More actions
It seems to me, having read this thread, that most people are in favour of either deleting or merging the page about n*gger. So I've simply deleted it.
The notion of this type of article — which is to say those in Derogatory names and insults and its real world equivalent, was always to make it clear to readers who may never have encountered the word what the word meant, and that it was intended to be offensive.
Doctor Who, after all, is written in British English, and it's reasonable to expect that Americans won't always see a British slur as offensive, and that some Britons, writing about American subjects, won't always get just how offensive an American slur might be.
This is particularly true of the N-word usage in The Celestial Toymaker, which has zero context, and might leave/have left viewers with the impression that it was "an okay thing to say".
The article in question was therefore written in order to attach proper emphasis on just how horrible the word was, something that the Civil War-era novella actually managed to do. It was therefore easy to demonstrate, just by quoting the Doctor and Peri, what the full meaning of the word was, and how it made various characters in the story feel.
However, it's not worth upsetting the users of this wiki, and I think I see more consensus around removal rather than preservation. So it's gone.
I've also deleted Negro. It's a complicated word with a complicated history, and there's not enough in the DWU to give it full context. The DWU simply doesn't get you to the American journey of the word, from over a dozen uses in MLK's "I Have a Dream" to Barack Obama's 2016 removal of it from US Census code.
I'm a little less certain about Tangerineduel's suggestion to get rid of Paki, because it's not an insult in wide use in all parts of the English-speaking word. I think it serves some utility in pointing out to readers that it's not merely a shortening of the word "Pakistani", but actually a slur. But it's not a hill on which I'm prepared to die; it's merely not something I'm initially prepared to delete today.
As for broader proposals to get rid of Derogatory names and insults from the real world, I'm fine with it, if that's what y'all want. It was an idea that I had at the top of the last decade merely to help people on both sides of the Atlantic more deeply understand what characters were really saying.
Perfect example of the confusion the little project was trying to solve, if you need one, can be found in 2020's Ted Lasso. It's about an American who suddenly has to manage AFC Richmond, without any knowledge of football at all. The local fans immediately take to calling him a wanker, but he has no idea what that means. Since he's inundated with the word, he eventually has to turn to the landlady of his local pub to give him the definition.
As that show makes abundantly clear, a lot of Americans just don't get the vernacular points of British English, and vice versa. That's the only thing this category of page was meant to alleviate.
But if you all no longer find value in this type of page, they're not worth heartache or anger. The pages can be swiftly deleted with a simple bot run.
So, with the N-word and Negro now deleted, please continue to debate on the basis of whether you want to keep this kind of page going. Given the already-wide participation in this thread, I don't think we need to hold this discussion open for more than about a week from now, though.