[WikiEN-l] COO story now in major media

[Anthony]

On Dec 25, 2007 3:15 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/12/2007, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > (*) Don't bring up some strawman about victimless or petty crimes.
> > We're talking about someone who recklessly caused the death of one
> > person and who intentionally shot another in the chest.
>
> It's not a strawman. We would never have an article on someone who did
> that, normally.
>
Sure it's a strawman, because no one is arguing about victimless or
petty crimes.

> We're an *encyclopedia*; I myself spent hours some time ago digging
> through categories of people listed as criminals to try to get rid of
> the ones who were there as some kind of proxy for a court record or a
> sex offender registry. I never saw a single complaint about it in the
> general case, just bickering over individual instances being 'notable'
> or not.
>
> "Commiting a serious crime" - short of something famously scandalous,
> or mass murder, or something that caused changes in jurisprudence - is
> not and has never been accepted by the community as a reasonable basis
> for inclusion of a biography.

Well, FWIW, I never said it was.

> I don't see why it should change just
> because we know of them.
>
I don't even know that I agree with that.  The fact that "we know of
them" means there's likely a greater interest in the information.

That said, I'd probably vote to delete this particular biography, on
the grounds that while she's someone people should be writing about,
she's not someone Wikipedia should be writing about.