - where the author is listing antisemitic and racist websites- the article by Lev Topor clearly supports the fact that they target Jews. Certainly we could tweak or reword parts of it (if you think that the summary of a source is inaccurate but that the source itself is usable, you could propose a better wording to eg. summarize Topor's article as you see it.) But at the very least removing the entire sentence strikes me as out of line; there is, as you acknowledge, extensive sourcing discussing the site's primary types of targets, and we previously didn't cover that aspect at all. If you have better sources that say different things then of course we could use those instead, but these aren't so low-quality as to justify removing a single sentence in the body, at the very least. We can remove the preprint if you want, since it's not the sole source for anything. Does that address your core objections? (I think we might even want to consider mentioning the targeting of transgender, disabled, and neuroatypical people in the lead, since that has the strongest sourcing, seems like a major part of the site's notability, and nothing could reasonably be construed as disagreeing with it, but that's a separate discussion - body first.) --Aquillion (talk) 23:34, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

When did I ever object to stating that they target transgender or disabled people? That has already been in the article for a while, and I've not objected to it at all. I'm not an apologist for Kiwi Farms, believe me. Requiring quality sources is not whitewashing or apologism. I don't see how Lev Topor in any way explicitly indicates that they target jews, only that at least some kiwifarms users are antisemitic. I'm not disputing Crocels Press because it's Welsh, obviously. I'm disputing it because it's extremely obscure and seems to have no reputation within the field of social science. What makes it ultimately different from a vanity press? The description of Kiwi Farms in the book as a "neo-Nazi white supremacist hate group... website" contradicts those given by other sources. Who is the author of that particular chapter Ashu M.G. Solo? Does he have any scholarly reputation? Going through his scholar results, he appears to be an obscure independent scholar who primarily publishes about computer science. The article already has much better sourcing than this. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:05, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Solo publishes about social and computer science. Internet harassment sits at the intersection of these things. In any case, I've demonstrated that it was a peer-reviewed paper, so I don't think it's reasonable to argue that a single sentence summarizing it is WP:UNDUE. Your personal disagreement with the author's conclusions doesn't allow you to dismiss it as a source; clearly there are large numbers of high-quality sources describing the site as far-right; there are other sources with other descriptions, but few sources that completely disagree. Likewise, saying that the site contains threads targeting those people is not the same as saying that its focus is to target them, which is what numerous other sources say and which wasn't currently in the article. -Aquillion (talk) 00:17, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

The quote you attributed to the ref in this edit isn't in the source, assuming this is the source. Somers-all-the-time (talk) 00:12, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

That... is odd. That version doesn't contain the case studies section where it appears. I'll revert to the previous ref for now, to be safe, and look into it. --Aquillion (talk) 00:27, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

At a glance, these are two different paper versions. It looks like it was originally a conference paper presented in 2020 (uploaded to ResearchGate in February 2020), and it was later edited (rather heavily I think), then the edited version was published to a journal in 2021 (published online 2022). Mention of Jews/Hispanics etc. is on p. 95 in the ResearchGate version. Looks like that was trimmed and just transgender & disabled people were given as examples in the later article. Chillabit (talk) 00:46, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

If that's the case then it's definitely undue. Conference abstracts are not peer reviewed and are generally subject to little to no editorial oversight. The fact that the claim was removed after peer view implies that the reviewers found the claim to be innaccurate, so I see absolutely no reason to include this at all. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:34, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Also, Johnathan Bishop Jonathanbishop (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) the founder and editor of The Crocels Press, is banned from Wikipedia for sockpuppetry, which relates to this COIN thread Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard/Archive_106#Character_theory_(media) and various threads linked to therein. This documents various issues, including having previously falsely claimed a relationship with Swansea University. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:52, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Conference abstracts are not peer reviewed and are generally subject to little to no editorial oversight. That is not true for the International Conferences on: Internet Technologies & Society and Sustainability, nor most computer science related conferences in general. Per that conference's call for paper's page (2022 conference, 2020 conference) submissions to it are subject to blind peer-review. As such I do not think we can make any meaningful conclusion on our own as to why the content was removed between the original form of the paper at the 2020 conference, and the later form of it in the 2022 post-conference journal. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:04, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

If COMSCI conferences are subject to significant peer review, why did so many nonsense SciGen conference papers get published? Just because it was ostensibly "peer reviewed" doesn't mean that the peer review was good or thorough. There's good reason to think the peer review of an academic journal, while not perfect, is signficantly stronger than that of conference. Again, my main issue is the characterisation of Kiwi Farms in the conference abstract is at odds with those given in other RS (who do not describe it as Neo Nazi or white supremacist), the author is an obscure independent scholar with no evidence of an academic background their website is certainly something. If Kiwi Farms was really specifically targeting black and hispanic people, why then did none of the news coverage or any other academic papers covering the topic mention it? Surely if it was true it would be newsworthy and noteworthy to include? And if it was true, why was it then omitted from the revised version of the published paper? Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:36, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

Academic peer review has it's fair share of problems, there are both predatory journals and conferences, whose sole purpose for being is to publish less than reputable research. However unless I've missed something, that does not appear to be the case here.

