[Wikipedia-l] "In memoriam"

[Ray Saintonge]

Jeroen Heijmans wrote:

> Last week I've tried to remove the "in memoriam" parts of the 9/11 
> pages by putting them on meta. This move was reverted (twice, I 
> countered) by The Cunctator. However, I have not heard any _good_ 
> arguments from him (or anybody else) for keeping them.
>
> The arguments were:
>
> * "I take it pretty personally" - Cunctator seemed to agree himself 
> that this isn't a very good reason
> * "these are among the most popular pages on the site" - that is not a 
> good reason. We are an encyclopedia, and no matter how many visitors 
> we get for a page, if it's not an encyclopedia article, it must go. We 
> could probably put some pornographic images here or music downloads - 
> that would bring visitors - but they're not encyclopedia material.
>
> Some have mentioned the pages should go to some special wiki - that's 
> fine with me, but I *very strongly* feel they should leave Wikipedia 
> now. The meta is the best place for them now. I've already brought 
> this up some months ago, and I agreed then to wait until after 
> September 11, 2002. It is now September 25, and time to move on with 
> these pages - there has been plenty of time to think of other/better 
> solutions. As I've said before, I don't think we should give 911 any 
> special treatment anymore - there's no reason for that.

I agree that most of these maudlin exercises should go elsewhere.  We 
only need to keep whatever is there that is of true historical 
interest..  An appropriately place link to the sentimental material is 
all the reference we need to it.  

The popularity argument is not a strong one.  Unlike the major TV 
networks we do not need to appeal to the lowest common denominator just 
to appease advertisers.

The "/Donations" sub-page would be my first candidate for deletion. 
 What business to we have encouraging donations to help people who have 
already been richly compensated?  The amounts collected in respect of 
these about 3,000 victims are already many times what has been requested 
to help the millions that have been affected by the AIDS epidemic in 
Africa, yet these latter groups often cannot meet their funding targets.

Some of us are just plain tired of all this whining about 9/11.

Ec