On Monday 11 November 2002 10:03 am, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I'm prepared to tolerate the "anti-" pages. If people want to paint targets on their foreheads for everybody else to shoot at, I don't think that the rest of us need to jump in to prevent their suicide. People who choose to put their names on these lists need to know that being there may say something to the rest of us about their credibility. There can even be several pages that seem to say the same thing (anti-american/anti-yankee or anti-gay/anti-queer/anti-pervert) with each expressing a different perspective on the subject.
If some of the sillier debates can be marginalized to these personal anti-pages, the more serious contributors are likely to ignore them completely, no matter how offensive they get. Individual user pages don't quite do the job for the people on these pages; they often need to feel that they are a part of a group, even if it is a group of one.
Eclecticology
But the wikipedia:namespace is not an appropriate forum for this. POV views held by contributors are only supposed to be on user pages and in the meta. Let's keep focus here people - we needn't have this material in the NPOV encyclopedia area. The Wikipedia namespace is supposed to be about the project, not about the views of the users.
Having these anti pages on the regular Wikipedians pages paints a very skewed and wrong image about our project. The new user will see different factions of other users and then will be presented with a choice; which faction should I join? This can only work against NPOV and against community building (because it in fact creates sub-communities).
We already have a POV wiki and user pages, so lets use them for this placing POV material and not the general wikipedia:namespace.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)