I have never been so ashamed to be associated with Wikipedia as I am just now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Allison_Stokke… There are a large number of people saying we should have this article. As of the time of writing, they seem to *all* be basing this on various forms of an assertion that because the subject fulfils an arbitrary criteria that we ourselves made up, having an article is therefore either necessary, our right, or inevitable. (It is not clear which of these schools they subscribe to, but it seems implicitly to be one of the three) There is *one* passing comment, made in response to my complaint, about a neutral article being a defensibly a "good thing", because then we get on top of the google results and it's better than the alternatives - I disagree with it, but it's a reasoned position. Otherwise... not a smidgen of editorial thought. Just an incantation of an article of faith, a slavish devotion to a meaningless line in the sand. And then, the crowning glory: "Strong keep ... No BLP issues and Wikipedia contains content you might find objectionable ... Wikipedia is not censored ... ethical point of views and non-neutral !votes are irrelevant." - from, god help me, an admin. One of the people we theoretically select for common sense and an understanding of our goals. Linking - I am not making this up - to the content disclaimer. Are we really saying that *because we made up an arbitrary rule ourselves*, we get to ignore any form of editorial sense and then loudly disclaim responsibility for the result? Do people honestly believe that this makes us an encyclopedia? A grand game of nomic over what does and doesn't constitute a topic, an endless series of rules on who we can and cannot write about, without any attempt to apply *judgement* to them? Without any attempt to say - hey, sometimes we have to make decisions on things? The world is not full of hard and fast situations. We can't draw nice defining lines everywhere and get shining happy results. Sometimes, God forbid, we have to think about boundary cases. I wish people would show some willingness to. What happened to the project I signed up to back in 2004? This twisted imitation of an attempt to write an encyclopedia sure as hell doesn't seem to be it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

There is *one* passing comment, made in response to my complaint, about a neutral article being a defensibly a "good thing", because then we get on top of the google results and it's better than the alternatives - I disagree with it, but it's a reasoned position. Otherwise... not a smidgen of editorial thought. Just an incantation of an article of faith, a slavish devotion to a meaningless line in the sand.

Are we really saying that *because we made up an arbitrary rule ourselves*, we get to ignore any form of editorial sense and then loudly disclaim responsibility for the result? Do people honestly