On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Let's cut to the chase: would it be easier to ban
the individuals or
to delete the pseudo-policy which they believe themselves to be
citing?
Unfortunately either would be a drama-storm.
In this and other cases they're citing "Wikipedia is not ..."
("Wikipedia is not a sales catalog", in this case). The fact that
that's not even what that page says - it's not an argument to delete
articles on commercial products, simply that Wikipedia should not
document things in a sales catalog fashion.
Those who go forth with the intent of getting rid of entire categories
of article generally start by nominating some of the worst of them for
deletion, generally the stubby ones. With luck, almost nobody has
edited them and thus nobody editing in that topic field notices the
deletion debate till it closes with either a delete or merge result.
It's quite likely in at least some of these, the nominator or another
deletionist utters the words "We should have a notability guideline
for <x>".
Once they get perhaps half a dozen of them deleted, they start
counting that as precedent in future deletion debates or force-merges.
They also start writing out a notability guideline that generally
requires that something not only be verifiable - that would be no
problem - nor that it has multiple independent sources - again, not
too controversial - but that notability requires more than that: it
requires demonstrable importance; the article must claim and source
that its subject matter is Really Important and not just Yet Another
<x>.
Sooner or later, we have an alleged consensus and documented
pseudo-policy that only truly historically important <x> get an
article. Then there's generally a move to redirect them all into a
single article or a few omnibus articles on the subject.
-Matt