On 6/27/07, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I assume that last line was meant to be prescriptive rather than descriptive.
The way I see it, the whole fiasco over Essjay was a much much bigger story than a single poll over the war. It's still being talked about today, see for instance http://p10.tech.mud.yahoo.com/blogs/raskin/10963. It also involves many more facts which cannot be succinctly summarized like a war poll.
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 don't see a purpose to setting an artificial limit on how much to cover such an incident. If all we know is that Jimbo shut down the site, and not much else, one or two lines would be enough. If, on the other hand, there is a lot more detail to the story, then we should take as much room as it requires to explain what happened, splitting out to a full article if necessary.
Looking at the [[Essjay incident]], the section on ==Reaction== does seem to be poorly organized if not fluff. But the rest of the article seems necessary for providing a complete account of what happened. The title is poor, but that's because we as a group have realized it's bad taste to write about someone like Essjay but haven't yet decided that writing an article on the only incident someone is known for is basically the same thing.
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?"
I really don't think Wikipedians have adopted the spirit of "right to vanish".
Whether or not to destroy the historical accounts of the Essjay controversy is a difficult question because the facts go beyond Essjay. Why didn't Jimmy Wales do something sooner? Doesn't the New Yorker do *any* background checks on people? I guess these facts could remain without mentioning real names, but finding out Essjay's real name would be trivial to do.
Ultimately I think the best argument for deletion is that Wikipedia is not a good place for an article which is essentially about itself. Maybe back before semi-protection and username blocks and 3RR enforcement you could have something there which resembled a neutral article, but those days are gone forever.