On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I don't spend a lot of time on on Wikipedia itself these days,
Clearly not. Removing general discussion from talk pages is standard practice.
but when did the project start censoring talk pages, or is [[User:Faithlessthewonderboy]] just going ahead and making up his own rules. This came up at [[Talk:Larissa Kelly]] about the /Jeopardy/ contestant. Her Wikipedia article was a topic of discussion during the chat portion of a recent program in a way that could be taken as criticism of deletionists. I disagree (but can understand) why some people don't want this mentioned in Mainspace, but suppressing this harmless discussion on the talk page beggars belief. This censor seems to have the idea that anything which "does not pertain to improving the article" should be removed from the article, and that merely being trivial is hurtful.
Talk pages are not article space, and these pages have traditionally served as a more relaxed place where there is wide latitude for discussion, and where otherwise nasty conflicts can be defused. While there are certain overtly nasty things can and should be removed from a talk page, these situations are really the rare exception. Most issues that can be considered trivial or off-topic in the widest sense of those terms tend to be talked out quickly, and to be subsequently ignored without harm. When we start suppressing valid criticism from the talk pages, we've dug ourselves a deeper hole than I had previously imagined.
Ec
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