There’s currently a debate going on at Wikipedia over the blacklisting of ReadWriteWeb.com (RWW). Blacklisting, as defined by the site’s own policy page on it, is a deterrent “that should be used as a last resort against spammers.”

In a post to Wikipedia’s discussion area for blacklist challenges, RWW Founder and Editor Richard MacManus explains that he was alerted by a Wikipedia editor that his site had been blacklisted, and respectfully requests that the ban be lifted. Clearly, RWW doesn’t need to spam Wikipedia for traffic. And so it begins…

RWW is one of the busiest, most popular, and most respected technology blogs on the internet. It has over 270,000 subscribers and is in Technorati’s list of top 20 blogs. It is syndicated by the New York Times and Google, among others. Needless to say, MacManus’ request was declined on the grounds that blogs are not reliable sources. Of course, to say that RWW is not a reliable source for web technology news is ridiculous. Editor Steven Walling comes to RWW’s defense, stating the obvious reasons.

There are two alarming things going on here. First, the purpose of the black list is not about excluding reliable sources. It’s about keeping spam off the site - a worthy cause in anyone’s estimation. Has all the hubbub about Wikipedia reliability turned the black list into a reverse list of reliable sources? That seems like kind of a big policy change, and one they might want to note on the site.

Second, are all blogs categorically unreliable even when they’re run as a profitable business with an editor at the top of the food chain and paid writers who contribute? What’s the difference between that and the technology section of a major newspaper? Its fair to say that readers of both expect and get the same level of truthiness and fact-checking.

It makes you wonder, has Wikipedia lost its nerve?

Wikipedia drama aside, there are two other sides to this that gave me a chuckle. First was the sheer volume of text this debate generated. It got me thinking about how amazing it is that editors have contributed to literally millions of high quality, many downright tome-like, articles. But if you click the Discussion tab at the top of just about any page, you’ll see that the article content is often dwarfed by it. Take the article on Bluegrass as a random example. It’s a hefty article at around 17,000 characters. But the discussion of this article comes in at a whopping 68,000 characters! It gives you pause.

The second funny point is the spam on the Blacklist policy page. I couldn’t help but laugh.

MacManus, by the way, just posted about this as well.