Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 05:25:33AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
On Oct. 20, RK returns and adds section headings and introduces the first "Changing Doctrines" material.
It is of note that the Changing Doctrines material was a straight dump of material RK had already written and put on another page on the Wikipedia, so it consisted of paragraphs and paragraphs of duplication. Secondus, the material wasn't even directly related to the topic of the article that he dumped it in. RK's information dump would have been appropriate in the talk page, but not the article proper.
I don't agree with you on this. The Changing Doctrines material is directly applicable to the subject of the article, "Jehovah's Witnesses: Controversial Issues". That material is about the Jehovah's Witnesses. And it is a controversial issue. So it belongs directly on that page.
Characterizing copying and pasting of legitimate information as an "information dump" is not very helpful.
I will refrain from characterising RK's action, but I invite you to look at what he added, then imagine if you were a Jew, and someone dumped something like that in the article on Judaism, how would you feel?
If the article were titled "Judaism: Controversial Issues" and it dealt with some points that were (a) about Judaism and (b) Controversial Issues, I'd be fine with it. Did those paragraphs need NPOV-tidying? Then that's what should have been done, then.
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Are you operating on a theory that no material should ever be duplicated in the wikipedia? I would agree with a milder claim that _often_ we should avoid duplicated material, and that duplicated material _often_ signals a need for refactoring. But just saying "This is duplicated from elsewhere" is not a sufficient reason to just summarily delete something (over and over and over and over and over).
--Jimbo