On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Susan suggests that RK is racist against Chinese people because he complained about your use of Kanji for your username. That's more or less the same argument, and ridiculous in both cases.
On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
("racist", Susan Mason's word, is indefensible, I agree.)
I know that defending Susan Mason is very much a minority pursuit around here, but I should point out that at no point on [[Talk:Idolatry]] (where this all started) did Susan accuse anyone of racism. I've just checked all of this user's edits on that page, to make sure.
The offending quote was, "What? Chinese people aren't allowed to contribute to the english wiki?" It was RK who characterised this as racism, saying, "Susan Mason effectively called me a racist".
Susan's statement was of course badly worded, but I don't see it as an accusation of racism, myself: it's about what writing systems one uses, not about what race one belongs to. And please let's not argue about whether or not one *could* interpret as racist. My point is that Susan didn't use the word "racist", and the statement can be interpreted in other ways. This mailing list often seems to get into these "Chinese whispers" situations where people's positions get distorted, and I think we should all be sure to check our sources. We should be experts at that, working on an encyclopaedia project!
Oliver
P.S. - Jimbo and Toby - don't take this as a personal criticism. You're both great people, and it's just unfortunate that your messages were the ones I found to use as examples...
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+