[WikiEN-l] Human dignity

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/14/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > I would vote "delete, nn - human dignity".  A full explanation would be:
> > For goodness sake, leave the poor woman alone.
>
> It's a combination of factors, I think:
> - Did she actively seek out this publicity, or was it forced on her?
> - Is there an identifiable "cult" surrounding her persona that goes
> beyond narrowly limited demographic or subcultural subsets?
> - Have other publications using reliable processes (not necessarily
> print) picked up the story for some reason other than reprinting it?
> Has it ever transcended the "Offbeat News" section?

Along these lines:
Will anyone care in a year? two years? ten years? one hundred years?

Wikipedia is forever. It is a waste of the project's time when someone
writes an article on something which will be forgotten before the
article matures.

Our behavior should be guided both by ethics and by a practical
dedication to the goals of our project (*Free Content*,
*Encyclopedia*). Articles which represent a breach of ethics should be
deleted just the same as topics which are unencyclopedic.

Jimbos example rests somewhere inbetween... and a decision which
weighs the harms and merits of the coverage should be considered by
the community.