On 2007.11.15 13:44:42 -0500, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu scribbled 0 lines:
Quoting Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com:
On 2007.11.15 16:43:27 +0000, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net scribbled 0 lines:
On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:30:27 +0000, "James Farrar" james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
Having an article because they hate us is no better than not having one because they hate us.
[[Daniel Brandt]], for instance...
(OK, technically we don't have an article on him not because he hates us, /per se/, but because after 14 AFDs reasonable people got bored with the circus and threw in the towel.)
Got good, non-trivial biographical sources about Brandt? I know where to find deletion review.
Brandt's article was deleted for lack of sources.
Guy (JzG)
Just for those who weren't around for the Brandt articles: what Guy is saying here is arrant nonsense. The Brandt article had dozens of good sources stretching back decades. It was deleted out of a combination of WP:IDONTLIKEIT and WP:NEVILLECHAMBERLAIN.
To clarify - what actually happened was after repeated AfDs (13 of them) and Brandt repeated harassment, the current clause in BLP that allows for deletion for marginally notable people was added. A 14th AfD occurred. This AfD was closed with a "complex merge" attempting to preserve as much of the articles material as possible while respecting a possible privacy right for Brandt.
Now my editorializing: It is clear that if Brandt were not Brandt it would have been almost certainly kept. As far as I can tell, there have been exactly two cases where the community has been willing to delete an article of a willing public figure; Daniel Brandt, and Seth Finkelstein. In both cases, there was not a clear consensus in the AfD, both had a DRV and the response in the DRVs in both cases was more or less "we're sick of this. enough". However, there was not a lack of sources.
Now, as an aside can we please discuss this rationally without insulting each other and making Hitler comparisons?
The deletionists long ago showed that they'd already irrationally made up their minds, that no amount of sources would ever be sufficiently reliable, notable, or 'about' Brandt to count. Hence, they are in effect cloaking their IDONTLIKEIT arguments in rhetoric about RS and V and so on. You just saw an example of this by Guy in another email.
Many people have also said that Brandt was not worth the trouble of covering and that the article should just be deleted or that they should give in to those who wanted it deleted. Can you think of any better examples of appeasement than Neville Chamberlain?
-- gwern