On 05/02/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Of *course* it's our place to make subjective editorial decisions on whether or not content is appropriate - where appropriate is a broadly-defined mixture of "acceptable", "useful", "well-placed", etc etc. We do it all the time, as a community and as individuals or ad-hoc groups. There's no 'Big Book of Encyclopedic Merit' we refer back to...
We don't use those measures to decide, though. We use verifiability (which is pretty objective) and notability (which is not, but appears to be pretty much unavoidable if we want to be realistic).
"Verifiability" and "notability" are more aspects of the same decision. The decision, in the end, is always "does this improve the article". There's no checklist, whatever nebulous policy terms we may have pulled out of thin air - we have people looking at text and making an editorial decision on "better or worse this way".
We do think about our content. We do judge our content in a myriad of ways. It's simply *wrong* to pretend we always sit there and boil everything down to some little two-step process of "is it verifiable yes is it notable yes in it goes".
On the other hand, maybe you use a very broad definition of "notability" which encompasses all my subjective balances. In which case, we're making the same arguments just calling them by different names :-)
Censorship is clearly subjective and avoidable, so should be avoided.
This is a fairly nonsensical point; its use in this argument is to assert "what they want is tantamount to censorship and censorship is a bad thing therefore we don't do what they want".
But, imagine a demand that we don't include hardcore pornography - certainly a form of "censorship", albeit one you and I (probably) agree with. It doesn't mean that we should, or that by not doing so we have somehow "given in" to the demand and are morally tainted by it.
We don't include it because *our editorial judgement* says not to, and if it happens to coincide with what some external group desire? Well, good for them.
We have a history of this same kneejerk reaction with people who complain about their biographies, and it leads to worse articles there as well. "They're complaining? Well, we're not censored! Fuck them! Dig up more dirt, that'll show them!" It's... not good.