On 8/29/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote:
[...] The fact that anyone would even try to rationalize and/or justify saying to another person, "Go away, you trolling fuckwit" is symptomatic of the cancer that exists in the culture. [...]
This is just SO not true. Marc, as I believe you've said yourself in the past, you're not especially experienced with large collaborative online projects. Trolls and other disrupters will keep poking and poking and poking and poking and poking and poking and poking until even the most patient of saints lose their cool - by definition, that is the goal. It doesn't mean there is a cancer in the project, or that it's doomed, or whatever, it just means that everybody has a breaking point. Of the various online projects I've worked in the past 25 years, WP is by far the most tolerant of troublemakers; on serious projects like GNU or Linux, people won't even talk to you until you've proven yourself useful somehow, and if you even slightly irritate one of the project owners, you might as well as give up and move on to something else.
Absolutely. I think many of us are approaching this situation from different angles, with different points of reference. Please bear in mind that this is a mailing list, not a wiki, and that our standards here are different because of this.
Also, folks, please try to reread the conversation that took place prior to David's comment. I would not have reacted the way David did, but what he did was hardly unjustified, and I think, not inappropriate.
Johnleemk