[Wikipedia-l] Re: DW

[Lee Pilich]

[just tried to send this from the wrong email address, apologies if it ends 
up on the list twice]

At 16:00 12/10/2002 -0700, Jeronimo wrote:
>As some of you may have seen from the Recent Changes page, I've been
>involved in an edit war with user DW (also appearing as various IPs
>starting with 209) over [[List of famous Canadians]]. DW, who did most
>of the initial work on the page wants to keep off Canadians that in his
>eyes are not famous.
<snip>

DW is not the most affable chap in the world. To me, he comes across as 
arrogant and self-important, and is wasting a lot of time at the Canadians 
article. His comments suggesting that he is one of the few people 
contributing useful content and that everyone else is out to sabotage his 
wonderful prose do not sit well with me. And he has a history - he 
questioned naming conventions in his usual charming way at 
[[Talk:Henry_I_of_France]] and seems to have upset J Hofmann Kemp quite 
seriously (see her archived talk at 
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:J_Hofmann_Kemp&oldid=200626 
if interested). Whether that had some effect on her deciding to leave, I 
don't know, but it seems very possible.

As you say, he's also contributed a decent amount of good material, 
although I don't have the historical knowledge to say whether his 
historical articles are NPOV (JHK seemed to think some of them were not). 
There also seems to be a copyright question over his article on [[Mavis 
Gallant]]. But, all that said, I'm sure most of his contributions are fine, 
and he does seem to have made quite a lot of them in the short time he's 
been here.

My personal feeling is this: he's antagonistic, rude and disrespectful, and 
he doesn't seem able to entertain the possibility that he might be wrong 
about anything. But this is not enough for a ban. At the moment, at least, 
he seems only to be causing trouble at the Canadians page, which is 
something to be grateful for, anyway.

Probably he will become frustrated that nobody else wants to do things his 
way, and he'll leave. Indeed, as I write this, he's threatening to leave 
the project at the Canadians talk page. I don't like to see anybody leave 
the project if they've added good content, and I'd much rather he settled 
down and at least *tried* to get on with people, but if he went it would be 
blessed relief.

This is my first post to the list; I'd've liked it to be about something a 
bit more cheery, but there it is. I'm on the digest, so I've not seen any 
other responses to Jeronimo's post - apologies if I'm duplicating stuff.

LP (camembert)