User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20190928203157/@comment-6032121-20191015144202

Amorkuz wrote: When I say that Arcbeatle Press is a self-publisher, it is because this is a fact I have been proving by multiple quotes, including from James Wylder himself, over and over again. This fact is not for validity or against validity. It just is. If somebody considers this or similar facts irrelevant, they are welcome to ignore these facts. If you are right about their unimportance, so will the closing admin.

That the relevance is up to the closing admin is one thing. But I maintain that if a debate such as this is to go anywhere, it is quite another to act as though users should just collect random facts without any idea of how they relate to the question at hand: validity. I refer you to my earlier thought experiment: should I just start compiling every minute tangentially-connected detail I can ,from the colour of James Wylder's socks to the precise number of question marks in his œuvre, simply because they are facts, and then leave it to the closing admin to figure out if these facts were helpful?

In other words, if I think a fact you have provided is irrelevant, then yes, it's up to the closing admin to tell whether I was right, as such. But that doesn't dispense you (or anyone else who is considering researching this or that fact) from considering whether a fact is relevant to the question of validity before you start an argument about it on the tread.

This whole "self-publisher" thing has taken up a lot of the thread's collective time and attention that could have been better spent examining whether the stories actually pass the four little rules. If you don't have any particular idea of why these facts are relevant in mind, and aren't arguing either for or against validity, what are you doing? These things are called "Inclusion debates", not "Threads about tangentially-related facts at the end of which an admin will make an inclusion decision". You were originally part of the one-sided decision to delete these stories from the Wiki, so clearly you have an idea in mind of why they should be invalid. Why would you spend your time collecting very tangential facts for no clear reason, instead of stating this position and arguing for it?

So I'll echo User:Bwburke94: even if your contributions to this thread so far haven't been an attempt to argue for invalidity, you were one of the three admins who originally came to the conclusion that the stories shouldn't be covered on the Wiki. What was your reasoning then, for God's sake? Surely I'm not the only one to think that if any fact is relevant here, it's that?

(Of course, it may be that you were only carrying out a decision taken by the two other admins in a conversation to which you weren't privy, although that isn't the impression I got. But in this case, I'm back to my earlier request: could you give us the names of these elusive admins? And, if they asked you not to disclose their names, at least tell us that and make sure they show up sometime soon? At any rate, I think you really ought to clarify which of these scenarios is actually correct, if only so no more people get confused about this.)

If you don't have any such reasons why the story should be invalid, and are just stating facts without arguing for invalidity… then, er, that would mean that there isn't actually anyone in this whole thread who's been arguing against this story's validity. If so, what's even the point of having a debate about this, when we all agree that these stories should be valid?