Earle Martin wrote:
On 20/10/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
In this incident we had two copyvio articles and a bunch of unattributed images. It's not at all clear how you're progressing from that to the conclusion that all of Wikipedia's fictional character articles are so out-of-control that they need to be "nuked."
I think Phil is speaking from having read numerous fictional character articles, not implying that his feelings stem from this incident. (I happen to agree with him; the amount of blithering fancruft is astonishing.)
Yet he's using this incident as his "excuse" for it. If this incident itself had nothing specifically to do with his proposal and he was just tossing in an old dream of his, why was it initially focused on just Marvel comics characters?
We need to demonstrate our lack of tolerance with a zeal previously known only to BLP.
Wikimedia Foundation could get sued for having "fancruft" in articles about fictional characters? Or having fancruft could somehow ruin the lives of fictional characters? Those are the reasons for BLP but I don't see any similar level of importance for fictional character articles.
Again, I think you're misreading Phil's point, namely that we should be as ruthless at eliminating fancruft as we are at BLP issues, not that fancruft is causing the same problems as BLP issues.
No, I don't think that I am. There's reasons why BLP is "ruthless" with regard to biographies of living people and those reasons are completely inapplicable to biographies of fictional characters. If you want to propose being equally "ruthless" for fictional characters I want to see a reason that's just as strong.
Also, the definition of "fancruft" is far less clear than the definition of "libel." I'd want to see something solid and widely accepted for that as well.