[Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

[Jeroen Heijmans]

Some time ago, I proposed to re-work the [[September 11, 2001 Terrorist 
Attack]] articles to make them real encyclopedia articles. This was met 
with agreement bij Maveric149 and Bryan Derksen, who however proposed to 
postpone this until a year after the attack (mav) and move the curren 
tpages to Wikipedia:Historical Wikipedia articles (Bryan), with which I 
agreed.

As the time to start this work is approaching, I want to let the other 
Wikipedians know about this and give their opinions, if they want to. 
I'll give my view of the future articles below:

* The main article, as it is, has a very good start, and little has to 
be changed to that. My main problems are with the subpage and related 
pages. First of all, many of the subpages, such as /Satire, /Slogans and 
terms, etc. should not be in an encyclopedia, or at most be noted in 
short piece of text with a few examples ("Most american media developed 
slogans like "America strikes back" at the start of American attacks on 
Afghanistan"). Others can be severely shortened, removing the "news 
value" and reverting to facts and summaries. The parts of the 
subarticles that really have to do with the subsequent attack and 
anthrax attack should be at those articles. External links should be to 
pages that give a good summary of the issue, and not merely newspaper 
articles. Much of the remaining subpages could be included in the main 
article itself.

* As for the list of casualties and the individual articles on them, I 
think these should all go. In my view, the articles currently existing 
are terrible and useless. They're terrible because they are templates 
that say "(Name) was killed on September 11 (...) in 
(WTC/Pentagon/Airplane). He lived in (Place), (State) and was married to 
(Name). He had (#) children.". And these articles are about as useless 
an article on the man walking his dog that I can see out of my window 
right now. My opinion about a list of casualties is less strong, but I 
also think it has little value. A good link to a memorial site (I'm sure 
there are some) would be much better.

As I'm sure there are people with different opinions, let it be heard! I 
hope we can work out a future plan for these articles and then do this 
job together.

Jeronimo