At 10:14 PM 6/5/2004 -0700, Geoff Burling wrote:
I've been busy with work for the last few days, & there are probably better issues I should address, but seeing this statement from Daniwo has made me angry. 172 is consistently rude to anyone whom he does not consider his intellectual equal, & especially to those who hold a contrary opinon contrary to his.
I've only crossed paths with 172 once, as far as I remember, and it was a somewhat similar experience. I stumbled upon the article [[Origins of the American Civil War]] and noticed that due to its long length it had been split into four articles titled Origins of the American Civil War, Origins of the American Civil War (2/4), Origins of the American Civil War (3/4) and Origins of the American Civil War (4/4), all with a hand-crafted table of contents and a set of "next page"/"previous page" links at the bottom linking them together. I thought this was a rather inelegant and fragile way to organize it, and went to the existing subpage [[Talk:Origins of the American Civil War/categorization]] to look over previous discussion and talk about how I wanted to change things.
172 seemed quite opposed to me doing anything at all, even before I'd started presenting any specific ideas. He told me to read all the relevant sections of other talk: pages without telling me which pages he was referring to, and although I spent a great deal of time explaining why I thought the article needed changing he wouldn't tell me why he was so dead-set _against_ changing it. He moved the subpage /categorization to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War/Archive_... in the middle of our discussion, protected it without explanation, and finally he stated that if I were to attempt to go ahead "that's going to provoke an edit war." Since I'd seen some of his other edit wars and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the discussion I just threw up my hands and went on to other things.
This isn't a particularly "nasty" confrontation, as far as these things go, but on the other hand I suspect it didn't get nasty because I simply gave up and let him have his way. I feel bad about that; I honestly wanted to improve the article but got driven off by threats and hassle rather than convincing arguments to the contrary. 172 has since apologized but his apology didn't contain any suggestion that he might be willing to allow changes to the structure of those four articles so I don't know if it was really worth much. I'm not concerned with my hurt feelings, I just want to tidy up without fear of being bludgeoned into submission by edit war if I do something 172 doesn't like.