User talk:Larry Mudd

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Mediation on The Andy Griffith Show dispute
Hi there! As a member of the Mediation Cabal, I've taken care of mediation of the issues regarding The Andy Griffith Show. I've already filled myself in the details, but before proceeding, I'd like everyone interested to offer me a (very) brief view of the core dipute before proceeding. Any suggestions and thoughts will be heeded. Regards and hugs,  Sh ' a ' uri   smile!  23:52, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Brief recap of the Andy Griffith debacle.
When I first came across the Andy Griffith Show article, it looked like this. Several portions immediately stood out to me as being unlike anything that you might expect to find in an encylopaedia article. I think most people will recognize which portions those are, but to be precise, I mean everything between the main section (after the "table of contents") and the external links, all of which is editoral material about the show's "morality" -- more than half of the article. Most of this (read: everything contributed by Hackwrench) is (to be blunt) incoherant and beyond copy-editing, since it is often unclear what it's intended to communicate. The most sensible thing seemed to me (and to a number of others, apparently) to be to just delete it.

Ee60640 eventually boiled Hackwrench's points down to a bullet list, but my reading of the NPOV policy (combined with what I think are common-sense expectations for encyclopaedia articles) leads me to believe that it's still jarringly out-of-place.

I originally wrote something here that was much more verbose than it needed to be. Actually, I'd feel pretty comfortable letting a mediator come to their conclusion based on Hackwrench's summary alone.

The main thing is, when does opinion become significant enough to warrant insertion in an encyclopaedia article? My feeling is that it is when opinion becomes an actual part of the subject -- when controversy is attached to it in a conspicuous way.

Hackwrench maintains that his desire to insert his social criticism into the article makes it relevan t enough for inclusion. It seems obvious to me that if this view were widely held, Wikipedia would quickly become a useless resource. Larry Mudd 05:32, 29 October 2005 (UTC)