Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20170618182814/@comment-24894325-20170930150303

On the other hand, stepping away from this discussion for a couple of month allowed me to process the arguments internally. And here is what I think about it now (I hope my position has moved towards the other participants). Due to the equality of media, there should not be a difference in identifying a RW object/person by name/image/sound. A book can be identified by a passage. A song can be identified by an audio snippet. A person can be identified by an image. (However, as the image above shows, one needs some minimal amount of context for the sake of sanity.)

I did at some point have problems with titles of songs, which may be hard to identify sometimes from audio only (I blame my musical upbringing). But in the presence of a shred of context the problem of identification should be resolvable. My second problem was that a title of a book or a title of a music piece can actually contain some information, unlike most proper names. The proper way of looking at it, I now believe, is to treat the page name as a variable name in a programming language. We give it a meaningful name for our convenience, but this should not give us license to extract information from the name. For instance, it would be improper to try connecting Marseillaise with the city of Marseille, unless its name is actually pronounced in-universe. As Josiah Rowe said, this is a bit of hair-splitting. But it was one of my worries, and one can find much more informative titles.

However, my main problem was the ability to connect different descriptions of the same object/person, to connect an image with the name, the text of a book with the title of the book, etc. I think BWBurke94 meant something similar when he talked about distinguishing between facts and depictions from the RW. For me the connection stating that, say, the man who gave the human rights speech has this particular face was more of a fact than a depiction. And this fact was, seemingly, inducted into the DWU based solely on the title of the page. That was and is my main struggle.

In other words, I agree with most of you if a RW object/person is always identified in the same way: always by image, or always by last name, or always by voice. The question is what to do when there are two unrelated and uncorrelated descriptions. I'm afraid I have to concede here that, though no universally optimal solution exists, there is little to be done other than put all these differently identified references to the same page. Again, the principle of equality of media was decisive in persuading me. (Needless to say, I would still be providing copious explanations in the BTS section regarding what is and is not known in-universe.)

We all agreed that having separate pages for MLK would have been madness. What I realised recently was that it is hard to provide a principled rule regarding which representations of MLK are to be primary and which are to be relegated to the BTS. After internal deliberations, I concede this point.

Having said that, my problems with the Monks and people they put into their propaganda are not resolved. For the simple reason that the context suggests those images to be doctored. However, my proposal to an admin who would want to close this debate some day is to remove the whole Monk situation from the general consideration. It is pretty unique, I believe, to deserve a separate, more pointed discussion what to do with in-universe sources that are known to be falsified.