On 7/14/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/15/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I would vote "delete, nn - human dignity". A full explanation would be: For goodness sake, leave the poor woman alone.
It's a combination of factors, I think:
- Did she actively seek out this publicity, or was it forced on her?
- Is there an identifiable "cult" surrounding her persona that goes
beyond narrowly limited demographic or subcultural subsets?
- Have other publications using reliable processes (not necessarily
print) picked up the story for some reason other than reprinting it? Has it ever transcended the "Offbeat News" section?
Along these lines: Will anyone care in a year? two years? ten years? one hundred years?
Wikipedia is forever. It is a waste of the project's time when someone writes an article on something which will be forgotten before the article matures.
Our behavior should be guided both by ethics and by a practical dedication to the goals of our project (*Free Content*, *Encyclopedia*). Articles which represent a breach of ethics should be deleted just the same as topics which are unencyclopedic.
Jimbos example rests somewhere inbetween... and a decision which weighs the harms and merits of the coverage should be considered by the community.