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Regarding AfD tag on Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories (section)

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Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
List of Tor hidden services (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Seems to fail WP:GNG, if not falling foul of WP:NOTDIR and WP:NOTGUIDE and I'm sure we're not here to guide people through the Tor network. Also including List of Tor hidden services as whilst they exist, we cant WP:RS them tutterMouse (talk) 14:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:10, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:10, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep both preferably(or else delete both).
    • First of all, the two articles are very similar and should perhaps be merged.
    • The first is supposed to be a list of primary sources (reputable sites on the Tor network that index other reputable sites).
      • WP:N compliance. When the right secondary sources are added, this article easily complies with WP:N.
        • The Hidden Wiki has been the subject of a great deal of news attention in the past, mainly because of attention related to the FBI shutdown and its reopening under a different server. While the article doesn't mention this, this is not a criterion for deleting the article but rather for improving it. By mentioning this, it easily complies with notability guidelines.
        • The other sites listed are competitors to the Hidden Wiki and many of them have been around for a long time, for instance, TorDIR and probably have received millions of hits from Tor users.
          • These hits in general, categorically cannot be tracked by secondary sources, this is the point of the Tor protocol after all, if there were reliable secondary sources it would mean Tor was defective at anonymizing traffic to hidden services.
          • So we must either use primary sources or else we effectively have banned all discussion of Tor sites from Wikipedia altogether. But the only reliable primary sources about these sites, are the sites themselves.
          • See this part of WP:RS, which explicitly permits these (self-published) primary sources to be used as sources about themselves, which they are, in this case, because the only claim made about them is that they are hidden service directories, no claim is made that they are 100% reliable, which would indeed need a secondary source to confirm.
        • Their notability thus comes from
          • the fact that they are cited with good feedback in other primary sources on Tor, including those on this list, that have already established their reliability by the consensus of Tor users;
          • by virtue of their reliability (which has not been shown, and is not asserted in the article, but is theoretically verifiable); a hidden service directory with 100% verifiably reliable links does not exist, and if it did, would be notable by virtue of that fact alone;
          • and by the reasons given below right here:
      • WP:RS compliance. I address the question of who is to say which Tor sources are reliable?
        • As indicated above, few or no reliable secondary sources exist to verify the reliability of Tor hidden services. Even if there were, for the reasons given above, there would be no way to verify their claims anyway.
        • Once again, WP:RS permits self-published or unverified sources to be used in articles explicitly about (lists of) themselves. The article does not say that they are reliable, only things like, whether they are moderated or unmoderated, which one can see by logging into the site; the article is not asserting whether or not these moderators are reliable.
        • Thus reliability of a hidden service directory cannot generally be asserted in a Wikipedia article, and it is not being asserted in this article.
        • Reliability of these sites can only be established by logging into them and checking out their links and buying goods and services from them, which are in many cases illegal, and therefore could not be done by any secondary source whose authors dislike spending long sentences in prison for narcotics trafficking, unregistered arms possession, stolen identities, child porn, and so on.
          • But this doesn't matter, because these primary sources are not being cited in other articles, except other articles about these sites themselves, with the exception of the second article by Rezonansowy (talk • contribs).
        • Hence the only claims made that require their reliability to be verifiable are
          • a) that they are notable
            • which can be established in the case of the Hidden Wiki by many secondary sources (media and press, just Google it)
            • and in the case of the other services like TORDIR by polling Wikipedia editors who use Tor, and asking about their notability. Just because such a poll has not been carried out by a secondary source does not mean that it cannot be carried out; that their notability is verifiable and has been verified, are two different claims; the former is sufficient; the latter is impossible.
              • As a Wikipedia user who uses Tor, I hold that the notability of the sites in this list are verifiable even if not verified by secondary sources which cannot exist (any such claim, even if made by a reliable secondary source, would be necessarily unverifiable, similar to reliable journalists reporting conversations with anonymous sources which don't reveal any information to prove the conversation ever took place.)
              • My claim that these sources are notable is not excluded as original research under WP:NOR; while I claim that my views on notability reflect the consensus of the Tor community, this consensus can also be obtained and verified by spending enough time on the Internet and actually asking users if these sites are notable enough to be listed; evidence you can obtain in a day by browsing forums is not original enough to be original research, but rather should be regarded as a primary source.
          • b) in the second article, List of Tor hidden services. This article is entirely unsourced without the primary sources listed in the first article, and assumes that they are reliable enough to provide the names of the hidden services notable enough to be listed in the second article.
      • Regarding this being a guide-- is not a reason to delete it, because it's not just a guide, it can easily be made encyclopedic by adding information that "also describe[s] the site[s] in an encyclopedic manner, offering detail on [websites'] achievements, impact or historical significance" (WP:NOT), which could be done pretty easily. Regrettably I didn't fill all that in when I made my contributions.
  • In short, those who want to delete either article should, instead, work harder on finding reliable sources about Tor and ways in which they can be verified in a manner acceptable to the Wikipedia community; this is not impossible, just maybe somewhat difficult, so these articles should have "requires improvement" warnings at the top for these reasons, but are not candidates for deletion.

