Why Wikipedia's Policy to Blacklist Blogs is Outdated and Wrong
This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he'd tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: "The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted." After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as 'spam'! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don't think we've done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.
We soon discovered, however, that Wikipedia has a general policy of not accepting citations from blogs. We think that policy is ridiculous in this day and age. Not only that, but it is not being consistently applied - we appear to be the only professional blog on Wikipedia's blacklist! The whole sad and frustrating story is below.
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