On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@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