“While I won’t contest that edgy subjects might be at risk in a place
like Wikipedia, I’d lean towards framing all of this as good versus
bad communication more than necessarily as a witch hunt against
certain types of materials.

Right, the Panetics article is not well written, and it is confusing.
I’d be willing to believe that this is a bigger reason for its looming
deletion than is the subject matter. But the subject matter is of
course part of the equation, because the editors don’t know what it
is, so they don’t have any a priori idea that it absolutely has to be
there. What the article fails to do is to explain clearly what it is,
and establish that it is an important subject that is part of a web of
references. Although there are references there, they are mostly
self-referential, demonstrating that the inventor of the term wrote
about it.

There are all sorts of entries in Wikipedia, some about factual
things, some about fictional characters, some about rock bands, some
about different people’s beliefs. A lot of these are allowed to stay,
even if many reviewers might find the subject matter a bit silly, or
they might disagree violently. To me, that is a matter of framing and
clarity and a visible web of reference.

If one describes the subject from a certain distance, with a certain
academic neutrality, the result is different. I.e. one describes
correctly what universe the subject belongs to. If it is a fictional
character, it has to be clearly labeled as such. If it is a belief of
a certain group of people, that needs to be clear. If one accidentally
labels something as science that most scientists wouldn’t agree as
being science, one starts getting into trouble.

If one describes the subject clearly, so it can be understood by
people who aren’t already insiders, one makes a much stronger case.
We’re talking about an encyclopedia. Even if one is very fond of the
subject, one needs to appear to not be taking sides.

To establish that a subject is important enough to appear in an
encyclopedia, one needs to demonstrate that it is part of a web of
other things. So, it needs to have references to related subjects,
meta-subjects, sub-subjects, etc. And links from those other subjects.

I think that if it can be demonstrated that a lot of people find a
subject important, and they have written about it, and the subject is
presented clearly and more or less objectively, it is going to be hard
to get around it, difficult to suggest it should be deleted.

Wikipedia has a fine entry on Astrology. I’m sure a lot of reviewers
would consider astrology some kind of superstitious nonsense, but it
doesn’t matter. The article frames it in a neutral way, doesn’t try to
pretend that it is science, but it explains some of its principles and
history, and it has many references. Nobody would be able to get away
with deleting that entry.

Yes, maybe there’s some undercurrent of Deletionism, but I think it
can be counteracted by effective communication.

In NLP there’s a principle which could be stated as “the meaning of a
communication is the result it gets”. If I try to get a certain point
across to a certain group of people, and they misunderstand me and get
mad at me, it is my fault as the communicator. So, I structure it
differently, frame it differently, say it differently, and after a few
tries, I might get a result more like what I desire.

So, in this setting I would also tend to believe that there’s a
winning way of doing it. There’s a way of presenting even difficult or
edgy subjects in such a way that they’ll survive hordes of Wikipedia
reviewers who have no inherent interest in those subjects.”