For your first two questions, current news coverage seems to have focused almost entirely on the harassment that lead to the campaign involving Keffals, and the aftermath from that. Within that narrative, harassment of non-trans and/or non-autistic individuals has been largely generalised. Eg, see statement by Liz Fong-Jones, which is summarised as forum users typically target people who are financially precarious. Meanwhile older news coverage seems to have focused primarily on the harassment of one individual, though again with generalised notations of attacks on minorities. As such I don't know if I would characterise Solo's work, in its longer form, as at odds with what other reliable sources have said. I would perhaps instead say that it is going into more detail about other areas that have previously been generalised.

For your last question, I don't think any of us can provide an answer to that without contacting the author. And I also don't think we should engage in speculation for why it was removed in lack of such clarity. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:24, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

The Forward has an article calling the site antisemitic recently: https://forward.com/news/517780/kiwi-farms-trolling-website-antisemitism-transgender-harass-4chan/ Chillabit (talk) 07:23, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

My issue was never with calling the site's content antisemitic, it was specifically going from Lev Topor saying that the site had antisemitic content to saying that it specifically targeted jews, which is not what the source material said. The Forward gives a much more specific example of Kiwi Farms targeting Jews with the harassment of transgender Jewish convert Yonah Gerber. This is in my opinion worthwhile and due to include. There's also some discussion of Moon's antisemitism and antisemitic harassment on twitter, but that's maybe better included in the "History" section. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:29, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

"Various ideologies"

This line doesn't reflect the content of its sources or mainstream coverage of the subject: Users hold various ideologies; Katelyn Burns, who had been targeted by the site, described its audience as "terminally online people from a wide range of political ideologies, from far right and anti-trans feminist types to edgy lefties obsessed with consuming internet drama".

The full quote from Burns is: "Of particular interest to many of the site’s users have been trans people, who they have labeled “troons,” a derogatory portmanteau of “tranny” and “goon.” Probably the best way to describe the site’s users is terminally online people from a wide range of political ideologies, from far right and anti-trans feminist types to edgy lefties obsessed with consuming internet drama."

And the other source mentions: "Since its beginnings more than a decade ago, Kiwi Farms has become a community focused on harassing and doxxing online individuals perceived as deviant, especially transgender people and people with mental illnesses."

The sentence portrays Kiwi Farms' user base as diverse or inclusive when mainstream sources do not describe it that way: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/05/cloudflare_emergency_decision/ "Cloudflare stops services to 'revolting' far right hate site" Rjjiii (talk) 22:31, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

"having a range of ideological viewpoints" doesn't mean or imply "inclusive". Transphobia isn't necessarily a "far-right" postion. It wouldn't be accurate to describe "gender critical" feminists as far right, given that they have little else in common with people who that label is usually applied to. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:54, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

I've removed the "varying ideologies" bit in favour of just the Burns quote. Hope that resolves the issue. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:55, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Relevance of nationality

In recent edit by User:Elli, the reference to American was removed. Given that the owner's nationality is American, and he has characterised the site as operating under American law and thus enjoying First Amendment protections to engage in "offensive" but allegedly legal speech, and having named his hosting company "1776 Solutions" and basing it out of the US (Wyoming company registration, Nevada hosting location), it seems to my (admitted conflict-of-interested) eyes to be highly relevant information where it's hosted and what country's laws it claims the protections of. Lizthegrey (talk) 20:08, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm fine with including that detail in the article, but it's not relevant enough to be in the short description. Short descriptions aren't meant to contain encyclopedic content, they are meant to be a very concise explanation of the article's scope, and the nationality of the site here is an encyclopedic detail. Elli (talk | contribs) 20:14, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Most of what Lizthegrey describes is not currently in the article. If reliable sources highlight those facts, then a summary of those sources should be added to the body. If it turns out it's an important enough set of facts, we should summarize the body content in the lead and possibly in the short description too. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 20:53, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

