On Tue, 24 May 2011, Tom Morris wrote:
The reason:
Wikipedia is on the Internet. If Wikipedia has an article
about something whose promoter specifically intends to spread it on the
Internet, it is impossible to separate reporting from participation. It's
a loophole in the definition of neutrality that doing things which help
one side of a dispute doesn't break neutrality, simply because our
intentions are neutral--even though our effects are not.
Using that logic, we
should probably shut down every page on WP about
politics, religion, alternative medicine and anything even vaguely
controversial.
There's a difference between helping someone who happens to find some publicity
useful, and helping something that is mainly a publicity campaign. There's
also a difference between spreading facts that are incidentally used in a
publicity campaign but are independent of it, and spreading the campaign itself.
If there weren't any anti-scientology campaigners spreading the word about
Xenu, we'd still have a reason to have an article about Xenu. If there was no
anti-Santorum campaign, we'd have no reason for the article--its entire
existence depends directly on that campaign.