Board Thread:Help!/@comment-43874324-20200702151414/@comment-188432-20200831224516

I would push back against the notion of this kind of article being completely "pointless", as WaltK has said. Their intent is to educate, like any other article here. One might personally find an article like wanker obvious, but you should in no way believe that everyone who uses English will.

A lot of British usage is obscure to the uninitiated. It's one of the reasons that I created a lot of pages about cricket. Most Americans, and not a few Britons, are absolutely lost when listening to some Davison scenes in audio, not to mention a few references by both he and Baker on TV.

Sure, these are small articles, but phrase definition is important to understanding some key scenes. Baker's reference to slow bowling in The Horns of Nimon might — to you — be perfectly obvious. But it's not to everyone. Heck, I don't think you can really follow Black Orchid part 1 without a little help from the wiki.

So I'd like to make sure that we don't judge an article's wroth based exclusively on personal English usage. Instead, we do need to consider the purpose of an article in light of how it helps people understand scenes.

It's really important that we remember that this is a global community, and that we try to make deletion decisions based on whether the article is, on balance, of use to all our readers, not just to whether it's a part of one's vocabulary and therefore something that doesn't need explaining to you.

Yes, some slurs are awful. But we do have to balance that against the larger effort to help people understand what's going on in the stories that comprise the DWU. I mean, we're not deleting the article clown just because there's a possibility a reader might have coulrophobia. Nor are we "hiding" it in an article about circuses.

While I've taken immediate steps today to delete a couple of articles, I don't think that's the best way forward, generally — even if it is technically possible. Let's use the next week here to mention the articles about slurs that are the most egregious and go from there.

That said, I don't want to turn this thread into an ongoing, never-ending, word-by-word examination of all our articles. Let's try to confine our review of Derogatory names and insults from the real world to the next week so that we can wrap things up relatively quickly.