[Wikipedia-l] "In memoriam"

[Jeroen Heijmans]

Last week I've tried to remove the "in memoriam" parts of the 9/11 pages 
by putting them on meta. This move was reverted (twice, I countered) by 
The Cunctator. However, I have not heard any _good_ arguments from him 
(or anybody else) for keeping them.

The arguments were:

* "I take it pretty personally" - Cunctator seemed to agree himself that 
this isn't a very good reason
* "these are among the most popular pages on the site" - that is not a 
good reason. We are an encyclopedia, and no matter how many visitors we 
get for a page, if it's not an encyclopedia article, it must go. We 
could probably put some pornographic images here or music downloads - 
that would bring visitors - but they're not encyclopedia material.

Brion suggested that these could stay, provided a way was found to make 
them useful. I think that is impossible. "In memoriams" are by 
definition NPOV and do not provide any information useful for an 
encyclopedia.

Some have mentioned the pages should go to some special wiki - that's 
fine with me, but I *very strongly* feel they should leave Wikipedia 
now. The meta is the best place for them now. I've already brought this 
up some months ago, and I agreed then to wait until after September 11, 
2002. It is now September 25, and time to move on with these pages - 
there has been plenty of time to think of other/better solutions. As 
I've said before, I don't think we should give 911 any special treatment 
anymore - there's no reason for that.

Jeronimo