On 6/11/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I sympathize with Phil, I really do, but the thing is that the reason governments never negotiate with terrorists isn't of some abstract philosophical reason, it's because it doesn't work.
Governments negotiate with terrorists all the time, and it often does work, which is why some terrorist campaigns come to an end.
I agree with Phil and I thank him for raising the issue. I deleted Brandt's article back in October, when it was just Brandt and myself who were writing it and he asked for it to be taken down. It would likely have stayed deleted if he hadn't talked about it, but he posted about it on a blog and so of course the blog owner recreated it.
Even after the Siegenthaler affair, Brandt is still only borderline notable. I created the stub on him only because he'd been used as a source in an article, and his name came up as a red link, so rather than delete the red link, I created a stub. There are very few reliable third-party sources on him. In such a borderline case, if the subject doesn't want the page to exist, there's no harm in taking it down.
Wikipedia is just a website, as important as it is to the people who read and write it. It isn't worth a single human life. My fear is that someone is going to lose their livelihood, or be physically hurt or worse, and where any of these things is a real possibility, we have to be responsible. The publish-and-be-damned attitude is inappropriate.
We have admins who are teenagers, single women living alone, admins in sensitive professional positions, admins with young children. Some of the people who have already been harassed have been contacted at home and at their work place, and their employers and parents have been harassed too. We shouldn't wait until someone is physically stalked or assaulted.
In my view, we should ask Brandt to delete the hive mind pages, and undertake not to recreate them or assist anyone else in doing so, and then we should delete his article and keep it that way.
Sarah