BJAODN is best left deleted or moved to another part of Wikiality where the admins that enjoy it can take ownership of it and decide how to handle it. Things like this and other [[WP:OR]]/creative writing is what wikia and wikibooks are for.
I don't see how the idea that you have yet another page in the main namespace that you have to comb through for bombs, spam, and astroturfing is relaxing and morale building.
--- phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/3/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/3/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl
wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG schreef:
On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 19:22:17 +0100, "James Farrar" james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
You think. Me, I think it might have been
exactly as stated: OK,
let's finally grab this tiger by the tail.
Yes, per [[IDONTLIKEIT]].
Or possibly per the reason stated.
No, apart from [[WP:IDONTLIKEIT]], [[WP:BLP]],
[[WP:NPA]], [[WP:FU]] and
[[WP:NOT]], there was not a single reason for
deletion of these pages,
and it's a scandal that they have not been undeleted
already.
The failure to recognize that BJAODN deliberately
violates the norms of
the rest of Wikipedia in order to make the culture
healthier and the
encyclopedia better (similar to how people can
experiment in the Sandbox,
but not the mainspace) is extraordinarily
disappointing.
It's called Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense for a
reason.
Yes.
In general, in comment on all the comments about BJAODN:
Any example of how a part of BJAODN violated the GFDL can be refuted with another part that doesn't violate the GFDL.
For every non-funny joke, there was one that had me in stitches, and probably you too.
For every dozen puerile misuses and 1/2 page cut there was -- if you looked hard enough -- something that would make you laugh, and you'd realize you were laughing because it was a joke about Wikipedia and you were a Wikipedian, and that is a good feeling.
No argument about how it was "a massive waste of time" or "a complete copyright violation" or "it was great through and through" or anything similarly broad and undiscriminating is going to fly in the face of a group of pages that were nearly six years old and incredibly diverse.
So: in the interests of not sitting through more copyright arguments and more deletion procedural arguments -- remember, every time you quote an acronym God kills a kitten -- let's get back to basics.
I'd like to propose leaving the old BJAODN pages alone for the moment -- recognizing that they are (hopefully) preserved in a dump and the deletion logs for the dedicated and foolhardy to sort through, remove the funniest bits for a future archive and credit if necessary. Anyone who wants to figure out how to make these available for non-admins to work on I'm sure would be welcomed, and hopefully the pages won't completely die by being left alone. If others want to fight to get them undeleted, or act boldly to undelete, my bias is that this would be a good thing, but doing so immediately and unilaterally will just cause further drama.
In line with this, I would love to see a discussion about keeping or deleting the pages with the participation of many more experienced Wikipedians and those familiar with the GFDL; there have only been a few loud voices so far, and while not a "crucial" page, BJAODN is a page that predates most of the policies and 90% of the content on this site. Thus I feel sure that many people beyond the people who have spoken up so far have opinions and strong feelings on it.
I'd also like to propose a new BJAODN page -- BJAODN for the 21st century -- that could come into being over time, where we work out a way to keep a small portion of the funny stuff; perhaps equitable basic policies for quoting pages, removing any hint of BLPs or attacks, and only quoting fair-use sized chunks of deleted pages. Yes, it's not encyclopedic; but yes, there is always going to be an urge to share that All-Time Best Vandalism Evar that had you cracked up for 20 minutes with your friends. I've had that urge; so has everyone who's ever added to BJAODN. How do we make a place for this? [1]
Lastly, I would love to see a discussion of whether this was appropriate behavior by the deleting admin -- he's gotten praised by some and abused by others. Does this sort of thing fall within being bold? Is this unilateral behavior desirable? Something to encourage or revile? Let's leave aside current policy about speedies, copyvios etc and think about what we *want*.
Finally, three challenges. First, I'd like to challenge those who care about it to improve the existing BJAODN page, maybe giving a short explanation of this phenomena -- especially for the sake of the many, many incoming links -- and showcasing some of the early diffs, which are pretty funny. It would also be great if an admin could retrieve the page titles of the various BJAODN collections, and post them as a reminder of what we had.
Second, I'd like to challenge everyone who is arguing about copyright on this mailing list to take the amount of time you've spent sending emails, double it, and spend that amount of time checking articles and new contributions for copyvios from material in the outside world. I guarantee you'll find a few, and this is a MUCH bigger problem than BJAODN ever was.
Thirdly, for everyone who thought that the collection of jokes wasn't funny or encyclopedic and therefore should go: a challenge to remember that good faith and tolerance of a lot of random crap is what makes any of us put up with this website at all. While no one is more self-righteous about making this a serious encyclopedia than me, we're talking about 60-odd pages out of 7,000,000, and things like BJAODN are like amateur comedy hour, or karaoke -- you may not like it, and it may be painful to listen to, but that doesn't mean you have to go on a crusade against every karaoke bar in the city and get a court order to shut them all down.[2]
Thoughts?
phoebe
[1] The last thing I added to BJAODN *still* makes me laugh when I think about it. [2] though if you do, I won't stop you; I can't stand the stuff.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)
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