From: Jimmy Wales
James Duffy wrote:
> The ''deletionists'' against ''inclusionists''
argument is utterly
> bogus. It is a case of those who take the idea that wikipedia as an
> encyclopedia seriously and basic standards below which an article is
> deleted and those who see wikipedia as some sort
of scribblebox
where
any sort of
rubbish, not matter how bad, has a 'right' to be left
undisturbed.
People have been upset about the phrase "straw man", but
really I think that phrase has to be said when you try to
characterize the debate in this way.
The problem is, recently folks have been crying "straw man" and it
hasn't been accurate, and unnecessarily villifies the poster.
In most of these cases, discussion has consisted of reasonable "What
if..." and "slippery slope" arguments when standards for
"articleness"
are lowered. This is not automatically a straw man, and in most posts
here, they have not been straw man arguments at all.
Straw men are more often a problem with logical reasoning, not policy
debate. If there are weaknesses in a proposed policy, and people
constructively point that out, it's not automatically a straw man.
-Fuzheado