I am sorry to take up your time with such a long entry but I have now been accused of vandalism and spamming several times now in the comments made by Rezonansowy (talk • contribs), for the crime of adding sources to the article he/she wrote, which, as I say above, would otherwise be entirely without sources. This accusation was made in the process of summarily reverting my edits with comments like "repeated vandalism" and "removed spam" (when the "spam" was the article's only source) without any explanation on either my talk page or the article's talk page, and attempting to have the page protected in order to prevent me from adding any more sources or links. (Luckily this request was denied by the administrators.)

This is ostensibly because some of these sources/links were from the Tor network itself, when in fact they qualify under WP:RS as primary sources, for the reasons I gave above (they may be self-published or unreliable, but they're only used as sources about themselves and about the hidden sites in the second article).

I feel the need to defend myself, because I am not a regular contributor to Wikipedia (but am a regular user of Tor) and these are the only few contributions I've made recently. I don't want my first contribution to Wikipedia in a long time to be labelled that way. If it is found not to be compliant with WP:RS or WP:N, I will be very disappointed, because the article certainly will improve the usefulness of Wikipedia as a reliable tertiary source on Tor (currently the only tertiary sources are wikis that are also primary sources, and I wanted to change that by making Wikipedia one of the few reliable third-party sources about Tor), and was certainly made in good faith to contribute to Wikipedia, contrary to the charges of "spamming" and "vandalism" made against me.

I should also mention that this article was already considered for (speedy) deletion when it was created a few days ago and the request was retracted based on comments made on the talk page, though they didn't specifically discuss compliance with Wikipedia guidelines.

From the above discussion, it is evident that several fellow contributors to Wikipedia believe that Tor should never be used as a source, even about itself, but I argue that this would be equivalent to banning all discussion of Tor from Wikipedia, since secondary sources do not exist and could inherently never be verifiable if they did; as an advocate of making Tor a public commodity (as well as an advocate of Wikipedia) I believe that it is very important that Tor be accepted as a source sometimes, since Tor hidden services are sometimes the only reliable sources about each other, and without major, reliable tertiary sources, especially Wikipedia, accepting this, the Tor network will be forever veiled in obscurity, especially to new users, with no reliable and publicly available way to navigate it. We don't want the only reliable sources on Tor to be the same sites that index scams, phishing/malware sites, and child porn. Wikipedia editors could help this situation if they're willing to accept that using Tor cautiously as a primary source can, if done properly, lead to reliable and verifiable information.

Sgutkind (talk) 09:18, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Editing

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Comments from Mercurywoodrose (talk) 04:28, 13 November 2013 (UTC) on my edits to Template:Tor hidden services

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I reverted your edits to the template as entirely inappropriate for a navigational box, as consensus has established here. Please try to understand what WP is. we dont give advice. we CANNOT afford to be held responsible for advice given here, so we dont post any advice or "how to"s. its an encyclopedia, summary articles on subjects, not official, or even personal, statements or research on subjects. Wikis started as discussion pages associated with finished products. WP IS the finished product. information here should be from reliable third party sources, and noncontroversial info from primary sources. I would encourage you to write a Wikibook on the subject. Mercurywoodrose (talk) 04:28, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My response

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I respectfully disagree that the edits were inappropriate, they were posted in an attempt to make Wikipedia a more comprehensive source about sites on the Tor network. However, I already gave all the arguments for my position on this talk page.

