From: "White Cat" <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> Headline on CNN right now is "Poll: War support at new low" do we have an article of this poll? We write articles on events unless they are notable enough for the entire year rather than day. A notable event would be Jimbo deciding to shut down the site (wikipedia) for example which would IMHO only be notable enough to be mentioned on the article on [[Wikipedia]]. Probably the coverage would be one or two lines, max a paragraph. Not a full article, that can be on wikinews (maybe). Essjay incident however isn't even worth a single line mention on article namespace. I also think that Essjay article is in violation of the spirit of "right to vanish". I do not particularly ''like'' Essjay but this mocking of him even bothers me. I ask myself this question: "will I be mistreated like him if circumstances are right?" - White Cat As long as there are proper citations of all facts from reliable sources, and that the subjects of these articles are welcome to contribute statements of their own (or point out other reliable sources) on the Discussion page -- and that these would be fairly considered by the community in the article's content, the article should stay. If not satisfactory to the subject, he or she should be able to request the article's removal, too -- but only a truly impartial committee (preferably EXTERNAL to Wikipedia, and using standard tests of notability) should judge whether the BLP is of "note" or not. The "Essjay controversy" is no different than: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Edmondson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_O'Leary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Troupe One would rightly argue that these four all held more notable positions than Ryan Jordan, but the moment Jimmy Wales (the sole-/co-founder of a Top 10 website) made public record and comment about Jordan in a venerable publication like New Yorker, that made the whole affair worthy of inclusion in any encyclopedia that seeks to have 2 million or more articles. A Google search of 'Wales Jordan Wikipedia Essjay' returns 39,000 pages. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. By comparison, a search for 'Quincy Troupe California laureate' returns "only" 10,100 pages; a search for 'David Edmondson Radio Shack Pacific' returns "only" 13,200 pages. If anyone needs to be blamed for the [[Essjay controversy]] article being in Wikipedia, it's Jimmy Wales. He's the one who made all of the publicity-drawing decisions that escalated this incident (elevating someone he knew -- or should have known -- to have inauthentic credentials to the Arbitration Committee, hiring the same person to his for-profit firm Wikia, and commenting that he didn't "really have a problem with it"), other than Jordan's initial untruth itself. Wales eventually sincerely apologized for his mistakes. I commend that. But, it's another thing altogether to suggest that the next remedy is to remove the article. If there are 39,000 pages floating around on the web about this topic, then clearly citizens of the world will seek out Wikipedia for the encyclopedia's version of the story, for years to come. What would it say to have nothing there, and a ban on recreating the article? -- Gregory Kohs Cell: 302.463.1354 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l