Larry Sanger wrote:
All,
Earlier today, I had no joy in trying to post this "open letter to Jimmy Wales" on Jimmy's own user talk page: the man himself deleted it. That is not the sort of behavior I would have expected of the head of an allegedly open, transparent community devoted to free speech.
<snip>
I came up with and promoted the idea of making a wiki encyclopedia, wrote the first policy pages and many more policy pages in the following year, led the project, and enforced many rules that are now taken for granted. I came up with a lot of stuff that is regarded as standard operating procedure. For instance, I argued that talk should go on talk pages and got people into that habit. Similarly, after meta-discussion started taking up so much of Wikipedia's time and energy, I shepherded talk about the project to meta.wikipedia.org - and after that, to Wikipedia-L and WikiEN-L. I insisted that we were working on an encyclopedia, not on the many other things one can use a wiki for.
Putting aside for the moment, the rest of your missive of quite respectable length; if you do deserve kudos for creating the very first heuristics for channeling discussion to appropriate fora, it is sadly regrettable that you were not able to choose the initial forum where you published your diatribe with more discernment.
User talk pages in current practice are not for blogging or personal communication (except to the extent that such personal communication is in the aid of cementing the trust and fellow feeling contributors have with each other, and thus helps our work as a community). User talk should be squarely about improving the encyclopaedia.
You may not have taken the trouble to acquaint yourself with the methods by which legitimate feedback and comment on wikimedian matters is currently channeled, but it would very much be worth your while, to facilitate a smoother communicative experience.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen