On 6/2/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 3 Jun 2007 at 01:26:28 +0100, "Tony Sidaway" tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Let's just get this straight: does anybody claim that these pages are necessary to the encyclopedia?
That seems to be the line of argument that people like to use these days every time they're out to suppress something (userboxes, "attack site" links, Esperanza, BJAODN, etc.), and can't come up with a good substantive argument about why it needs to be eliminated regardless of what anybody else thinks about it.
There are a number of reasons that have been presented about why this should be eliminated, though. Its legal status is questionable, it makes the project look like a playground instead of one building an encyclopedia, it contains libel and false information, and I'm going to add one: it makes no sense to edit these pages, so they don't belong in a wiki.
At some point Wikipedia has to draw a line - what is in and what is out. Unfortunately the method to do this is unclear, but in this particular case there's a simple compromise. The pages are available for download at http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/. If you think society is better off with them than without them, and you think the copyright issues are negligible, you are perfectly free to download the pages and set up your own memorial to them.
Anthony