Category talk:Atrocities

Is this really necessary and a good idea? This sounds like something that's bound to degenerate into subjective opinions sooner or later, not to mention the shades of gray involved in determining why something like Kentares caused widespread outrage and the multiple nuclear attacks going on at the same time didn't. The page was created with subjective labels (vile act, terrorism, the word atrocity itself). That terrible things go on in the game isn't a question but the way this is being done seems guaranteed to cause trouble. --Moonsword 14:41, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

What to use instead then? They are not military operations, they are in many cases not covert operations. I will not keep them in the Events master category. If you have a better suggestion then speak up. --Neufeld 14:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Leave them where they are unless you've got a good explanation of why things like the Kentares Massacre, the bio-attack on Galax, or the scouring of Galedon aren't "important events in the BattleTech storyline". At least two of them certainly were military actions, for that matter. It's a lot less likely to provoke a pointless debate over whether this action or another merited the label "atrocity" or whether this group or that group is engaged in terrorism. This has come up over on the CBT.com forums before and it was very contentious. If you are going to mess with it, find a label and description that's less likely to cause trouble. --Moonsword 14:52, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

I intend to leave nothing a just 'events'. If you have a problem with 'atrocity', then you have to find a label you like. --Neufeld 15:03, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Here's the problem: By the nature of what you're choosing to do, you're violating NPOV. Categorizing something as an act of extreme wickedness, a tremendous injustice, an atrocity by the definition of the word is inherently a subjective decision based on opinions, not facts. Find an objective definition to categorize on. It may work better if the category is defined as something like this: "Events commonly but not necessarily universally held to be acts of extreme cruelty or excessive wickedness." That lets people look at the category and know what's going on without asserting that BTW chooses to regard them as de facto atrocities. There certainly are events that are nearly universally regarded as atrocities but there's a difference between saying it's regarded as such and simply saying it is an atrocity: the former is a statement of fact, the latter of opinion. On the other hand, it's certainly only my opinion that this is potentially problematic. --Moonsword 15:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

To clarify something, what's in there right now isn't really an issue. But then you get into the question of why nuking Arcadia in the Crucis March isn't generally seen as an atrocity but just about everyone thinks what happened on Kentares was. The term itself is inflammatory in my experience and the definition is subjective from person to person. --Moonsword 14:58, 25 August 2011 (UTC)