This paper discussing why New Zealand was unsuccessful in persuading US authorities to act ("The United States cited support for the summit, but claimed to be constrained by the First Amendment") might be helpful, along with its sources list ([20] [21] [22], and Citron, Danielle Keats. 2014. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.). See also this Wired article and this CJR article. Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding sources for Moon himself citing the First Amendment anywhere reliable aside from his own forums, since he responds to journalists and law enforcement (where he might be quoted) with expletives rather than cogent arguments. Lizthegrey (talk) 21:41, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I think adding that NZ authorities contacted US authorities, and that the US said they were constrained by the first amendment would be relevant to the Christchurch Shooting section. However, I also think mentioning that it's an American site should be in either the history section or in the lead. Other sites like Google (it's a tech conglomerate but still) and Something Awful both have "American" in their leads. JungleEntity (talk) 22:17, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Regarding the lack of sources of Null citing the First Amendment, he only cites it in response to takedown requests that violate his (admittedly liberal) view of fair use and criticism. Generally, though, he makes an effort to avoid using the First Amendment to defend the site's behavior. To quote a recent interview with Null on the Rekieta Law youtube channel, "People online mistake 'First Amendment' with 'Right to say the N-word and derail conversations.' We're not a free speech site, we just try to be hands-off as long as laws aren't being broken."

As for Null's response to journalists, he has stated publicly on his YouTube/iTunes podcast that he's been refusing to respond to recent inquiries due to family issues and the (allegedly) inflamatory/leading questions being asked by reporters. As for law enforcement, he has an annoying stance that without a court order in the US, he only needs to comply with US-based law enforcement. To give him a shred of credit, he has gone to US law enforcement on several occasions regarding Christine Chandler, Ethan Ralph, DarkSydePhil, and other "lolcows" that were either breaking the law or were victims of other people breaking the law. BasicSID (talk) 07:15, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Reference to MTG swatter

Requesting that the sentence

On August 24, 2022, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated in an interview with NewsMax that she was swatted twice by a KiwiFarms user who identified themselves as "AltisticRight".

Be replaced with

On August 24, 2022, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated in an interview with NewsMax that she was swatted twice by an individual claiming to be Kiwifarms moderator "AltisticRight".

At the moment it's unclear who was behind the swat call. According to news sources discussing the call, the individual admitted in the call that they were swatting MTG due to her anti-trans stances. [Source 1] [Source 2]

Although the site is still down still, it's worth noting that "AltisticRight" has denied involvement on Kiwifarms and other message boards, citing the facts that they've never engaged in discussing Representative Greene and that there was very little discussion regarding her on the site at all. BasicSID (talk) 05:27, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

 Comment: The WGHP/Fox 8 source in the article stated that "while the caller allegedly told the police that their swatting was a result of Greene’s anti-transgender beliefs and policies, they also allegedly told police they were a KiwiFarms user, two things that seem in conflict with one another." Ignoring the Business Insider source, which mentioned the username "AltisticRight", there is no given source of AltisticRight's denial. Regardless, WP:BLPCRIME might apply. LightNightLights ^(talk) 07:17, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

I've updated the article with BasicSID's proposed wording. If sources are skeptical that the swatter actually was a Kiwi Farms user (and, to be fair, the author has a point that it doesn't seem to make much sense to swat MTG for being anti-trans and also be a Kiwi Farms moderator), our wording should reflect that skepticism. Endwise (talk) 08:27, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

That's a reasonable rationale. I don't oppose the "Kiwi Farms user" to "individual" wording change; I just wanted to qualify BasicSID's statement that "the individual [...] [swatted] MTG due to her anti-trans stances" which they used as edit-request rationale. LightNightLights ^(talk) 10:19, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

School shooter linked to the forum

How isn’t this mentioned? There is already an article on the incident, and the perpetrator was a poster on the website as well as affiliates.

Sources:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/08/evidence-new-mexico-school-shooter’s-involvement-racist-alt-right-overwhelming

https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/atchison_online_1.0.pdf

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-mexico-school-shooter-had-secret-life-on-pro-trump-white-supremacy-sites

https://viralnova.com/william-atchison/

https://www.daily-times.com/story/news/crime/2018/04/17/aztec-high-school-shooting-investigation-william-atchison/513013002/ Screendeemer (talk) 11:32, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Without having looked through any but the first link, it's probably because "visiting a website" doesn't really mean "was heavily influenced by" or "posted their manifesto on"; just because a nutjob visits a website does not mean we need to include that nutjob on the website's article (unless, as previously mentioned, it was the website they used). Primefac (talk) 12:21, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

The sources tend to just list a bunch of websites, e.g.: Atchison also allegedly frequented the Daily Stormer, the racist alt-right’s most notorious website, in addition to other known online communities favored by the alt-right, such as EncyclopediaDramatica, Kiwi Farms, 4chan and various videogame forums. If all there is is a list of such websites, and Kiwi Farms is among them, there's not really much to say about that on this article IMO. It makes sense for there to be a line listing all those websites over at Aztec High School shooting (which at a glance there is), but there's nothing meaningful you can say about it here, I think. Endwise (talk) 12:45, 22 September 2022 (UTC)