On 4/20/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
Our notability guidelines -- overly simplistic nature and permissiveness towards the utterly trivial aside --were never meant to be a suicide pact. The question to ask is not whether Brandt "meets the criteria for inclusion" or whatever the wording of the day is. It's whether having an article on him actually *benefits* anyone, and whether any benefit outweighs the frankly horrific cost we're having to pay to keep it around.
No. If we take our role as an encyclopedia seriously, then these externalities are irrelevant. I would be deeply concerned about the kind of precedent where a sufficient amount of noise alone guarantees the removal of information. Now it may be Daniel Brandt, tomorrow, some strange religious group nobody has ever heard of, then some litigious video game lawyer .. this is the wrong way to look at the problem and could seriously damage our usefulness. And if you think that you can actually close this issue by deleting Brandt's article, you've apparently not followed the debate after the last speedy deletion attempt.
I'm already concerned that we have a thin skin when it comes to legal threats. I want us to develop a legal strategy where we have the confidence to stand up against bullies and kooks, rather than folding as soon as we get a nasty letter. But that also means that we have to take more responsibility to ensure that all our BLP processes are working -- including stable version tagging, and so on.
I can understand the notion of an "opt-out" for borderline notability, but I've come to the conclusion that this cannot be implemented in a reasonable fashion. The only thing that I see viable is that the subject's wishes are, by policy, one factor to be taken into account in an AfD. That doesn't mean they necessarily outweigh the interests of the encyclopedia, but that the people debating the issue ought to make a judgment call about it. Then let the chips fall where they may.