Seeing that the community of editors still disagrees on their compliance with Wikipedia's policies, I will most likely publish them elsewhere, indeed in places such as Wikibooks.

I will probably want to link to that Wikibook from these Wikipedia pages, I hope this is not asking too much, seeing as no Wikimedia sources exist on the subject (or any sources that are even partially reliable and community-edited, except for the Torhost.net website, a wiki which I started myself and wanted to use as one [among many] of the primary sources here, not as spam, but as a way of giving the public access to a source on Tor hidden services which is based on many days of editing and months of learning about and indexing reliable Tor hidden services--certainly not "original" enough to be original research, since many people know as much as me about this and can verify the reliability of my claims). I make no attempt to delude readers--I state at the outset that no source, primary or secondary, that talks about Tor hidden services and their reputations, can be totally reliable or verifiable.

Please consider contributing to that Wikibook (once I start it) or to the Torhost.net wiki, if you are interested in my goal of making a reliable index of Tor hidden services available to the public--or even consider starting your own website, which I would link to from both of these places if reliable and in accordance with these goals.

Sgutkind (talk) 01:37, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding AfD tag on Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories (section) --- 2nd response

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Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories

[edit]
Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
List of Tor hidden services (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Seems to fail WP:GNG, if not falling foul of WP:NOTDIR and WP:NOTGUIDE and I'm sure we're not here to guide people through the Tor network. Also including List of Tor hidden services as whilst they exist, we cant WP:RS them tutterMouse (talk) 14:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:10, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:10, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep both preferably (or else delete both).
    • I posted a very long response to defend my contributions to this page (Index of hidden wikis and Tor hidden service directories), on my talk page.
      • and also to defend my contributions to List of Tor hidden services, which were summarily reverted by Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) (who then, several times, accused me of "vandalism" and then "spamming", with no explanation on the talk page at all, my talk page, or on any talk page, when in fact all I was doing was adding sources to content that was unsourced. I feel the need to defend myself to some extent, because these are serious accusations.)
    • But mainly I want to defend the idea that it can, sometimes be acceptable to use Tor sources as sources about themselves, and to write articles about Tor hidden services that can be held to be notable by consensus of the Tor community, even when only primary (and no secondary) reliable sources can confirm this.
    • :: Sgutkind (talk) 09:40, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Response: I see that you don't understand which Wikipedia is and which not. Please reread WP:NOTDIRECTORY, WP:NOTGUIDE and WP:NOTMANUAL. I've copied your work to my computer, maybe a part of your contribs can be reused. Don't blame me for it, I like Tor, but your edits are completely unencyclopedic and and can not be part of Wikipedia in this shape. Not Wikipedia, but maybe WP:Wikibooks, Tor needs a guide and Wikibooks is place for books, guides. But before you edit, please read its guidelines. You have good intentions and all Wikimedia projects need people like you, but you have only to know how to do it. In the end, please. Don't judge an article which he drove to deletion candidacy. --Rezonansowy (talk • contribs) 11:14, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Response: I respect your disagreement, I appreciate you now have good faith understand my intentions are not to post spam but to add primary sources to Wikipedia that can say something reliable about Tor. Like I said, I'm familiar with Tor but less so with Wikipedia, perhaps I am not familiar enough with what qualifies as an article. But it needs to belong somewhere because otherwise the other article you started (List of Tor hidden services) would have no sources to draw from (i.e. & no way to prove the sites exist, their place in Tor, reliability for Tor users, notability, etc.) whether primary or secondary
      • I still think that arguably the article doesn't have to be a guide/directory/manual and can be made encyclopedic.
      • I still think that primary sources from Tor can sometimes satisfy WP:N and WP:RS as well as WP:NOT
      • I still think that Wikipedia would be missing something by not including this article indexing the most reliable (not 100% reliable primary sources on Tor, it has to be said somewhere
      • It's not a bad thing to move it to Wikibooks as a guide/manual. But it still has to be somewhere or else Wikipedia and other places will have basically no sources to draw from to talk about Tor.
        • If it's on a Wikimedia project (not just my own website) it can probably be made reputable enough to be a secondary source for Wikipedia, because people can verify that the primary sources I list are accepted by the community, and not just people like me.
        • If that works and is acceptable for other people, then the other articles about hidden services (The Hidden Wiki, Silk Road, etc.) will have primary sources to draw from too, we can all contribute URLs of the sites in List of Tor hidden services to the index.
        • That way those articles will have both primary sources, from the URLs, and a secondary source (from the index/guide, whether it's in Wikipedia or Wikibooks). Whereas right now List of Tor hidden services and its sub-articles don't have any sources that they can list.
          • Of course they do have primary sources indeed, on Tor, ...but,
          • I guess the problem is that, these can't appear on a list of sources because of these policies, because currently they don't have any secondary sources establishing that they are the real primary sources, with the criteria like reliability/notability/etc., so we don't know anything for sure except that they exist.
        • I appreciate that any of you might disagree with me, as long as there's a constructive way to solve this problem, by placing the information somewhere that's reliable and community property, so that information won't be wiped out from the public Internet. --Sgutkind (talk) 21:42, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete The former is written like a how-to guide; you should not use "you" when writing a Wikipedia article. The former is a paltry "list" that barely has any content. Neither shows any evidence of reputable sourcing or notability. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 21:41, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete both (one is unsalvageable, the other is a list that can easily fit into the main article on tor), its just going to continue to attract SPA editors who want to turn our articles and templates on tor and other hidden services into guides or indexes for using these services. they can do this on their own damn website. You kids get OFF my lawn! this whole topic needs to be carefully monitored so that the SPAs dont ruin their encyclopedic nature. all we need is the main article. i really dont think we need the template either, and its a target for inappropriate editing as well. and if i need to say it, i will: this is NOT a diatribe against the subject. i really dont even care. i just want the articles to be NPOV and based on reliable sources. maybe they could write a wikibook on it.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 04:20, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

