On 6/5/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sun, 4 Jun 2006 16:45:14 -0700, you wrote:
It is never good to piss people off.
I disagree absolutely. It is very often good to piss them off, when the alternative is letting them deface the project. This list is full of people who are pissed off because they have been prevented from degrading the encyclopaedia.
Reducto ad absurdum. Pissing off an obvious vandal (or subtle one) is par for the course. I don't care about their feelings.
I do care about normal positive editors who happen to run afoul of Tony's latest crusade du jour. One of the reasons to follow process is that people tend to go along with a consensus decision even if they personally disagree, but will often react strongly negatively to an arbitrary ruling by someone percieved to be a tin-pot dictator.
In this specific case, the only things which I have seen generally negatively reported about the collective small crowd highly offended by Tony's refactoring signatures is that they're newer contributors. Not vandals and not as a rule problem users.
Tony stepping on vandals a lot doesn't mean that everyone he steps on is a vandal. If you start seeing everyone you piss off as the same, you've lost.