User:Andrewa/Wikipedia is not vulgar

“ Tom didn't swear, and by that token they guessed how mad he was. ” — Henry Lawson, The Man Who Forgot

People use profanity for a variety of reasons:

• For some, it is just what they are used to. One of my most precious memories is talking to two outlaw bikers who had come to thank me for a favour I had done them. The conversation took place inside an otherwise empty church, and the one doing the thanking preceded every noun with a particular f-word. After a few minutes of this, his mate elbowed him hard in the ribs and said with no intended humour "Wash your mouth out, we're in a fucking church".
• For most of us, it's something we do for emphasis. (And that's more of us than would admit to it, it's just that the bar is higher for some than for others.)
• For some, it's just a way of showing off.
• And for some, it's a way of promoting themselves or their art form.

And in almost all instances, it's a combination of two or more of these.

Wikipedia does not avoid profanity when it is encyclopedic. Wikipedia is not censored and that's part of it, and this point is often validly raised, particularly in my experience in move discussions where a proposed title contains vulgar language.

But there's another side to this. Neither does Wikipedia tolerate profanity when its one purpose is promotion (any more than we tolerate any other form of promotion). And that is more common, and sometimes even more tempting, than you might think.

Suppose your favourite band has a song in the charts with the chorus and subtitle Gonna fuck your ass off, but the track title is Pretty Flower. (I don't think anyone has done it yet, but I'm sure they will now I've suggested it.) That subtitle will most probably gain it a certain notoriety and increase its press coverage. Where does Wikipedia stand?

Wikipedia reports. If the subtitle is the common name, or part of the common name, or needed for disambiguation, we use it. Tough. And if it ain't we don't. Tough again. And in any case, it's potentially encyclopedic information, so if the song is notable we include the subtitle in its article, if it's part of a notable album we include it in the track listing, and if the Parents with Principles lobby group (I made that name up too) takes Kiddy Stuff TV show to court over it and it gets thrown out and seven police officers die in the protest afterwards, we report all that too.

That's easy. We keep our heads while others are losing theirs. [1] Or that's the idea.

What is harder is if the profanity is not in common use. It's an important part of the art form. It's easy to think, hey these guys rock, they deserve to have the full impact of what they've created reflected in the name of the Wikipedia article. That's encyclopedic, surely?

No. They create. We report. If that's the way you feel, then promote the track and its subtitle in the appropriate media. Do that successfully, and we'll report it accurately, including in the article title.

And in the meantime, fuck off.

Examples

Watch this space, and feel free to add them. This page (like all others) belongs to the project, not to me.

• Talk:Climax (Slum Village song)#Requested move 20 December 2017 proposal to change the disambiguator to Girl shit, but it's not looking good

See also

Some or all of these appear in the running text above

• wp:profanity, the official content guideline
• profanity, our article on the stuff
  • and vulgar language redirects there
• Wikipedia is not censored, as I'm sure you know