We have now been dealing with what I will term the "Brandt affair" (and the variety of subsidiary conflicts) for more than a year. In that time we have seen wheel-warring, arbitration cases, bans, harassment, attack sites, counter-attack sites, violations of just about every policy we have by any number of parties, editors leaving, editors being forced out, more than a dozen deletion nominations, a few undeletion nominations, and megabytes of pointless, ever-repeating arguments on and off Wikipedia, all for the sake of making sure that our article on Brandt stays around. I think it would be reasonable to say that this issue has become, by any measure, the single most disruptive one we've experienced in terms of damage to the community and the project as a whole.
But why do we need -- or want -- a biography of Brandt so much?
Brandt is not, in any real sense, an important individual. He has not been the subject of biographical works of any substance; he has not been profiled in magazines; he does not have a fanclub. His only claim to notoriety is that he was mentioned in a few newspaper articles dealing with broader topics than himself. Sure, this may let him fulfill our "notability" requirements -- as does every Pokemon and most models of vacuum cleaners -- but in a true historical context, he likely wouldn't even be a footnote. Had he lived a hundred years ago, his hometown newspaper probably wouldn't have bothered to run an obituary; farther back, and we wouldn't even know of his existence.
If we too were not to bother with an article on him, what would we lose? There will be no students who wish to research Brandt and lack for a resource, no curious reader that will see Brandt's name elsewhere and look him up; in practical terms, Brand is so obscure that a biography of him is not actually going to be *useful* to anyone. (Not that our current article is truly a biography, in any case; it's merely a collection of individual episodes in his life -- the ones that some newspaper happened to mention -- strung together with neither context nor connection to one another.)
The costs of trying to keep the article around, on the other hand, are immediate and substantial. Forget, even, the massive amounts of time being wasted on this by everyone involved, the bad press we've received, and all the other tangential problems; the most dramatic loss to Wikipedia are the many productive editors that have left the project as consequences of this affair. How many editors are we willing to sacrifice to keep the article? A dozen? A hundred? All of them?
Some people may consider it to be a victory on our part to have retained the article in the face of such determined opposition; if it is, it's merely a Pyrrhic one.
So why, then, have we dug in our heels so thoroughly on this? Why can't we just get rid of the article already and all go back to doing something rather more useful than this endless fighting?
Kirill