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Several questions / answers have cited UXMovement in the past when asking / answering questions believing the site to be evidence-based, when (in the site owners own words):

UX Movement .... isn't a testing and research facility. It's just a blog.

The main culprit article over on UXMovement was this one about search button placement. At first glance it seems legitimate until you read the source page referenced, as well as the comments on the UXMovement article itself. IXDA picked up on this a few times and I don't want UX.StackExchange to link to pages that pretend (intentionally or not) to be research when they are only blog posts.

Some questions here on our site using UXMovement as a source:

Dashed underline on required fields (Answer)

Tap to hover and double-tap to click? (Question)

If we agree it's not an appropriate reference site we can determine a best course-of-action to take.

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As a teacher, I agree completely with the spirit of your question, which is about information literacy & providing the best/most solid sources when answering. However, I don't think that attempting to blacklist a link from being added is the way to go because besides the actual technical issues of doing so, we would lose the teachable moment. Plus, it can't only be one blog that provides content of questionable accuracy, so we (well, you, as a mod :) ) would have the added responsibility of maintaining that blacklist.

Some things that come to mind, though:

  • Community-driven correction, much like when the folks on StackOverflow object to links to w3schools.com and add a comment whenever it's used that says "This is a bad source. See w3fools.com for why."
  • Add something to the FAQ about finding appropriate sources.
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    Agreed - blacklisting is not a particularly appropriate term here, I've removed references to it from the question. (Whether it's technically possible or not isn't really the point I think, that's what us Mods are for!) I think I also agree that the teaching aspect is actually more important than deleting erroneous 'facts' providing no information to the OP / visitors as to the deletion.
    – JonW Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 13:34
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    Left me just add that the "-1 w3fools" clique is one of the most annoying, unhelpful groups of people on Stack Overflow and they almost never cite what is wrong with a given article, they simply attack any post using a w3schools link regardless of the accuracy of it's specific content. That is not the sort of "community driven correction" we need.
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 14:49
  • @BenBrocka Yeah, see I've only seen it for 2 months and it's been about 50/50 on the helpful/unhelpful -- probably over time and en masse it's wicked annoying. But in general, a kind and gentle and helpful citation to something better or note that something is perhaps questionable as a source isn't a bad thing. Given this community, I know we could do it. My w3fools comment was the only SE example I had at hand (are there others?).
    – jcmeloni
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 14:52
  • Well on Cognitive Science.SE we try to encourage scholarly resources and discourage anything that even looks like it's related to pseudoscience, but I don't find that situation applies here. I think we should simply judge answers by their content, if they cite an incorrect or contentious point we should bring it up, but I don't see a need to poison the well against UX Movement.
    – Zelda Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 15:01
  • @BenBrocka That's good to know, thanks. Sounds like a plan.
    – jcmeloni
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 15:07
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I don't see how this is different from dozens of other blogs and other non-scholarly articles that questions link to; I don't see this as any more valid than removing all links to http://www.lukew.com because "it's a blog".

From what I read in chat it sounds like they wrote a couple of bad articles or published something unsourced. I'm certainly not seeing the sort of reaction to UX Movement I see against w3schools and I recommend against removing links on principle until I see some strong evidence that UX Movement either provides poor or false information or that the UX community frowns upon UX Movement.

Like other blogs UX Movement sometimes cites sources, sometimes they don't. We're in a subjective field often driven by small sets of data, instinct or even personal choice at times. Often the point of an article link is to explain an idea, not share a statistically valid, peer reviewed factsheet.

If a UX Movement article is demonstrably incorrect or is inappropriately being cited as an authoritative, scholarly source, removing the link and leaving a note is probably warranted. Even then, there's nothing special about UX Movement that warrants removal.

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  • The issue isn't with citing the website itself, it's more about citing pages from it as evidence-based study when that may not be the case. Lukew has evidence on his posts, but ones without evidence are clearly indicated as just being his (albeit well informed) suggestions.
    – JonW Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 15:24

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