Re: External link policy and polyfills

[pransh15]

Hi everyone! 👋

With what happened over the weekend on a polyfill discussion, I wanted to share what our external link policy is, the previous discussions we've had around polyfills, and why we decided to not include the links to polyfills.

Polyfills or Ponyfills

We have established our opinion about polyfills, and security is the most important concern. As also suggested by a community member in one of our previous discussions, we are concerned with the following potential issues surrounding polyfill:

• Security. Polyfills are intended to be added to websites (either by including code or linking to an external file); they must not lead to security issues at the time of the recommendation or later.
• Exemplarity. We try to present modern JavaScript. Often, polyfills use old patterns and syntax; this is normal as they work around the lack of new features. Including them in MDN was unfortunate as it added (and kept) old practices on pages.
• Simplification of code. We remain neutral in how developers choose to code, but we emphasize the importance of writing for modern browsers. We believe there's little value in teaching workarounds for features that have been supported by all major browsers for years, as we focus huge efforts on keeping MDN up to date with current standards. Similar to removing prefixes in CSS, we wanted to remove polyfills and shims for well-supported features.

External link policy

External links are allowed on MDN Web Docs under specific circumstances. Pull requests that don't meet these guidelines will be rejected. Key considerations include avoiding broken links and refraining from promotional behavior and potential conflicts of interest. If you are referencing your own project, it is required to disclose this connection in pull requests. We focus on tools that have a wider adoption to ensure long-term relevance.

In general, if you're considering adding an external link, you need to ensure that there is minimal risk of the following:

• Broken or outdated links
• Appearance of endorsement, especially for commercial products or services
• Attempt to use MDN Web Docs to distribute spam
• Shortlinks that obfuscate the link destination

Explanation:

• You should always disclose if it’s your project. MDN gets many requests to add external links, we reject those who do not disclose if they work on/for the project.
• Self-linking or self-promotional. MDN does not support self-promotional links, we encourage the community to share links.
• Higher adoption is necessary, hence popularity. Since MDN is a source of truth for millions of developers, promoting a new and experimental tool that may or may not be maintained later makes them a less attractive choice to include on MDN.
• Ticket to fame: MDN requests links to be added to their content because a backlink can do wonders for their SEO. So we understand the motivation for folks to add links to their projects on MDN.

All pull requests containing external links are evaluated based on the established relevance criteria, without consideration of personal preferences.

These policies have been put in place (and we review them periodically) based on our experience of handling and evaluating numerous situations over the years. At MDN, we take our responsibility for the content, including external links, which we share with developers with the utmost gravity.

We are happy to hear from you, feel free to start a discussion if you have questions or concerns. You're also welcome to join our community call if you want to bring your questions about external links to the team.

Along with that, a 7-day block was issued against a user for their behavior in the conversation. We are appreciative of their time, knowledge, and expertise, and hope that they continue to contribute to OSS and MDN while following Mozilla's Community Participation Guidelines. With that said, I also want to thank our reviewers for their patience and resilience to stand by MDN’s policies and take on the responsibility of ensuring MDN’s content quality.

The web has moved forward together, with millions of developers helping each other, and MDN has always strived to play its part in it with utmost responsibility. MDN is an open-source project that is powered by a community of contributors, and we are committed to maintaining this community as a safe space for everyone involved.

Happy to hear more from the community. ♥️

Thank you,
Pranshu Khanna
Community Manager, MDN