Board Thread:Clean up Concerns/@comment-2059440-20160822192203

I have seen an increasing number of mild controversies concerning what makes a "villain" and not concerning people from other time periods or societies from our 21st century (largely) multi-national viewpoint : I feel as a wiki we need to perhaps enforce a variety of the "Values Dissident" rule in order to be more factual..

basically what this means is we need to figure out if a character would be immoral, criminal and "evil" by the standards of their society / time-period and native "universe" rather than just from a modern audiences viewpoint..

the further you go back in history the more you see things in characters that you feel are "evil" or "immoral" but are they really? this is an endless debate and can't really be answered.. morality is way beyond our ability to class in a Clean Up Forum but I do think we need to try and avoid Moral Absolutism for the sake of this wiki staying neutral..

I'd really appreciate if we started a discussion on this and what can be done to try and get a solution : there's a slippery slope between suggesting that past misdeeds (such as enslavement, inequality etc) was acceptable and the opposite, where we declare everyone in that period was racist / murderous / whatever because they had views that while extreme to us was not for their own time period (for example many claim Walt Disney was a racist, homophobe and so forth.. the man was from a generation were such ideas were common.. he'd seem all those things to us but was he really that bad *by the standards of the time*?.. that's the key here.. we can't instantly claim a person a "villain" because of dated views or "professions" if such views or "professions" were a part of everyday life (medieval executioners, Victorian orphanage "caretakers" etc.. all professions we'd abhor in today's world, yet were commonplace.. not all of them were "evil" people, in the period they existed.) ) 