Keith Old wrote:
On 7/14/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
The simplest answer to why is that there are a lot of people who want to know about him. Also, there is a lot of misinformation going around.
Where is the evidence that a lot of people want to know about him?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22brian+peppers%22
For some comparisons:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22brian+peppers%22%2C%22linus+torvalds%22 http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22brian+peppers%22%2C%22ghyslain+raza%22 http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22brian+peppers%22%2C%22jimmy+wales%22%2C%22...
As it happens, we do have a fairly reasonable entry on Peppers in [[List of Internet phenomena]]; it says:
"Brian Peppers — An Ohio sex offender with a facial malformity whose photo in the Ohio eSORN (Electronic Sex Offender Registration and Notification) database became widespread. Snopes has since confirmed the photograph to be real [8]"
I think much of the perpetual debate surrounding the issue could be alleviated simply by replacing the "this page is deleted" notice currently at [[Brian Peppers]] with a redirect to [[List of Internet phenomena]]. That way, we wouldn't be telling every single person who googles for the name that "HEY, LOOK, WIKIPEDIA USED TO HAVE AN ARTICLE ABOUT THIS GUY BUT IT WAS DELETED BECAUSE JIMBO SAID SO! SEE!"
Of course, the other alternative would be to fix MediaWiki so that we can _actually_ protect a deleted page, rather than having to fake it with a template saying, in effect, "This page is intentionally blank." This would be a desirable feature in general, and I hope to see it implemented some day in any case, whether by me or by someone else. It's not even particularly complicated, it just happens to require some significant changes to the database schema.
(I'm cc'ing this directly to Jimbo, since I'd like to hear his personal opinion on this. Of course, I could just be bold and make the page a redirect myself, but in my experience this is one of the situations where such a change, if done unilaterally, would be likely to be quickly reverted with the summary "no, Jimbo decreed this" regardless of its actual merit or lack thereof.)