    • I indeed have "my own damn website", LOL, (and have made use of it in making contributions to these articles); it is one (among many) of the primary sources on the Tor network you can consider (and the only one which I personally have verified or know is reliable or verifiable), but alas:

      Seriously: If the Wikipedia editor community at large, thinks that having a list of (semi-)reliable sources about Tor, is against Wikipedia policy (or against the policy of being encyclopedic in general), then it might as well be deleted. We can indeed write a Wikibook about it, I hope nobody will find it objectionable if we link to the Wikibook from the Wikipedia articles that need it as a source.

      The rest of my response is long and so I put it on my talk page, I accept why people might want to delete these articles, so look on my talk page only if you care to.

      Here it is:

      I think it will leave Wikipedia incomplete, and disadvantage the public at large, not to have an index of Tor directories that ensures reliability and omits child porn. But, to some extent, I understand your arguments: no primary, or even secondary or tertiary, sources, whether they themselves reside on Tor or not, can be fully reliable and verifiable, or even verifiably notable. I respect the effort to keep a high standard on the sources Wikipedia uses. It's just that this will come at the expense of useful and valuable content. It may not be a diatribe against the subject, but it will, in effect, categorically exclude anything reliable about Tor from the content of Wikipedia.

      So, if you feel this way, help me write a Wikibook on an index of Tor hidden services, or contribute to my own wiki at Torhost.net. I did cite it as one source (among many sources and possible sources), but this came as the result of months of "testing" (if you know what I mean...) a variety of Tor hidden services...; if you consider this to be "original research" or unencyclopedic, which it may (or may not) be, or to be (at the very worst) spam done solely in the interest of self-promotion, consider that I'd encourage you, and be happy to help you start, your own wiki on the subject; if everyone who feels this way did this, a reliable consensus about Tor hidden services would indeed eventually (and soon) be reached. Remember that the original Encyclopedia in Enlightenment France, came from a bunch of radicals who were considered crackpots by the respected sources of the regime. I personally believe a much higher standard can be reached when wikis are open to all contributors and all sources available on the Internet; if Wikipedia aims to exclude Tor primary sources, it may indeed maintain an even higher standard, but it will come at the cost of a lot of content.

      I encourage responses from all contributors, including those who respectfully disagree with me, the only thing I don't encourage is people to accuse me of spamming; even Rezonansowy (talk • contribs), who originally thought this was spam, has acknowledged I did this out of good intentions, good faith in my intentions is all I ask for in your replies, whatever you may have to say on the subject or about my contributions.

      Thanks for contributing to a useful debate with me; and I am not being sarcastic. Sgutkind (talk) 04:14, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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