[WikiEN-l] Brandt, bios, and other thoughts

[Slim Virgin]

On 4/20/07, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:

> The costs of trying to keep the article around, on the other hand, are
> immediate and substantial.  Forget, even, the massive amounts of time
> being wasted on this by everyone involved, the bad press we've
> received, and all the other tangential problems; the most dramatic
> loss to Wikipedia are the many productive editors that have left the
> project as consequences of this affair.  How many editors are we
> willing to sacrifice to keep the article?  A dozen?  A hundred?  All
> of them?
>
> Some people may consider it to be a victory on our part to have
> retained the article in the face of such determined opposition; if it
> is, it's merely a Pyrrhic one.
>
Thank you for this injection of common sense.

We should block Brandt, delete his bio, and wash our hands of the
whole affair. I suggested this to Jimbo in October 2005, although we
agreed at the time to delete the bio and not block Brandt. The block
came later, from others, because of his behavior.

The bio was duly deleted, and it would likely have stayed that way had
Brandt not posted an open letter to Jimbo  (before deletion, I
believe). This got some bloggers interested in it, and one of them,
User:Philwiki, recreated the article.

Tony Sidaway said earlier that Jimbo's decision to unblock could be
seen as pragmatic, but it's the opposite, because it keeps Brandt
around our necks. The pragmatic option is to get rid of the only
legitimate reason Brandt has to be interested in Wikipedia. Delete the
bio and have done with it.

Sarah