Board Thread:Help!/@comment-43874324-20200702151414/@comment-6032121-20200702234057

@User:Najawin: Perhaps the historical standard works for racist slurs, but for e.g. insults aimed at queer folk, things get very complicated very quickly due to the underground nature that was the lot of gay/queer culture for most of its relatively recent history in the western world (including while Doctor Who was beginning to air, natch). With a very small number of exceptions, any one word for "homosexual" or "transgender" has at various times been both an insult and a word used by the community to describe itself; it's often hard to know for sure on which side of the fence a particular word began, and nor is it terribly useful for the present.

Recall the whole "That's so gay" debacle from the RTD era… Does Gay get the same slur tag as the N-word page? It has a "clear history of being used to insult a marginalised group". But that doesn't feel right to me, all the same.

I think common sense should be exercised, rather than a hard-and-fast history-based rule. These things change fast nowadays, and we're not looking for a nuanced history of the usage and nuance of Controversial Term X (although how that history intersects with its use throughout the history of Doctor Who would make for an interesting BTS section), we're looking to avoid making our readers now feel unwelcome.

@User:Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived, while I understand your position, I really don't think it's viable to delete these pages. At best we could make a one-of-a-kind, symbolic exception for the N-word page, but going further than that is a slippery slope that we really can't sustain. (Merging a select few of the slur pages into Racism might be a viable avenue, again especially in the N-word case, but that can only go so far.)

As far as the "look" this gives the Wiki goes, I'd argue that the deletion of the pages could be construed as equally problematic. We delete the page with no further action, and tomorrow, the twitter mob will be crying, "did you know official BBC media have used the N-slur a bunch of times? well, there isn't a word on the Tardis Wiki about that! Wonder why!".

Deleting the pages wand pretending offensive-yet-valid DW content doesn't exist would smack of head-in-the-sand-ism, IMO, even if I know that's not the way you mean it.