[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

Thu Nov 6 22:34:33 UTC 2003

On 11/6/03 5:08 PM, "James Duffy" <jtdire at hotmail.com> wrote:

> The Cunctator's idea that if one person opposed a deletion it should be
> stopped is farcical. Wikipedia does have a few people whose contribution to
> debates are 'whatever everyone else wants, I oppose just to be different'.
> If someone wrote an article [[Adolf Hitler was a nun]] the same small group
> would be out on the barricades defending it just to be different. They see
> wikipedia as some sort of game to wage extremist agendas, whether political,
> ideological or analytical. The rules being followed where high-threshholds
> are required for deletion (2/3 etc) are sensible and don't allow the 'watch
> me cause trouble' brigade to force wikipedia to keep nutty, absurd
> ridiculous articles, often through false names being created to allow
> multiple votes.

The straw man arguments are farcical. I don't consider unreasonable
objections to be valid. I do have a wider definition of what I consider
reasonable (when it comes to inclusion) than you do.

> As to the victims of 9/11, there is not one iota of justification for
> keeping these articles on wikipedia. What happened on 9/11 was horrible,
> disgusting and outrageous, but wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a shrine.
> The US suffered a horrible experience but so have many nations and peoples
> have had just as horrific experiences, many indeed far far worse (the
> Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Hundred Years War, two World Wars, etc).
> Articles based on the Irish War of Independence that covered individuals
> murdered by the British or the IRA, ('Mickey O'Brien was a good man and
> father'; 'Sir Laurence O'Keeffe was a kind employer and father', etc) would
> deservedly be binned.

Again, a straw man argument: your examples violate NPOV.

> America's traumatic experiences in /one/ series of
> incidents, which by world standards has a relatively small death toll,
> cannot be given 'special' treatment no matter how emotionally traumatic the
> impact on the US and its psyche. This is a world encyclopedia, not an
> American one, and cannot treat the life of one US victim as more worthy of
> attention than a Palestinian victim, an Israeli victim, a Holocaust victim,
> an Irish victim, a British victim, a Somali victim, a Chilean victim, etc.
> These pages give the impression that US victims are somehow /more important/
> and in a special league to every other.

Again, this is the "some people put so much work into carefully researching
the reports on the lives of the people killed that day and creating entries
for them, and we can't be bothered to do the same for other people who have
been killed, so we should delete all the entries" argument.