[WikiEN-l] Brandt, bios, and other thoughts

[Kirill Lokshin]

We have now been dealing with what I will term the "Brandt affair"
(and the variety of subsidiary conflicts) for more than a year.  In
that time we have seen wheel-warring, arbitration cases, bans,
harassment, attack sites, counter-attack sites, violations of just
about every policy we have by any number of parties, editors leaving,
editors being forced out, more than a dozen deletion nominations, a
few undeletion nominations, and megabytes of pointless, ever-repeating
arguments on and off Wikipedia, all for the sake of making sure that
our article on Brandt stays around.  I think it would be reasonable to
say that this issue has become, by any measure, the single most
disruptive one we've experienced in terms of damage to the community
and the project as a whole.

But why do we need -- or want -- a biography of Brandt so much?

Brandt is not, in any real sense, an important individual.  He has not
been the subject of biographical works of any substance; he has not
been profiled in magazines; he does not have a fanclub.  His only
claim to notoriety is that he was mentioned in a few newspaper
articles dealing with broader topics than himself.  Sure, this may let
him fulfill our "notability" requirements -- as does every Pokemon and
most models of vacuum cleaners -- but in a true historical context, he
likely wouldn't even be a footnote.  Had he lived a hundred years ago,
his hometown newspaper probably wouldn't have bothered to run an
obituary; farther back, and we wouldn't even know of his existence.

If we too were not to bother with an article on him, what would we
lose?  There will be no students who wish to research Brandt and lack
for a resource, no curious reader that will see Brandt's name
elsewhere and look him up; in practical terms, Brand is so obscure
that a biography of him is not actually going to be *useful* to
anyone.  (Not that our current article is truly a biography, in any
case; it's merely a collection of individual episodes in his life --
the ones that some newspaper happened to mention -- strung together
with neither context nor connection to one another.)

The costs of trying to keep the article around, on the other hand, are
immediate and substantial.  Forget, even, the massive amounts of time
being wasted on this by everyone involved, the bad press we've
received, and all the other tangential problems; the most dramatic
loss to Wikipedia are the many productive editors that have left the
project as consequences of this affair.  How many editors are we
willing to sacrifice to keep the article?  A dozen?  A hundred?  All
of them?

Some people may consider it to be a victory on our part to have
retained the article in the face of such determined opposition; if it
is, it's merely a Pyrrhic one.

So why, then, have we dug in our heels so thoroughly on this?  Why
can't we just get rid of the article already and all go back to doing
something rather more useful than this endless fighting?

Kirill